Påske! [Easter]

God Påske [Happy Easter] everyone! I hope your week was filled with lots of eggs, even more candy, and mostly, thinking about the great miracle of the resurrection!

Not gonna lie, it's been a crazy busy week. It's also been pretty hard to get around from place to place. You see, here in Denmark, they take lots of vacations. So Easter was another reason for them to close down all the shops and cut down the amount of busses that are driving throughout the day for 5 days. Busses basically only drove hourly. But that's ok! That meant more people that were home, right?

Ok, congratulations to Haley!!!! That is so awesome! Young Ambassadors will be such a great experience for her! She has a lot of great opportunities lined up for her. Also, congratulations to Nathan with student council as well! I loved student council!

That "Because of Him" video on lds.org is really good! http://easter.mormon.org/ We actually have already used it for a lot of our lessons. Luckily for us here, basically everyone speaks at least decent English so there were many people we could show that to.

I heard that Ældste Whitlock was back as well! I unfortunately didn't get to see him though. He should be going to BYU soon so you should definitely invite him over! Ældste Elsbury goes home this next Monday as well...it's really weird to think about that. I definitely appreciate the help and great examples they've been for me.

Speaking of transfers....Ældste Mogensen and I are staying together here in Odense! Wahoo! It's been a party up here and I'm glad we have one transfer more! This week we've made a goal to have a complete English fast so we've only been speaking Danish to each other. It's been way fun, but definitely difficult. It's showing the areas I need improvement in BIGTIME. But it's really fun to know that I can just speak Danish.

So...let's begin with the crazy story...Friday we were doing some weekly planning, right? So we randomly get this call from a member in our Ward named Ken Hall. He's way awesome, been a seminary teacher in the U.S. and all that jazz, and is one of the best members for fellowshipping. He doesn't call me Ældste Wawro though...he just calls me "The Polak" or "Polako." Unfortunately, he lives down around Svendborg so we don't really see him that much.

But! Continuing the story...

We answer the phone and he tells us to come down to Svendborg for an Easter Egg Hunt. There will be investigators there to talk to, so just come down. We were pretty confused, but we decided to go down anyway. We get to the other Elders apartment and ask them what exactly is going on. They said they had no idea, that he wouldn't tell, but the only thing he said was make sure we were wearing your normal missionary clothes, not P-Day clothes. He picked us up from the apartment in his car and we immediately started asking questions. He wouldn't give us any details. He only said, with his mischievous smile, "Don't worry, you'll only be breaking 8 missionary handbook rules today." (Of course he was kidding because we didn’t really break any rules.)

Where exactly are you taking us?

Nice place for an Easter Egg Hunt

We picked up one of Svendborg's investigators and proceeded to drive off the Island of Fyn onto the Island Thurø, still technically in our area but not a place we would ever actually visit because, well, it's off the Island! He then pulls off the road into a forest where we walk through mud and swamp onto a beach, all of us in our missionary clothes. We walked by a bunch of campers who all whistled at us and made fun of us for being in the middle of this swamp/camping ground/beach place in our nice shirts, ties, and slacks.

Then we began the Easter Egg hunt. It was in the center of the swamp where we were losing shoes, Ældste Mogensen alone fell about 4 times in the mud! All the eggs were stuck in mud or in thorn bushes where we were all getting scratched and cut up trying to reach. At the end of the hunt, we all returned back to the beach area, all bloodied, bruised, and muddy (especially Ældste Mogensen). But the festivities were not over. We then proceeded to have a bunch of egg competitions that involved us not trying to break the egg. The last game we literally just lined up and threw eggs at Ældste DeMordaunt (Again, us being in our missionary clothes). It was the craziest, most awful, and best Easter Egg Hunt I've ever been on. 

We met with T***** this week, of course. It's still going really great with him. He is still excited for his baptismal date. We did just found out something from a member who works at the facility where he lives. Apparently, he hasn't told his parents yet that he is planning on getting baptized. Technically, it's not necessary to get permission from them since he's old enough, but we don't want his parents to get angry at the church by feeling that we are taking advantage of him. So we are going to talk with him this week and tell him to talk to his parents about it.

There were a few people that we wanted to get in further contact with, so we decided to bake some cookies and deliver them to our investigators! It actually turned out really well. There were a few different people that we dropped them off to, but definitely the best experience was with Familien P*******, A**** P******* hadn't called us for a few days, so we were getting worried that maybe her husband scared her off. When we got to their house to deliver cookies, we were Lucky enough to be able to talk to A****, her husband, and her mom from Poland who was visiting! The mom really wanted to talk to us, but she only speaks Polish and German, which unfortunately, neither Ældste Mogensen or I speak. But luckily, Anna translated a few things for us and her mom said that she would like to visit our church some time! We also were able to talk a bit with the husband and I think that was really good for him to see that we were "fairly" normal people.

I had been thinking a lot about my time in California recently and thinking about what things I learned from there that I could use here in Denmark. There must have been some reason I was sent there, even if it was only for a short amount of time. I remembered a lesson that my companion and I made to help members with their member-missionary work. We called it "The Miracle Lesson." Basically, we promise a miracle will happen at the beginning of the lesson, we talk about miracles and how we receive them, we talk about the miracle of the Restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ, and then we give the promise from Neil L. Andersen where he says that if you pray to know which of your friends or family are ready to hear the gospel, names and faces will come to your mind. We then kneel right there and pray with the members to know which people they should begin working with. While I was in California, it worked really well with every family we taught it to. It truly was a miracle as we saw them think about people that they hadn't thought of before or had ideas of what they should do. And of course, after we prayed we had them write down the people and the goals of what they would do to help them by what date.

We decided to try it this last Sunday on Easter at the Bishop's house. We combined the Miracle Lesson with the Family Mission Plan so we could keep doing what the Ward already was working on and we focused on the greatest miracle of all, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It went fantastic! They even mentioned that there were multiple people that they could begin working with. They really loved the lesson, so we're thinking about trying that more here with the members. And then Follow-Up!

Well, that's everything! I hope you enjoyed the pictures I sent yesterday. Oh! Also, thank you so much for the packages! Both my one-year mark package and my Easter package. I really did appreciate getting them so much! Love you all!

MKH,

-Ældste Wawro