This week Aldste Haddon's email was great, I don't think that I could say it any differently so I have decided to live on the edge and post it here for you. As always, thank you for caring about and praying for Our Missionary! We appreciate all you do for our family!
"The quote of the week is by President Newell, “The mission is an extremely hard thing, life is incredibly hard for everyone as well. The Garden of Gethsemane wasn't easy either. ”
It was the first week of snow... So now its dark for 18 hours of the day, colder then a Eskimo's freezer , humid, windy and I am absolutely loving it. (As long as I have thermals and wool socks on.) This week we taught a lot of less-active people. The ward has about 220 members and about 40 active. So we have been the clean up crew for the most of them. Trying to get these people to remember the happiness they have felt from the church before and getting them to come back.
There has been a lot of problems in this ward from the beginning. As of lately there has been a lady who has been excommunicated going around and teaching less-actives how to write themselves out of the church. Which has been a really big problems because we have about 20 people who didn't really want to. Now we are working with them bringing them back to the church and helping them to be members once again.
[We started to work with one man] He is probably one of the nicest people I have ever met! It was a miracle that we found him again, because he wasn't on the ward lists anymore. So we just went through old reports and saw that he was taught at one point. So we called him up and he was telling us how much he has missed the church and having the missionaries over. So we came over and he has been really sick, so we gave him a blessing and starting to teach him again.
He told him of this nice old lady who came over from the church and told him that if he follows these steps he can have less contact from the church. So he did just because she kind of convinced him to. But now he has finally realized what happened and want to come back once he starts feeling better.
Our work here like I said isn't really all the same as other areas I have served in. We are building this ward so that its can eventually be one of best wards in Sweden. We are working really hard with getting less-actives back and strengthening the members here.
Doing as the Lord himself did, “What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing”
I am so happy for the work that we are doing here and everyday I try to be just a little bit better, work a little bit harder, push a little bit more and at the end of the day I just hit my bed and know I have given it my all. And then the alarm wakes me up, and I do it again.
Love you all,
Elder Haddon"
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