This week has been pretty good. There weren´t many things that were any different from normal though, so this will be a shorter email.
This week Elder Walker showed me how to use all the resources on the family history room computers, so I am starting to do some real work on my family history, which is fun. When I find a name that is missing some information, like the specific birth date, or parents´ names, I can look up pictures of really old Swedish church records that have all that kind of information. Those who have done indexing before know how hard it can be sometimes to decipher the really old cursive writing from the 1700s and 1800s. I am trying to read that same writing, but in Swedish. So it is a bit of a challenge, haha. But I am able to pick out names and some key words so I can figure out the important information.
We had a couple of member dinners this week, which were super fun. At one members´ house they had a big gingerbread house that they let us destroy and eat, haha. I think I have a few pictures of it. Last night we had dinner with a family that knows Elder Walker´s family. The wife knew Elder Walker´s dad when he was a missionary in Sweden. The husband went looking through pictures on his computer, and found pictures of Elder Walker´s family at a Midsummer party like 6 years ago. So that was pretty cool.
The only other big news from this week is that Elder Walker and I are moving! The contract on the apartment we are in ran out, so we´re moving to another apartment that is closer to the city, but a little further from our area. The elders that live there now are moving to a new apartment that is closer to their own area, so it works out pretty well. The fun thing about moving out of a missionary apartment, is that you find a lot of random things when you start cleaning it out. We found a soccer ball, a bunch of clothes, some empty journals, and a lot of other things. I´m not really sure what we´re supposed to do with all of the stuff that we don´t want or need. We will be moving out in about 3 hours, so after emailing we have to go back and try to organize things as best we can.
My spiritual thought for this week is about missionary work, but I´ll try not to make it too preachy :) This is actually something that Elder Stafford had an insight on, so it´s not my original idea. It has to do with how we know that today in the latter days the Lord is hastening His work. Many times we take this to mean that a lot more interested people will show up wanting to investigate the church, or that missionary work will just happen. But we need to remember that this is his WORK, which means that we need to do our part and do work to make things happen. Hastening the work can be taken to mean that today with so many resources and opportunities to share the gospel, we need to do our part to hasten the work. I will relate this to Jacob chapter 5. When the Lord of the vineyard goes out to harvest the fruit of the trees for the last time, that is when he brought together and used the most servants. This was the harvest that brought forth the most good fruit, but it was also the harvest that took the most preparation, effort, and work. I´m trying not to be preachy, so I´ll just end with this: The servants that helped with the last harvest had great joy with the Lord of the vineyard because of the fruit, and so can we when we help in this great work.
I hope everyone has a great week!
Elder Smith
Pictures!
1) This is a cool tree sculture/lamp that is at a subway station in our area
2) Here we are at a member dinner. We had hot dogs with guacamole on them. It was interesting
3) Here is the gingerbread house
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