Week
57; December 8, 2014 – Ikea, the taste of Sweden!
I hope
everyone is having a great time preparing for Christmas. We can really
feel the Christmas spirit here in Sweden. There is no better time to be a
missionary than around the Holidays in Sweden. After the dark, cold month
of November, everyone just seems like they want to take the entire month of December
to be happy, and we've met some wonderful people.
The week started-off
with a really cool experience. We did a service project for a member in the morning
and we had a long afternoon of swing-byes without much success. By that
time, we were decently far away from home at that point and our phone had
died. But, we left some things at the other Elder’s apartment earlier that
day, so we needed to stop-by before we went home.
I decided to ask someone
if I could borrow their phone and I felt like I needed to talk to a girl by the
train station. I just asked her in English if I could borrow her phone to call
a friend because my phone had died. She laughed and said her phone had
just died too and that she had the same problem. We got to talking for a while
and she said she went to a Christian school growing up, but wasn't very
religious herself. We needed to go the same direction as she did, so we
kept talking on the train. She told us about how she'd been living in
France with her boyfriend and that they just broke up, so she'd recently moved
back to Sweden. She said she was at a point in her life where she was
trying to get a few things figured-out, and said that our meeting was possibly
a sign that she should go to church! The coolest part was that she said
she actually lives really close to the church. We gave her our card and she
said she would come to church sometime in December. So, we’re hoping that she'll
come in the next few weeks. This was a way cool experience and one of the most
unexpectedly positive contacts I've seen in a long time.
In Sweden we're definitely
seeing that youth are often the most open towards the gospel. They are
still open to forming new ideas and beliefs and they have probably been the
most positive people to contact recently.
I had one of the coolest
meals I've ever had in Sweden last Wednesday! An older lady in our ward, Betty,
wanted to make sure we had a proper Swedish Christmas feast experience while doing
a little missionary work. So, she decided to take us to the Julboard buffet
(The Christmas Table) in what I'm, pretty sure is the biggest Ikea super store in
the World! She said, older people like it a lot, so expect it be busy. And
boy, was that an understatement! I'm pretty sure every retiree in the greater
Stockholm area had made the pilgrimage to the giant Ikea to partake in the
Christmas feast.
Sweden has become a lot more like America in their tastes, or
at least, like a really, really healthy America, you could say. It was
absolutely crazy! They had five different kinds of Seal (raw hearing). I
skipped that, but I did get some Salmon because it's almost required that you
eat some form of fish in a Swedish Christmas feast. They had all kinds of
ham, potatoes stuffed with beef, rice pudding (one of my favorite Swedish
deserts), of course, they had lots and lots of Swedish meat balls, and every
other Swedish food you could think of. Even after a year I sometimes
wonder what true Swedish food is actually like, because of how Americanized
their tastes have become. But I think I can honestly say I know what Swedish
food is now. We each had about four plates full and we felt stuffed by the
time we finished, but it was super fun! Betty is one of the coolest people ever
for giving us that experience.
That night we went out
to one of the farther out parts of the area to contact people. The town square
there wasn't very big, so we decided we would change it up a bit and solo
contact people while staying close to each other. I decided to do
something a little unusual and talked to a street vendor. He was a little
surprised, but when he figured out who I was he got super happy and said, “Wait,
your 20, and you came all the way out here from California to tell people about
God, That's amazing!” He said, a lot of people from his culture live in
California and he had me guess where he came from. I had no idea, but it turned
out that he was from the Sikh faith. I thought I knew a thing or two about Sikh's,
but I didn't know much at all. He briefly shared the history of his people with
me and I shared a little about our faith as well. He said that he didn't have a
ton of friends in Sweden, so he invited us to come by his house and share more
about why we’re doing missionary work. So, I'm hoping we'll meet him this week.
Fun fact: He told us his name is Singh, but so are the names of 20 million
other Sikhs around the world. I guess they all have the same last name who
knew, got to love what you learn on a mission, right!
So, on Thursday night,
we had us some culture. The ward is putting on a Santa Lucia (Saint of Light) production
and we've been invited to be a part of it. This is the holiday where girls wear
a white dress and a crown of candles on their heads and sing together before
Christmas. It's not really seen all in the US, but it's a huge tradition
here. So any way, the practice went well and the songs were super fun, but
we found out that we were getting costumes as well. They want us to be the
star boys. We will stand behind the Santa Lucia girls and sing with them. Our
outfits will also be white gowns. The ward members thought we looked great in
our traditional Swedish clothing. We took lots of pictures, but I don't think
I'll put them in the blog, so ask me about it when I get home and you'll have a
good laugh!
Lastly, we finished-off
the week with a great lesson with a girl named Mercy. She grew up in
Sweden, but studied at UCLA. We got to know her for about 30 minutes, but she
came with a lot of questions about how we gained our testimonies. She was
really touched by what she heard, and then I shared my Grandpa's conversion
story. She thought that was absolutely incredible. She said she hadn't been
taking a lot of time to read the Book of Mormon before, but she felt strongly
that there was something important in the lesson and she committed to read it
very seriously in the coming week. We are hoping to meet her one more time
before Christmas and see how she feels about baptism!
Well that's what
happened last week. Christmas is almost here and I can't wait to talk to you
guys then… It's going to be great!!!
I love you guys so much -
Have an awesome week!!!
-Äldste Stoeltzing
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