We experienced a cool miracle during our proselyting time last Monday evening. Elder Olson wrote about it to our mission Facebook page, so I will just copy and post his post here: "We have a quick miracle to tell y'all tonight! We have a goal this transfer to pray specifically to find people who recently started believing in God. We have found many people throughout this transfer already that have answered that prayer. In fact we experience this almost daily. When we find these people we turn to each other and shake our heads in amazement! We have found that people that have recently started believing in God are more receptive to our message!
Our prayer was answered again today in a miraculous way. We were walking to an area instead of taking the bus and started talking with this older lady from the U.S....long story short she almost died 6 weeks ago and miraculously lived and made it to Sweden. It was because of this 25 minute conversation we were delayed enough to meet another man. Within a minute we found out that he recently started to believe in God about 2 months ago! Elder Francis almost turned to me and laughed. We were able to testify to him that this life is not just happenstance and we are going to meet him this week! We just wanted to invite y'all to pray for those opportunities to find those who recently began believing! We know this to be the Lords church and it is truly his work!"
It was quite special to first meet that American lady and then to meet the man who recently started believing in God (Bastian). The American lady shared with us that she was here in Sweden to visit some family history sites. She attended the big cathedral here in Växjö on the Sunday before we met her, and she started to cry as she told us about how grateful she is for the sacrifice her ancestors made for her to be able to have the life she has. It was tender to see that she felt the Spirit of Elijah, such a strong bond of gratitude to her family members.
The sixth of June was Sweden's national day. Elder Olson and I didn't realize that until we were out contacting people on the street and noticed a big crowd in the park near our church. A member spotted us from the crowd and we had a conversation with him, then we spotted a couple that Elder Childs and I met on a bus about a month ago. The couple came over and we started talking to them. It turns out that the man, Patrik, had some questions about the Book of Mormon and he asked if we could come over to teach them more! So the next day, Friday, we got to teach Patrik and Pernilla about the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We will go back to teach them more this Friday.
We met a man named Melvin and his wife as we were walking home one day. The wife has a niece who is a member of the Church and who lives in California. Melvin plays in a band. The interesting part of our conversation was that they had just been talking about our Church because they had just seen a copy of the Book of Mormon laying open on a rock in the forest. (?!?!) Elder Olson and I became very interested in finding out about the book (They thought that maybe we had left it there as a way to spread the message!). Once our conversation with them ended, we walked to the place Melvin and his wife had described and were met with a strange scene. A Swedish Bible was lying on the ground near a copy of the Book of Mormon. Further away was another Bible that had been ripped to shreds and was strewn about the forest floor. The books had notes written in the front covers. From what we can gather, the author of the notes in the books is a person to whom we gave a copy of the Book of Mormon. She left the book and two Bibles along the forest path, hoping we would find them and read the note about how she didn't accept the Book of Mormon but invited us to read the Bible. We think someone else must have found the books before we did and taken the Bible to rip it up. This was such a unique experience!
Elder Olson and I had a day full of finding people to teach on Wednesday. We felt that we should visit certain areas during our morning planning session. In the first area, the best contact we made was with an older man, Barry, who moved from Macedonia to Sweden 40 years ago. He wasn't super interested, but we left him with a card. We didn't think too much of it until a few hours later when we were in another area talking to people. We walked up to a random house and met another older man named Nome. Guess what? He moved here from Macedonia 40 years ago, too! We were surprised about that and asked if he knew a man named Barry. He did, and because of that we had a really good conversation with Nome. Nome showed us around his immaculate garden and we had a really good conversation with him and his wife. It was strengthening to see that the Lord had led us to where we needed to be and to the people we needed to meet!
I love you all! Have a great week!
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