Going hard and loving Sweden!!

Käre vänner, 

This week has been very smooth and had some cool little miracles happen. First I wanted to mention, some of you know that there was an attack in Stockholm. Just wanted to let you all know that no missionaries were hurt and we were all told to return home shortly after it happened. The next day we continued to work as usual. The four Elders in Västerås had the chance to go to Stockholm on Saturday for a temple trip with the congregation we serve in the day after it happened. We had a chance to stop through T central train station and it was so cool to see how fast the city reacts to something like that by getting together and comforting each other. Something you would never expect from a big city like Stockholm but there were thousands of people out on the street where it happened with flowers and candles lining the street. This is an amazing country and it will be sad to leave in a few weeks time. Elder Barnes and I aren’t letting off the throttle and we are going full speed as it comes to the end of this 12 weeks together in Västerås.

One of the girls we are teaching, Marvic, is getting baptized this Thursday! Super pumped :) 

None of the baptismal dresses actually fit her so there is a lady in our ward (congregation) that is making a white dress for her from scratch! Marvic is very excited and is making us Pilipino food on the evening before her baptism and is going to teach us how to make it. :)

Elder Nielsen

Elder Olson!

Other fun things, we traveled to Stockholm earlier in the week to have a Zone Conference. It was my LAST ONE! When missionaries are going home soon, they give there “farewell testimonies" at the conference. It was weird to finally stand up there saying my last goodbyes to the missionaries and bare my testimony in Swedish.  I talked about how much I have grown these two years and talked about some big things I have learned. A few things I mentioned is how important it is to take advantage of the time we have with our companions because we are supposed to learn and grow from this time on our missions. A companion is a good tool to see what you can change to become better. I also mentioned how fast the time goes and to remember who we really are because God wants us to be real people as missionaries, not just robots. He wants us to apply the good things about ourselves to the work. The zone conference its self was very good. I was able to say goodbye to some of my good friends in the mission. 

Elder Harrell

Last cool thing... Elder Anton and I were on splits this last week in Örebro and we went back to their apartment to eat some quick dinner and then we were going to head back out to teach two lessons that night. When we were on our way out, I saw a shelf with Books of Mormon on it in many languages. I only had a Swedish one with me, so I thought I should take another Swedish one and then I felt like I should grab one in Persian. So I grabbed it and we took about a 30 minute bus ride to teach a man we had an appointment with. When we knocked on the door of his apartment building no one answered. Tried calling him and there was no answer.  We thought there must be some reason why we traveled to the apartment. So we decided it would be a good idea to knock on the doors in that building. There were only 4 doors in the building and on the 4th door at the bottom of the stairs, a young woman opened the door and she invited us in to talk with her and her mom who didn’t speak any Swedish... but only Persian! So we went on to teach the young woman and her mom about the Restoration and the Book of Mormon. It turned out that the girl was very interested and took the Book of Mormon in Persian and we switched numbers with her and the missionaries in Örebro will hopefully be teaching her this week. God will lead us, I have seen it!  Not just this week, but specifically in these last two years.

Love you all and have a wonderful week!

Äldste Blackburn

Looks like Elder Barnes has found a new home