December 10, 2012

How y'all doin?  This has been an amazing week!  Our report to President this morning was a thousand times better than last week.  The mission has done a complete 360.  We had four baptismal dates in the entire mission last week and we picked up nine this week!  It was awesome!

Last Monday Elder W and I went to Oslo and walked around the city with the other missionaries.  The city is covered with Christmas decorations and it was fun checking out all the Christmas shops they have downtown. 

We met with K on Tuesday and went with her to a Pentecostal church where they have song and prayer all day long.  It was very peaceful and we had some good Pentecostal music that I almost dosed off to ha ha.  We took her to the Oslo center afterwards and had a wonderful teach with a member.  She really opened up and we were able to find out a lot of her concerns.  Her father that is a priest in the state church is way against our church.  She still lives with her father and he doesn't want her to visit with us.  We are going to take a break with her and hopefully we can pick her back up down the road.

We had a great zone leader council on Wednesday and we've got amazing zone leaders in the mission right now.  They had a lot of good ideas and they were all on fire.  We talked a lot about taking responsibility of your zones.  We drove the Stavanger and Trondheim zone leaders back to the airport and we flew out with the Stavanger zone leaders.  We had a great splits with them!  I love Stavanger!  It is one my favorite cities and it's a lot warmer than the east side of Norway.  I felt like I was on vacation in Hawaii or something ha ha.  It was fun to be with Elder V (my son) and Elder A (my daughter) for a couple of days.  We flew back to Oslo Friday morning.

Elder W and I had quite the adventure on Saturday.  We finally got to contact in our area after three days of being out of our area.  After our studies we hit the streets of Asker for a while before we went back to the office to do some office work that afternoon.  The adventure happened that evening.  We went through some former investigators and we found one that we wanted to visit. 

It was a family who was taught by some missionaries a couple of years ago.  They live on an island that has no cars.  We drove through Nesøya to get there which is like the Hollywood of Norway.  Norway is probably the most expensive country to live in the world and then you have Nesøya which is the most expensive part in Norway so you get the picture.  Anyways, we went to an island called Brønnøya and we had to walk across a foot bridge to get there.  We walked all over this island trying to find this former investigator.  I felt like I was in the South Pacific walking on a remote island in the jungle.  I would say 95% of the houses on Brønnøya are second homes.  We finally found this little cottage up on a hill where they lived.  They invited us in and we had a wonderful visit with them.  We set up another appointment to visit them this week.  It's an entire family with two kids.  It was one of the coolest experiences I've had on my mission.  They were a very humble nice family.  They don't have a lot and are one of the only ones that live on the island.  He does local stuff on island for work and catches fish a lot of times for their meals. 

H came to church on Sunday with his family which was a miracle. They have the possibility of being a huge strength to the ward.  After church we went to Presidents place and ate dinner with the new senior couple that came here.  The couple will be going to Bergen.  It was a great dinner and I feel very spoiled here in Sandvika.

Life is great here and it's going by so fast.  I've never been so busy but I finally feel like I'm starting to get the hang of things.  I'm really learning how to use my time wisely.  It will be important that i learn how to do that for college.  I want to study the gospel for at least an hour a day and go to the temple once a week.  It's always fun to hear from you all and I want you all to know that the church is true.  This really is the Lords restored church with prophets and apostles.  I'm so grateful for that I'm so grateful for all of you.  I hope you all have a wonderful week and I'll talk to you soon. Love you all!

Eldste Godfrey