Hump Dayyyy

I hit my year mark this last week, it seriously felt like yesterday I was grabbing some Cafe Rio in Provo with Ming and my dad before reporting to the MTC and starting this crazy up and down adventure we like to call a mission. It feels good to have my wits about me a bit more now and I can hopefully use the experience I've gained to make this next year of my mission that much better. Anyways onto the week, it's been one of those weeks where I feel like my heads been down the whole week just working and pushing for things to happen and I'm just know raising my head up and processing how everything went. If that makes sense...It was a great week in any case. 

Elder Scott had this crazy idea to set a ridiculously high goal for contacts and other lessons this week to push ourselves and talk to everyone everywhere. I figured why not go for it as long as we're committed. It amazed me how much I stopped caring about the little stuff and focused on the goals and our extended vision in our daily activities. The high goals forced us to be full time instead of just fill time missionaries and consider if everything we were doing was the BEST thing we could be doing, not just a good or better thing than something else. That's really how it is with everything in life though, there's so much offered to us in the world today and it's really when we focus on the best things we can be doing with our time and our foundational values that govern our priorities like God, our families, helping other people, that real growth happens and we find contentment. 

On another note though, Elder Scott turned 20 on Sunday! Shout out to my mom for sending some Australian goodies that I could gift to Elder Scott. He was stoked to open those up. I'd never had any of them but the mint slices were pretty good, they were like a thin mint mixed with a peppermint patty. We had dinner with the Wagner's after church and sang the classic Swedish birthday song and had some treats together. 

We went to the temple on saturday with the Helsingborg ward and that was a fantastic experience as always. There's a peace and serenity in the temple that can't be felt anywhere else. We got a ride with our ward mission leader, Svein Åge, and his wife and it was fun travelling to Denmark with them. We got back from the temple saturday afternoon and since you can't just have peace and happiness all day everyday we were welcomed back to Helsingborg with a nice riot going on in downtown. A soccer team from Göteborg had just played against Helsingborg and lost 3-1 and so some Helsingborg fans were rubbing it in to Göteborg and some fights were breaking out. There was a ton of police and one fight broke out a couple feet from Elder Scott and I. We were standing watching all the happenings safely on the other side of the street from the big aggressive group of Göteborg fans and suddenly one of them pointed across the street towards us and yelled "Helsingborg?". We were confused but a guy next to us shouted "ja Helsingborg" and so the big group of dudes started running towards this guy right next to us to beat him up and Elder Scott and I just took off running down the street since the guys are all our age and we didn't want to get caught up in the action. The police intervened pretty fast and broke it up and we stayed safe. 

Here's a cool story that's unfolding right now. So the Wagners are an awesome member family and Casper Wagner's girlfriend, Victoria, learned about the church and was baptized through that association. Sara Wagner has a boyfriend named Timmy who we've hungout with a couple times while at the Wagner's house. Elder Scott really hit it off with Timmy, who's 15, cause they both love League of Legends and use all these terms and inside jokes that go right over my head when I'm with them. Anyways, Timmy came to church on Sunday since it was Elder Scott's birthday and stayed for all three hours! Then he came to play laser tag with us yesterday on p-day and hungout with us the entire day while we got lunch and went around Helsingborg. He said he's coming to church next week too. Timmy's the coolest dude ever, really shy at first but talkative and really down to earth once you get to know him. 

I love the people here in Sweden and I'm thankful that I have another year to serve them.

Peace and blessings,

Äldste Hainsworth

 Copenhagen Temple

Things gettin serious