Happy New Year! More Swedish for Heather and I Promise I Didn't Use Google Translate!

vecka 29
Hejsan!!

Sorry about the confusion!! Yesterday was P day and so I was able to write a couple of people but we had kind of an interesting situation happen that required our "attention" so we are using just a little bit of time to get our letters out this morning. This is also the last of the weird days and P day is normal starting monday again.  We will see if I am staying on Gotland or leaving tomorrow so I will let everyone know on Monday but I should be here still.

Also, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! It was a good year last year and I have just been thinking how crazy but amazing it is that I am able to spend this year completely on a mission and how blessed I am to be able to do that:). I also wanted to say thank you so much to everyone that sent me packages and letters for Christmas they were the best and absolutely made my day and my weekend. (if you dont know missionaries get kind of crazy when they get mail so...;). This week has been interesting it is actually a relief for us as missionaries that the new year is over so that we can start meeting with all of those people that just said, "wait until the New Year" so now we will see if they are really interested haha.

One thing that was really crazy was that everyone was pretty much gone last week in church and the stake presidency called us to say that they were not going to be able to come to the meeting and that they would want us to take care of it. But we thought that it would be a problem because we would just have to give sacrament to ourselves and everything would be fine. But on Saturday night we got a call from a family that comes from Karlskrona that said they wanted to visit the church tomorrow and were looking forward to the meeting and then we had two investigators show up. So, I presided at the meeting and conducted and led the music and gave a talk and then gave the lesson in Sunday school with everyone... It was interesting I think we did a good job considering we have no real idea of what we are doing and Swedish is still sketchy but it worked. It was really cool actually to see that family come to church and when I told them the situation that the branch would be basically gone he just reminded me of a scripture that says when two or three are assembled in my name there will I be also. So that was a really good reminder to me and I have really seen the reality of that on Gotland because on a good day we are less than 20 people in church. But the Spirit was there and everything went smoothly.

It has been a pretty cool week and one of the miracles that we have been able to see is that of prayer. We prayed this week that we would be able to get three lessons on tuesday and all three of those lessons canceled on us, which is weird because that never happens to missionaries :P. But we found three people that we were able to teach either in their doorway or in their house for the first time. Even though 2 of them we personally probably wont see again it is a testimony to me that Heavenly Father is really concerned about us as missionaries and what we are trying to accomplish as well as He is concerned about the people that we teach and the people around us.

For New Years we got to meet with investigators and with the Herreys and have dinner and then we actually watched a restoration film because that is who the Herreys are and we were able to get another appointment with them and they will hopefully come to church this Sunday which we are really excited for. But they left early because they have a baby and so we stayed up and watched a movie with the Herreys until midnight where we screamed and watched the fireworks and drunk people outside and then went home. It was actually really exciting and more fun than I probably make it sound.

Vi är super spända för verket dem här näste 6 veckorna och vi hoppas att vi ska hitta några stycken att förena grenen här. Jag har bara en transfer kvar tror jag och vi ska få en ny grens president och äldre missionärer. jag hoppas att allt ska gå jämt och skönt men vi får se om Himmelske Fader har nånting annat i sinnet för oss ;)

Jag Älskar er!!!!!

Äldste Israelsen

I wrote in Swedish mostly because Heather said she wanted to see more of it. Also to prove that I can speak Swedish... I promise I didn't just put it into Google translate haha. sorry about the pictures they will be in Mondays letter!!