sea2swe: Hakuna Matata

Hope everyone had a solid week, we're just chugging along here in Vendelsö and this week had its share of ups and downs.

We taught Mikael about the sacrament to help him come to sacrament and he seemed to really understand it and committed to come to church on sunday to partake of the sacrament. We showed up on sunday before church with a member that was willing to drive him and he didn't answer. Didn't answer the phone or door and we sadly had to go to church by ourselves, we were pretty bummed, we've been working on getting him to church for 3 months.

I went on splits with Elder Loertscher this week and we figured out that the ice cream truck in Sweden only sells ice cream in bulk which is dumb!! For example, to buy an ice cream sandwich you'd have to drop 100 kr and buy a box of 8 ice cream sandwiches. We left that ice cream truck empty handed.

A guy named George from Kenya started talking to us at the bus station and he was such a bro! I mentioned that I went to Kenya in high school and he was like "niiiiice, jambo!" I said "Jambo bwana" he said "habari gani" I said "hakuna matata!" and he was laughing and loving it, this American kid speaking the only Swahili he remembers from his trip to Kenya. It was pretty sweet. We answered a lot of his questions about God and the meaning of life and all that good stuff. Then a couple days later we were walking back to our house and literally right across the street from our house in an apartment building and the door opens and it's George! He invites us in and we talk some more, George has a lot of deep thoughts about religion and we shared some of our thoughts from a gospel perspective that were much simpler and he seemed to like them. He said we could drop by whenever and we could talk some more.

Romans 6 is one of my new favorite chapters about repentance! So good! I love verses 21-22: "What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of those things is death. But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life". I love it! By their fruits ye shall know them! That's been a big focus of mine lately is just acquiring more light in my life, getting that good fruit that it talks about through scriptures, meaningful prayer, the sacrament, service, etc.

I love my mission, I love this work, and I love all of you!

Äldste Hainsworth