Week 59 - Last Week Until Christmas!

I know this is a day later than usual but we moved our P-day to go to the temple.

We had a crazy week so let's get started!

Tuesday we went to the senior center again. It was kind of cool because I got to talk to someone who is from Landskrona which is where I lived when I was in Helsingborg so that is super cool! 

Wednesday we went to Sankta Lucia. They have a choir in the Swedish church that sings while holding candles and it was super awesome. You can probably look it up online if you want to. We had a pretty fun member meal that night as well.

Thursday we met with Josefina, one of our recent converts, and had a really awesome lesson with her. We also did some finding and then came home and made a big dinner because we had the 4 Sundsvall Elders staying with us. We had a pretty fun time trying to squeeze into our apartment. 

Friday was Christmas zone conference and it was Norrland and Stockholm South zones combined, hence why Sundsvall stayed the night with us. Zone Conference was fantastic! We had some great training and President Youngberg wants us to read the entire Book of Mormon between Christmas and New Year's so for a whole week we are to spend 3-4 hours a day reading. It's going to be awesome! The second half of zone conference was participating in some of the Youngberg's Christmas traditions so we got to watch 'It's a Wonderful Life' and read a Christmas story so that was really cool. We also went to the Musical but the mission has gone through all of the Book of Mormons they had so we were forced to simply offer to deliver. (To give you an idea, the mission ordered 10,000 copies just for the musical for this fall.) 

Saturday we helped a member rearrange some furniture and had lunch with them. We also had our Christmas Concert so we were there for that. They had a fika afterwards which is a swedish word for essentially snack time. They had some rolls and julmust for people to eat. They had a lot of rolls left over so we got sent home with an entire bag.  We then also went to the musical late that night again.

Sunday we had a great day in church. We had a great sacrament meeting. We tried calling a bunch of people and tried to get some stuff set up for the week as well as a bit of finding.

Yesterday we did not have P-day so we went out working. We visited the Senior center. We had a quick lesson at a member home that went really well so that was awesome. We went straight from there to meet a potential investigator. We asked the family to pray for us and for the lesson to go well and it did! It was super awesome!

Today we had our P-day and we visited the temple. It was really great. I love the temple. It is such a peaceful place.

Christmas is less than a week away. I am so grateful for the Savior and this time of year to celebrate his birth. God Jul!

--Elder Ashford

Pictures are at the temple, 

our Christmas tree with ornaments we got at zone conference that look like name tags, 

the temple again, 

 and this crazy car we saw on our way to the musical just driving around Stockholm blasting Christmas music. 

The guys inside were dressed like Santa Claus.

Here are some pictures we took last week with all of the snow. (The snow has since melted away)