Stoeltzing Surfing Stockholm

Week 47; September 29, 2014 – Lost Sisters and Found Opportunities!

Wow, fast week! This one’s been really fun! So, P-day was awesome! Sisters Gambles, Clingler, and Verolla went home last week, so we had to do something awesome for them. It's pretty sad to see them all leave. They came to Sweden in one of the most famous MTC groups in the mission. Some of us lovingly refer to them as the Relief Society, because that group made-up at least a quarter of the sisters in the entire mission. So, to go out with a bang, we arranged a scavenger hunt to take unique pictures throughout Stockholm. I was on Sister Gambles’ team, so we ran through the city trying to see as much as we could in an hour. 

Scavenger hunt... Taco anyone?

We got to the Royal Palace and one of the challenges required us to get one of the guards to smile and take a picture with us. Sister Gambles tried, but he wouldn't flinch, so I told him, “she's about to leave the Country and the last thing she wanted was to see a Palace guard smile.” He agreed and cracked a little smile for them! We may not have won the scavenger hunt, but that picture was Epic! 

Smile and say... Cheese!

Tuesday we had another great lesson with Andreas. He said he'd gotten some tuff news that his father had been diagnosed with advanced stage lung cancer and he probably wouldn’t live much longer. He said that he could handle the news. Despite the fact that he's still struggling with some parts of the gospel, he knows that families can be together forever, and he knows he'll see his Dad again. Afterward, he told us a few incredible stories about how the spirit helped him do some amazing things. He said he feels the spirit so much stronger when we come by and he wants that feeling so bad. I told him that we're not the reason he feels the spirit, but he was feeling the spirit because he was saying things that he knew were true and the spirit was testifying to him that the things he was saying where true. We ended the lesson a little teary-eyed. I know that he is going to be okay because he's starting to realize that the truthfulness of the gospel that he feels in his hart is more important than the questions he hasn’t been able to answer yet. 

District Breakfast

 Wednesday we had our last district breakfast before sister Gambles and the others went home. She will be missed and she was super fun to serve with. We actually lost the Sisters in Västerhaninge because Sister Sandalin was transferred up to Gubbangen, a Little North of us. That meant our area got bigger, so we inherited a ton of new potential investigators! I think that will be a good shot in the arm that will help us get the area going even better. We'll be running up and down the train tracks, trying to get in touch with all the new people we now have to work with! 

On Sunday we had one of the coolest experiences we’d seen in a while! We felt like we should go down to a town called Ösmo that we had just gotten from the sister's. There were several people that we wanted to swing by and see, but there was no one home at our first stop. On the second try, however, we were looking for someone named Therese and when we walked into the apartment complex we saw a lady walking out of the basement with a ton of clothes that she needed to carry upstairs. We asked her if we could help, but she didn't want us to bother. We insisted, and helped her take her stuff up three flights of stairs. I asked her at the top if she'd be interested in taking a few minutes to talk about Jesus Christ. She said she'd actually met with some missionaries before and she stopped talking with them because school had gotten too busy. I said we can teach her a lesson in five minutes and she let us in because we were so helpful to her. I asked her name at that point, and she said, “Therese!” It was the lady we came to see! The timing couldn't have been more perfect and I know we were directed to Ösmo at that time for a reason. The short lesson went really well and we taught her about finding strength through prayer. She liked having a quick lesson and invited us back in two weeks! It was a great experience and I'm so thankful for the Lord’s help in crossing paths with Therese at exactly the right time. 

Get off the fence!

Have a great week everyone… I’ll see you guys in the relatively-near and not-far-distant future!

-Äldste Stoeltzing