Wow this week was legendary!
We were super busy with a lot of stuff. We started off by flying up to Trondheim on Wednesday and got to meet some of the members there that I knew from when I served there. The next day we had our last zone conference with the west coast zone and it went super well! We hyped up the missionaries and then went out on splits with some of them and showed them how to street contact. We have a lot of young missionaries who have never done this stuff because of Corona so we're just grinding and getting them hyped about old school finding ways. Then the next day we rented a car and drove down to Kristiansund and visited an investigator and the Branch President of the small group that meets there. We ate some really good food and I've decided that reindeer steak is my favorite meat now! We went out that night and went fishing with this guy my companion use to teach and we got some cool pics with his camera. Then he said to us, " it looks like the northern lights are going to be out tonight" so then we got hyped but ended up leaving and then they came out after we went to bed I was so sad. The next day we packed up and drove down to Ålesund!! It was so good to be back there, we met up with my boys Kjell and Kimbo and we had a bonfire and roasted hot dogs and had a nice good talk. Then later that night after we got home we get a call from Robert ( the guy from Kristiansund ) saying that the northern lights were out again!! So we sprinted outside and up a hill and we saw them!! I was so hyped it's been one of my goals here and I finally got to see them after 20 months! They faded pretty quick so I didn't get any good pictures but we had a feeling they were going to come back so we waited and waited. All the people who were waiting with us on that hill including President and Sister Tew left and went home. But we waited and then they came back very slightly but then out of nowhere this dude comes out of the bushes with a nice camera and tells us he takes photos of the northern lights and that this was super rare to see them this far below the arctic circle so we were lucky. He had some cool attachments on his camera to where he could pick up more light when he took pictures and then he said, "well do you guys want some?" so he took some pics of us and they looked super cool. We were so stoked afterwards. We woke up the next day and had church in the little old bakery! It brought back so many good memories and made me realize how much I've grown these last 2 years since my first area in Alesund. My mission has changed me so much and I'm eternally grateful for it. After that we went on a cool hike with Fride and Ida (two recent converts me and my comp taught) and some of their friends to the place Ida was baptized. It was up the mountain under this cool waterfall. It was totally out in the middle of no where but the view was amazing. She lives back in the boonies out in this fjord and it's such a pretty place. Then the next day we packed up and headed 9 hours back home to Oslo. We had planned on going to some world famous hikes but they were all closed because of bad weather. It started snowing and got super foggy so we didn't get to see some of the crazy cool nature we were driving through but it's ok because I've done that drive before. Me and my trainer took the car up there and opened up the area baptized some people and helped out as much as we could and now a year and a half later I drove it back down and the branch is probably going to close down soon. It was sad to see but it is what it is.
I've been reading a ton recently and just finished a book called Faith is Not Blind. I would HIGHLY recommend it to everyone, it was amazing. But on the way home after we switched driving I started another book called "Yearning for the Living God" and it's about a general authority by the name of F. Enzio Busche who was raised in Germany during Hitler's regime and his conversion story and how he yearned to find God amongst all the evil around him. It is truly an amazing book. I really loved some of the comments he made. First "We must have as our objective the desire to live by the Spirit, to be guided by the spirit, to act by the Spirit, to teach by the Spirit, and to decide by the Spirit. Then we CANNOT fail!" That is so true, we must have our goals focused on those 5 aspects. And If we do so we cannot fail, and even though we are not perfect we can try our hardest. There's an analogy that President Packer gave in a talk that I loved. He said “If you take a letter half the distance to a mailbox and stop, then start over going half the remaining distance and stop, then repeat the process over and over, theoretically will you ever really get to the mailbox?” One bright student said, “No, but you’ll get close enough to mail the letter.” We cannot reach perfection in this life but we can get close enough to deliver the letter if we really try. But how do we continue forward if it seems like we plateau? Elder Bushce explained it well, "When we are on a spiritual plateau it is necessary for us to understand that we cannot do beyond that plateau until we increase our level of sacrifice and our ability to take one step further!"
Hope you all have a great week!
