Tuesday evening we traveled to Stockholm to spend the night for Zone Conference on Wednesday. That meant our only real time to get much done was in the morning and early afternoon. We had met two investigators and another member pretty much back to back so we were going all over the place. We then packed our bags before heading to the station. We got to stay the night with the Office elders and the Assistants as well as another set of elders who traveled all the way from Karlstad. It was fun though.
Wednesday was zone conference. It was also President and Sister Beckstrand's last zone conference as they will be going home in a few weeks. We had a great training though. The Assistants talked about remembering to take the scriptures and liken them to ourselves, to see the personal application, as well as then help others see how the scriptures apply to them too. The Beckstrands then gave us the training that they usually give to missionaries when their going home since they won't be able to give that to all of us later. I really liked President Beckstrand's thoughts. He essentially went through President Monson's talk from 1972 titled "Finisher's Wanted". It is a great talk and reminds us of how important it is to stick it out to the end instead of giving up before we earn our reward. We then had lunch and then time to take pictures as it was essentially the Beckstrand's big goodbye to all the missionaries. We then went and got on a train home. We hadn't realized earlier in the week how late our train was going to be so we had scheduled a lesson for right after we got back. After the lesson we finally got home.
Thursday we met with one of the people that we had got a phone number from. They invited us over in the morning to what turned out to be... the Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall! We met and had a good discussion but we could tell that they weren't super interested in our message. We then met with Nils-Erik, the man who was baptized recently, and we went over the Plan of Salvation. It was a great lesson and we even watched the Mormon Message "The Refiner's Fire" which is fantastic if you haven't seen it. We also took a train all the way out to Nyköping to meet several people only to have them all cancel on us so we had a good time just contacting instead since we had to wait for our train home.
Friday was a pretty quiet day and we had a good member meal.
Saturday was transfer calls! Elder Olson and I are staying in Norrköping together so that will be fun. We had a few lessons during the day and then we had dinner with some members that night.
Sunday we had church and it was great as always. We also did some studies and contacting later in the day. That night though was an awesome experience. We went out tracting, we first knocked on a few doors that had been pretty positive when we tried them several weeks ago. Neither of them answered so decided to continue knocking our way through the building where we had left off last time. We didn't have a ton of time so we were expecting to just knock a few and then leave to get home. The very first door we knocked on opened up. It was a guy from the Ivory Coast and he had actually met missionaries a while ago. We were talking at the door when one of his kids comes up and says "Mom says they can come in" so they invited us in. They had just had a party for their 3 week old baby, as in we had heard their guests leaving in the stairwell about 5 minutes before we knocked. We sat down and had a great lesson. The man had a lot of really good questions that we were able to answer and was happy to have us back again. It's one of those experiences where you just know that God put us there in the right place at the right time. It was so cool.
God really does know each and every one of His children and knows what they need and when. He loves each and every one of us. I hope you all have a wonderful start of summer!
-- Elder Ashford
Pictures
The first one is my district at zone conference
Then it's Elder Olson and the other 3 of us who have all been companions with him
Then the last 2 are us riding majestically as knights on this random outdoor chess we found while contacting
Bonus Photos
We had half of our MTC group at Zone conference so we got some pictures as a group with the Beckstrands.
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