Good news first: We had mission tour this week and Elder Dyches came from the Europe Area Presidency and it was AWESOME! I got to play the piano for 4 zones which was great! And I got to see most of my group from the MTC which was too good! I loved every minute of it. Elder Dyches is inspired of God, he is a great leader and it meant a lot to have him there.
Also good news is that Swedish Midsommar is this week! We actually get 2 days off of proselyting because everyone is Sweden will be up all Friday night getting drunk. So we're excited to spend some time with the members then!
Ok here's the bad news:
We'd been realized lately that our teaching pool was shrinking, people were just suddenly not interested anymore or just simply to hard to get a hold of. It stunk. Also, Daniel (a recent convert) was on track to going to the ward temple trip this Saturday, and we were SO excited for him! We were even MORE excited when we found out that there was space for US to come too! Well, Daniel cancelled last minute with the same excuse he gave last time for not coming and we were'nt allowed to go without him. We were really struggling to get ANY planned lessons at all, and our weekly planning session this week was just awful. We were really down about it, when we woke up Sunday morning to a text from Esan saying that he wasn't interested anymore and wasn't coming to church again. We still don't know why. Literally almost every good thing that Elder Swenson and I had worked for had disappeared in the space of about 3 days, and this was right after the mission tour we had where we fasted for the work to go forward. I was beyond depressed, and it hurt to think about Esan. I was struggling to find a reason to why I was even here.
Then I got a hold of a talk that Sunday about a modern day Shepard who talked about how hard it was to feed sheep. Long story short, I realized that these weren't my sheep. They were the Lord's sheep, and the person who is the most upset when a lamb goes astray is not me. It is our Savior. That realization helped me to understand the Savior's love and appreciation for what I was doing even if the people weren't accepting our message, and it gave me the capacity to carry on. We continued to fight hard and were blessed for it, we managed to get 3 new investigators just over the weekend! Their names are Victor (from Sierra Leone, actually an Italian citizen), Ali (from Jordon), and Konan (from Ivory Coast). They are all awesome!
So yeah! Things are a bit rough right now but we're not letting that get to us. These are the Savior's sheep we're working with. Each and every one of them is precious.
I love all of you! Kämpa på!
pics
2.The gang!
3. Me and this statue in Örebro
4. They sent us tickets for our travel, and this is the only time my name has ever been spelt wrong. Like on anything. Joshua Mason. It's not hard.
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