Århus IV: A New Hope

Well it has been a good first week of the transfer! It is always a pretty crazy scramble to get everything situated after transfers but nonetheless, its going swell:) If your wondering what the title means... we (the members of the Århus apartment) started a new morning workout dynasty. So we are all still going strong of our streak of 7 days so far haha. (It is most likely the longest in the mission right now ;) haha) .

But here comes the real stuff:

Progress:

So with our boy J*... he is doing great:) He is progresslvely more sober the more we visit him and he has come down in number of cigarettes a day overall. He has yet ahead of him, but it is amazing to see how far he has already come. He keeps telling us about how he used to play soccer and stuff and not have to stop because he couldnt breathe and stuff like that and he is determined to turn it around so he can get back to that point. He is surprisingly active for a smoking 60 something year old haha. So great stuff there.

As far as Guliano, he is still working on getting some things worked out personally but it is all good!

Oh Yeah! Caroline is getting baptized on the 11th of June! It is pretty set that she will be able to so I am super stoked!! Send some prayers her way:)

We are doing a lot of finding right now to make sure that we have a large pool of potential people to meet with. A lot of those we have been trying to get in contact with that wanted to meet have been busy or dont want to meet anymore. So we have done a lot of finding this week among the craziness of the schedule. But we have been able to teach a lot from our efforts.

One example...

So There is a guy we found named S*. He is a pretty "doesnt matter" kind of guy but last time we talked he said "why not" to meeting with us and so we were able to come back and teach him. His apartment was pretty gnarly... he had two gineua pigs just running around free reign on his floor. Also he had a good 5 strips of fly paper hanging around.... wellll actually more like hundreds of dead flies hanging around on paper ;) haha. But aside from the unpleaseant living conditions, it was a good lesson in a weird way. We taught him all about the plan of salvation and why it is important to not procrastinate the day of our repentance. He still was whatever about it but i think that in a way it changed something inside of him. So we will see where that goes.

Other stuff:

Right now in the mission we are really emphasizing our mission standard of "teaching Repentance, and baptizing Converts". We want to be able to bear our testimony to them and teach them how they can return to live with Heavenly Father so that they will make the choice on their own to do so or not. The reason being that it is better that we focus on helping one person gain their own presonal conversion than to go out and just see how quick we can go through the process.

Elder Bishopp is a great comp. He has a pretty level head on his shoulders and is a solid guy to be around! We have been having a great time together so far!

haha i forgot my planner and my journal so i honestly am spacing on what happened exaclty and when...

Spiritual thought:

This week i was studying and i found something that expounded on last weeks spiritual thought i shared on the interweb with you all haha. I thought more about why we have weakness,opposition, trials, etc. and i was reading in the Doctrine and Covenants Section 136 verse 31 where it says: "My people must be tried in all things, that they may be prepared to receive the glory that I have for them, even the glory of Zion; and he that will not bear chastisement is not worthy of my kingdom."

As i was reading this scripture, i thought about how the Bible talks about the refiners fire. The refires fire refers to the fire used by blacksmiths to refine metals such as silver and gold. In doing so, they get the metal very hot and it gets out all of the impurities out if the metal. This applies to us as mortal because we have to go through this process of refinement. That may mean that we are put in the flames, set on the anvil, and pounded while we wonder why this helps at all. In the end though, we come out a much better, more pure piece of Gold (or whatever metal you want to be:) )

Im greatful that we have opposition and trials and weakness. Even though we still have not reached the end product, we are able to feel the refinement process make us better through our spiritual and temporal burdens.

Have a great week! You all are awesome:)

Venlig Hilsen,

Ældste Jeppson