sea2swe: The Book of Mormon in the Qu'ran?

Heeeeeejsann! Let's not waste any time with the chit chat and just get right into this week shall we?

So to start off the week we took another 2 hour train ride (each way) to a specialized zone training about the Book of Mormon and how to use it effectively in our missionary work. It was awesome, the Spirit was strong, I learned a lot. I'm really coming to realize honestly for the first time in my life how deep and insightful and rich and full of light the Book of Mormon is. Our district had a fantastic 15 minute discussion on just the first four verses of Enos. As one member told me, "Other books are clever, but the scriptures are deep". That's really stuck with me, no wonder we're supposed to study them our whole life! We had a zone family home evening in the afternoon and got to ask our mission president and his wife anything we wanted, it was some good zone bonding and fun was indeed had.

We had a crazy unplanned lesson this week from a guy who stopped us on his bike. He was a muslim guy who likes to learn about religions so we tried to teach him the Restoration so he could understand Mormons better. He kept arguing with us though about Jesus and having a living prophet. When we told him his name is Thomas Monson and he lives in America he asked if he's in a secret society like the Illuminati or something. Super interesting discussion with this guy but we weren't getting anywhere so we just gave him a Book of Mormon. He flips it open to check it out and reads the chapter heading of 1 Nephi 22 and started freaking out and asking us "who wrote this?", "seriously man who wrote this?!". He said it was pretty much straight out of the Qu'ran, we didn't know what to tell him but he said he's gonna go study it some more so that's good! I've sure learned a lot about middle eastern culture and muslims here in Växjö considering we pretty much live on a Mosque, I love it!

So a member had to go on a day trip somewhere and asked us if we could watch her dog for the day as service so we did to help her out! So we had Ami over for the day, she's a little cuddly dog and we got lots of cute pics with her of course. She sheds a lot though so there was plenty of hair to vacuum up after she left.

On sunday no one we are working with came to church, just one of those sunday's! It was good though, I tried translating a member of the Stake presidency's talk that was visiting us and his old man Swedish combined with his Southern Swedish\Danish accent went straight over my head, I'm not to that level yet! We've been going by lots of tankbara undersöker (potential investigators) and still hitting that finding work hard, tracting it up! We've been doing this cool thing where we have members write there testimony in the front of a Book of Mormon then handing it out to people like we try to do and then reporting back to them who there testimony helped bring the gospel, it's been awesome!

President Beckstrand has given all missionaries the challenge to switch off reading 2 Nephi 9 and Enos every night this transfer and I've been doing it for a couple weeks now and it's been amazing. No matter what, I always learn something new when I read. It has really showed me like I said earlier how important the Book of Mormon is and how much we can learn and apply to our lives. I challenge everyone to try the challenge for at least one week and see what you think, I promise your desire to read the scriptures will grow.

Have a super crazy good week and I love you all!

Med mycket kärlek,

Äldste Hainsworth