Hellooo!
Thanks for another awesome email. Life's been crazy up here
and a little stressful at times but not in a negative way. Still loving
Norway.. I think its impossible for me not to love. Its been pretty cold lately
but that's no surprise really. We've been really blessed in our district and
zone lately in case you didn't know. Right now our zone has 16 baptismal dates
and 12 of them come from right here in my district. Our district has more
baptismal dates that the other zones do. Completely wild. We've been way
blessed with these unheard of numbers. President has just been blown away. I'm
not sure why heavenly father started giving us all these awesome people but its
a miracle.
Shanklin and I have a baptism on Saturday with a Norwegian
guy named Tore. He's a chill 27 year old dude and he's basically a member
already with all the activities and church gatherings he's coming to. He might
know more members than I do. He's readily accepting all the commandments
including the word of wisdom and law of tithing. Our only concern is with the
law of chastity because of the homosexual thing, he asked a lot of questions
about that. Everyone is liberal here so they sometimes assume that our stance
on marriage between only men and women means that we hate gay people. Obviously
that's not true and I think he understands that as well, so it looks all good.
We've planned a
pretty awesome baptismal program and came up with a system of getting a bunch
of members to come.. basically just give assignments to certain members so they
have to. Its genius. We're giving every auxiliary a way to contribute.
Administrating is key to ministering. This ward has really opened its eyes to
missionary work but we still got a long way to go.
We sat down with our bishop and missionary leader and
discussed next year, our goals and stuff. Its awesome to be able to work with
such great priesthood leaders.
I had to give a talk yesterday. It was supposed to be next
week but they called me on Saturday and said they needed me this week. Its was
about Christ and how he is our light. It was pretty good but I hardly had any
time to prepare. Especially with all the other mission stuff to take care of.
This week is going to be crazy busy. We have a 3 hour zone leader training
meeting this week as well with president coming to town. Luckily Elder Jones
and I aren't teaching all of it because president wants to teach as well. I
love learning from older and wiser people who really know the gospel on a
deeper level.
This week after our awesome meeting in the cozy christmas
decorated mission home, I had yet another flight story. I have bad luck when it
comes to having smooth flights but that's OK because cool stories come from it.
No hotel this time but we did get about 40 bucks(got me two slices of
pizza..cool). What happened was our plane home from oslo took off but then
wasn't able to land in trondheim because the runway was frozen.. so we did some
extra flying to kill time as they tried de-icing the runway. They weren't able
to get the runway cleared so we ended up turning around and going back to oslo.
It was a long night. Eventually we got on another flight to trondheim and
managed one of the sketchiest landings ever. You would think that norway would
have this whole winter travel thing figured out by now. But I'm not complaining
with all these flights that im getting. I'm just hoping all of our missionaries
will be able to make it down here to trondheim this week. Those poor brethren
up there in the dark arctic circle...
I also had a learning experience last night. We visited
these newly wed members at their house. It was spotlessly clean, nice furniture
(no kids yet). we talked with them and then taught them them the doctrine of
christ as we sipped on some glogg and ate pudding. It was perfect. At the end I
felt prompted to give the husband a blessing but thought about the dang bus we
were about to miss.. so i IGNORED it!! So LAME. I talked with elder Shanklin
about it afterwards and he told me that he ignored the same prompting as well.
That was the worst feeling ever so we quickly repented and gave the member a
call. We told him that we "forgot" to offer him a blessing when we
were at his house. He told us that he could really use one since he's been
stressing over his exams. Heavenly Father taught me something that night being
the interesting teacher he is. Never again do I want to ignore spiritual
promptings. It feels terrible.
So its been a pretty great week! I hope you all are getting
excited for the most wonderful time of the year:) have a fun week with work and
look forward to those precious days off! Hard work is always worth it in the
end! Love you!
Eldste Skinner
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