This week was really crazy.
Tuesday we had a specialized zone training in Malmö. The mission department has changed the missionary schedule so we had a lot to talk about that. I'll get into it more once I get to Thursday. We talked a lot about diligence and President Beckstrand tied it to Michael Phelps.
Michael Phelps has had a number of times where he got distracted in between Olympics and people thought that his career was over. He then would go back to work and focus and we all have seen the results of that.
In Preach My Gospel it defines diligence:
"Diligence is steady, consistent, earnest, and energetic effort in doing the Lord’s work."
President Beckstrand emphasized this principle a lot. It was a really cool training. The training took up most of our day because we had to travel to Malmö, were there for 6 hours, and then go back.
Wednesday was pretty fun. We did a lot of contacting. We then had dinner with a member and her friend who are both from the Philippines. They are super funny. We then had to go to the church because the ward invited us to an activity. It's a way to get one of the less active members an opportunity to be involved and she is really good at yoga so she led a yoga class! I have to admit, I was not expecting to be doing yoga on my mission but it was a lot of fun. Because of yoga though we actually missed the World Wide Missionary Broadcast so that brings us to Thursday
We did our studies and ate an early lunch on Thursday so we could get to the church to watch a recording of the broadcast. They emphasized the importance of teaching about faith in repentance and then announced some big changes. They changed our schedule, so that we have less companionship study but we get out a lot sooner than we used to and have more time to proselyte. Our schedules are now a little more flexible and we are able to go to bed a little bit sooner if we want because of this weird thing called "sufficient sleep". They also changed the points that we focus on in missionary work and simplified it. We used to have 9 key indicators that we would report numbers for but now we only have 4 and it is really helpful. It makes it a lot easier to focus on the people we meet instead of worrying about numbers. To quote another missionary "It's like the First Presidency was inspired or something".
Friday we went to Halmstad because one of the missionaries had a pre-going home meeting in Stockholm so we had to go pick up his companion. We spent some time contacting up there before coming back to Landskrona where he stayed with us. Saturday we got transfer calls so we found out who is moving where. I'm still going to be in Helsingborg with Äldste Murtonen though.
Saturday was interesting because we still did missionary work but now we had 3 missionaries instead of just 2. We talked to a lot of people on the street and met with several people. We had lunch with some members and shared this awesome talk by President Monson (Principles and Promises) about how sometimes we still need to ask God for blessings we may already be entitled to. We also had another meeting with a member and we talked about the Plan of Salvation. It was awesome how strong the Spirit was there. We had an amazing discussion and we got to know him better because we had never met him before. That night we had to bring Äldste Porter back to the train station so he could catch the train his companion was on so they could get back to Halmstad.
Sunday we had church. We had a really good Sacrament meeting and the classes were really great. We then had dinner with the Bishop's family and we shared from Alma 34:32 about how our time on Earth is a time to prepare to meet God. If that's the case we need to try to do our best and it is really cool to see how Christ's Atonement comes into it. Everyone always remembers that the Atonement helps us overcome sin but people forget that it also helps us to overcome our weaknesses, pains, and trials. It was a really good lesson.
I hope that you all have a great week. I'm sorry I don't have any pictures this week, I didn't have a lot of time to stop and take any.
-Elder Ashford
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