God Jul!
What a great week!
As part of the #LightTheWorld initiative, Elder Harris and I have been handing out #EttLjusFörVärlden cards! We still have a ton left that need to be handed out before Christmas, so we are planning to contact like crazy this week! The cards are a great way to talk to people because we can talk about anything with them and then have a great way for them to be introduced to the Gospel- through service!
Zone Conference was in the Handen chapel, near Stockholm, on Friday! So uplifting! I saw Elder Butler. It was much lighter down there. The plane ride was fun, but it was too dark to see anything.
We took a series of trains to Handen where we spent the night with 4 other companionships! One train from the airport to Stockholm and then another to Handen. Elder Harris knows the transportation systems really well because that was his first area (Stockholm).
One of the biggest announcements is that our mission will be reading the whole Book of Mormon in one week, from Christmas Eve to New Years Eve!!! We are to spend all of our personal study and companionship study that week reading, and then we will take an additional two hours each day to READ! I am so excited. President Youngberg said that the idea came from a friend of his who was a mission president in Canada who did it with his missionaries. I think that we will need to read around 76 pages a day, which will be very manageable in the 3.5 hours that we have. Syster Youngberg's part of the Zone Conference was on Christlike attributes, which is the chapter in Preach My Gospel that we will be focusing on this transfer! She tied it in to Elder Holland's talk from General Conference on perfection.
After the learning part of the conference, we got to eat an amazing Swedish 'Julbord,' which means Christmas Table in Swedish! There was a ton of food, which was great, but the best part was that I got to sit by Elder Butler!! He is currently serving in Katrinaholm which is part of the Stockholm South Zone. The zone I'm in, the Norrland Zone, had conference with his zone. It was so cool to catch up with one of my best friends after 3 months. After the Julbord, President and Syster Youngberg shared some of their family Christmas traditions. The first one was watching It's A Wonderful Life!! It was awesome to see a movie! The Youngbergs then performed on the piano for us and read a story about a carpenter making wooden Nativity figurines for a widow and her son. The whole zone conference brought the Christmas spirit so strongly! I am so excited to celebrate Jesus Christ's birth here in Sweden!
Elder Harris and I flew home with the Luleå systers and then drove back to our apartment in Boden. I took a picture when the clock said midnight, or 00.00 Swedish time. Haven't stayed up that long in a while!
Also, I forgot to write last week that Elder Harris and I went to Storforsen! We drove there last p day and you can see all of the pictures on the last email. Storforsen is this area of a river in Sweden where there are huge rapids! Elder Harris and I were the only people there last Monday. There was a ton of snow and part of the river was frozen. It was super beautiful with the evergreens in the background covered in frost.
Jakob is doing AWESOME! Taught him twice this week, and he came to church again!
On Tuesday we taught him the Word of Wisdom, and he hasn't drunk coffee, tea, or alcohol since! He is super ready and accepting of the gospel, it's a miracle. Still working towards the 13th of January for baptism!
Sankta Lucia: We had permission to go see Sankta Lucia, which is a SUPER POPULAR cultural celebration in Sweden, (you can look it up to get more details) Basically there was a choir that sang a lot of nice songs, it was fun, we went with the Dahlkvist family and Jakob.
One of the talks in church yesterday was on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, 'I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.' The speaker translated the words herself into Swedish and talked a lot about peace. There are two words for peace in Swedish, fred and frid. Fred means peace as in peace after a war, and frid means more like an inner peace or calm. One of the parts of the speakers talk that I really thought was great was when she explained that even though there is not peace in the world, we can have peace in our hearts because of Jesus Christ. We can have frid even when fred is not!
On Sunday we went to the Dahlkvist's for dinner and taught Jakob again, it went really well!
I love you all and I hope that you have a wonderful week as we look forward to a special day in the year when we can focus on the Prince of Peace, the Light of the World, our Savior Jesus Christ!
Merry Christmas!
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