Stoeltzing Surfing Stockholm

Week 37; July 21, 2014 - Finding Lost Sheep

So, it's been a good two weeks and we've seen a lot of blessings come our way! Several really cool things have happened and this week ended a lot better than we could have hoped.

The big miracle of last week was making contact with a less-active lady named Camillia. We've been trying really hard to meet all the less-active people in the ward and we've had a hard time making contact with many of them up to this point, but we decided to go a little out of our way to see if we could meet Camillia. We saw her walking out the door with two kids, I guess they were going to play basketball, but they said we were welcome to join them. If we'd been 30 seconds latter we would not have caught them.

After we played, we talked with Camillia and got her story. She had been baptized about 15 years before and she was an active member for several years. She ended up re-marrying a man that was against Christianity and she stopped coming to church. They split-up about six years ago and she wanted to come back to church, but she had lost contact with everyone. Her life is pretty busy, but she wants to make an effort to come back soon. It was amazing to see someone who hasn't had contact with the church in so long still have a strong testimony and respond so well to an invitation to come back. I know we were definitely guided to be in the right place at the right time and I look forward to having the chance to help her and her family more.

We also made contact with a less-active member named George who had lost contact with the missionaries about six months ago. He was super cool and sounded like he'd be open to meeting with us more. It was so awesome to find two great people that we can help. I think being able to teach them regularly will make the work here feel a lot better. They are both awesome!

The rest of the week went really well too. Usually street contacting here is tough, but we were super blessed with the people we ran into. The first guy we stopped this week was a Syrian man that listened to the whole first lesson (with a little help from our friend Google Translate)! He sounded really receptive and we got his number, and hopefully our Arabic speaking member will be able to help us teach him more!

Later, we ran into a guy on the street that said he was pretty set in his church, but recommended that we go and talk to his friend around the corner who works in the candy shop. So, we tried it, and the guy was super cool actually! He was an atheist, but enjoys talking about religion and he had a ton of questions. It was kind of hard to teach him because he asked some tough questions in Swedish, but he says he wants to keep meeting with us!

We also got some sad news this week. Elder Gray and Sister Miller are leaving the area. Elder Gray has been my my companion the longest and the past 12 weeks have been super fun. He's done a great job here, and, I think after five months in Norrkoping, he's finally ready for some change. He seems really happy for his new area in Sundsvall, up North. He'll do great up there and I know anyone who works as hard as he does will find success. Sister Miller is leaving to train a new missionary in Söderteja (suder-tell-ia). It was super fun having her in the area, she was also in my zone when I started my mission. She's almost done with her mission and hasn't trained yet so she's super excited to be a missionary mom! 

We’re actually getting four new greenies in the zone, so that will be crazy! My new companion is actually Swedish! I'm really excited because I've been told he prefers speaking Swedish and I need all the help I can get, so this will be really good for me! I'm going to treat the next six to twelve weeks like Swedish boot camp, and hopefully, I’ll feel a lot more comfortable with the language when I finally transfer out of here!

Well that's what's new. Thanks for reading!

Love you guys!

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