Monday, May 5, 2014

There is Still Power in SYL

Kære familier og venner,

Wow, does anyone else seem like the road to Easter is a long one this year? I guess that's just what happens when it is on the 20th of April.

What happened this week?

-We asked if we could meet with one of our less actives again, the same time next week. He already had put us in as a reoccurring event on his phone! Ha ha :)

-Ankhaa brought a friend to Institute and we taught the Plan of Salvation in our English Institute class.

Rundown of my birthday:
-Sister Pearson made me buttermilk syrup, pancakes, eggs and bacon
-We visited and shared a message with a less active member
-We made cupcakes to bring to Ankhaa's since she wanted to make us dinner later and we decided we'd give some out to random people on the street, too :)
-We helped Solveig clean out her basement with the Elders
-We met with Roby, but ended up having to take him with us to drop off a rejsebon (kind of like a check to buy a train ticket) to the elders.
-We met with Ankhaa and she had made us dinner. She found out the day before that it was my birthday and bought me heart earrings. She is so sweet! Then we watched some Mormon message videos with her and Roby :)

A miracle from the week---We had given Ruslan a Book of Mormon in Bulgarian and invited him to read Ether chapter 12. Unfortunately, the Book of Mormon was an old translation that did not have the whole book. Luckily, there is a newer version. He told us he would not be home and we could not meet for a whole week since he had work all week, but that we could drop it in his mail box. We came by, were just writing a sticky note to leave on top of it and he walked out of his apartment building! He ended up not having to go into work. He said himself that it was a miracle that we crossed paths because he was just going to leave and so were we! Instead we were able to meet with him right there on the steps of his stairwell and have an impromptu lesson about the plan of salvation.

And another great miracle :) Every week, we have weekly planning. It last around 3 hours. During weekly planning we make goals for who we will meet the next week, what we will teach or share with them, how many lessons we want to teach, etc. At the end of weekly planning, we make goals of what we could work on to help ourselves be better missionaries. One of our goals this week is to speak Danish as often as possible because we have been slacking on that. It's kind of hard since the majority of our investigators are from different countries and don't speak Danish. But, we had remembered that we had been called to preach Jesus Christ's gospel in the Danish language, so we had better keep practicing.

On Saturday night, we had a lesson with an investigator in English. It was 9:15 p.m., so we just headed to unlock our bikes so we could get home. As we walked to our bikes, a man passed us. We said hi to him and he said hi back. Hi in Danish is, ”hej,” which sounds the exact same, so it is pretty universal and we could be speaking either language with that. I wanted to remind myself and Sister Pearson that we should speak Danish so after the man had passed our bikes, I bent down to unlock my bike and looked over to Sister Pearson (the same direction as the man who was passing us) and said, ”og, vi skal snakke dansk.” Meaning, ”and, we should speak Danish.”

The man heard me say this and turned around looking curious what we had said since he thought I was talking to him. He looked interested in what we had to say. So we began a conversation in Danish. We told him that we had just finished meeting with someone in the area and talked to him about God and Jesus Christ. We told him we were missionaries. Then we asked if he was studying here and he said he is actually a teacher at the university. We asked him where he was from and he said Romania, so I pulled out my limited Romanian vocabulary and said, ”bună ziua” meaning, ”good day.” We continued to speak in Danish until we asked him what churches he had been to. He told us that he wasn't sure how to say all of them in Danish and asked if he could say them in English. We told them it was fine and that was our first language. Then, he asked why we had been speaking in Danish since he was better at English. Ha ha! So we switched to English. We got his number, and he got ours. He wants to meet sometime this week! What a miracle. I know that it was because of the goal we set and that the Lord wanted to help us accomplish it. I really don't think we would have ended up having a conversation with him if it weren't for the commitment we had made that day to speak Danish.

Jeg elsker jer!

Søster Orgill

P.S. SYL stands for Speak Your Language which they would encourage us to do at the MTC so we could learn the language faster by practicing

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