Please, Help Your Missionaries!

Sasha has disappeared... it is really frustrating, we don't really have any investigators now that are progressing at all. We need to be doing more finding work, but that is always the least fun and least successful. Please, help your missionaries find people! The members are able to bring people in to the church so much better than missionaries are! Finding is slow, even though it is summer and all the students should be done with school, they are all "busy". I don't know, it is hard, having this message that everyone should want, and people don't want to even taste! It is even worse when they get mad because we talk to them. The cool thing though - not that it is ever good to be rejected - is that I always feel happy. It doesn't matter if they insult me or anything (not that that happens often) I know the truth and they are really missing out. It is amazing how much we are able to love random people we meet on the street, they hopefully see that love and can see the light of the message I want to share so much.

Yesterday was a little different. It was Stav Konferens, and we got to watch a broadcast from Salt Lake City! It was amazing , and we had one of our newer investigators in church. We got to listen to many of my favorites! And, as usual, it was very easy to feel their love and to learn from the spirit. I just hope that our investigator was able to understand most of what they said, he doesn't have the best English (we set up English in another room for him and we joined him with a couple other members who prefer to listen to the person not just the translation.) They were doing this for the first time in our branch. It is really cool seeing how different it is in a branch.

Teaching is a lot of fun, that is by far the best part, being able to have a good teach, to feel the spirit and to be able to say the right things to teach and guide without making them feel attacked in any way. It is amazing to see what happens. The message is full of such light and joy, it is evident in the feelings that it brings into daily life!! It is so cool seeing it touch someone in a teach and watching how they react, how they begin to want that for themselves. Finding is also a lot of fun, because I get to learn more ways of getting people to talk who would rather not, to get them interested and learn their views on life. It really is fun being a missionary!!!!!

I think that time is not working quite right. It is going a lot faster than is should be. I don't have the time to do any of the things that I should be doing in the little time left in the day. All I know is that school never went this fast. Not even pole vault season went this fast. Time just disappears!

This first quarter has gone by way too fast. I feel relatively comfortable but at the same time I know that I still have a lot that I can be doing better. For example, today I worked out... really worked out, and it has been a while. It felt good, helped me to wake up, and I am going to be doing it every morning now. You can check! I am a lot more comfortable talking to people and the cool thing is that they don't switch to English most of the time!!! I want to work more on Swedish though, I have been slacking off a little bit. In the next six months I will be working on talking to people , in the aspect of finding how to present the message so it is something they want, not just "hey, we come from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and we talk to people about God, do you believe in God?" That doesn't work so well. I also plan to improve my Swedish vocabulary and continue to work on pronunciation. I still have a lot of work to do and I want to be able to explain better the doctrine, our beliefs and why they matter. It needs to mean something to the people.

It is good to see the light, recognize it for what it truly is and growing to become what we should be. I am so glad for this opportunity to come here and share the gospel with the people of Sweden, to serve them and to learn so much at the same time! I would never ever trade this time for anything!! I love you all. I will work as hard as I can, these people deserve to hear the truth. I am excited to see what next the Lord has planned for me and all my brothers and sisters, both here and abroad.