How is everyone?? It's crazy that July is almost over, which is surprising because It has been a pretty cold summer. Summer may be gone before it ever came. We've been trying to utilize our short sleeve shirts regardless, though. It's kind of like back in Minnesota when everyone would be wearing shorts and a t-shirt out to recess on a 30 degree day just because it was 60 degrees warmer than it was in January. Speaking of Minnesota, we have been doing service for this member that is originally from Minnesota (although she came to Norway in the 80's). We talked about everything from wild rice, to homer hankies, to Duluth, to the Mall of America etc.
We've started teaching some really cool investigators. I told you about one of them last week that we found as an answer to a prayer. We have taught him several times now and he has a way cool story. Several years ago he started a search for truth and he totally changed his life around. He knows the bible better than I know myself. He can be hard to teach sometimes because off how much he speculates and how much he gets caught up in the details, but this man loves to learn! As of Saturday night he only had about 30 pages left in the Book of Mormon ! He only eats fruits and vegetables and when I asked him what he ate in a normal day he said the following: half a watermelon for Breakfast, the other half for lunch, and 12 bananas for dinner! Needless to say, I walked in to the kitchen and there were probably 50 ripe bananas on the table, all of which are probably gone by now. I'm committed to trying this out one of the days this week.
The other cool guy we just started teaching is named B. B. is originally from Mauritania, but has lived all over. We teach him in Norsk but he also speaks fluent French and English so sometimes we bland between the three languages :) It was weird because we had found him a couple of weeks ago on the street, but accidentally forgot to call him! Luckily one of the roles of the spirit is to bring things to remembrance and the apartment number he gave us popped into my head one day. Just this past week we were able to teach him three times. He has been smoking for something like 40 years, so we decided to teach him the Word of Wisdom on the second teach and gave him a blessing. He is a quiet man and doesn't say much in teaches, but the things he says are always really powerful and show that he understands what we are teaching. It's been a real joy to meet and teach this great man.
We were in Trondheim again on splits with the zone leaders this past week. Got to help teach one of their awesome investigators and do some finding on the streets. Trondheim is an awesome city and they speak a real goofy sounding dialect that kind of sounds like Chinese to me. I've been chilling down in the South for most of my mission, so it's fun to get exposed to that.
I think one of my favorite things about the mission is all the cool people we meet! They may not all get baptized and they may not always agree with our message, but they have helped me to be more open to other ways of thinking and other ways of living. We are all brothers and sisters from the same God and the more we leave our comfort zone and serve our fellow men, the closer we will come to Christ. I'm really trying to be more objective in the way I look at people so that I can see things from their perspective and give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
Elder Duncan is down to his last couple of weeks before he heads home, and a bunch of other missionaries will be going with him. We've got 13 new elders coming at the Aug. 5 transfer and about 14 the transfer after! It's been a blast having a comp so passionate and committed to this work!
Everyone is on vacation right now in Norway. I joke that we should just send all the Norwegian missionaries to Greece for a couple weeks and we would probably find more Norwegian speakers to teach.
Thanks for everything! Have a great week! :)
Love,
Eldste Parkinson
