The Bold and The Beautiful

January 8, 2018

Hello Hello Hello!

Danish Word of the Week: fyrværkeri - firework! 

Danish Fun Fact: The ambulance cars a giant Mercedes vans. 

The scripture that I feel sums up this week is Alma 38:12, ''Use boldness, but not overbearance; and also see that ye bridle all your passions, that ye may be filled with love; see that ye refrain from idleness.'' That was my goal of this week- to be bold. 

 On Tuesday we went down to the castle that we live next to (yeah, we live next to a castle) and talked to everyone we saw.  We met some pretty awesome people, a really cool girl in particular from China.  She is here on a trip with her family, but seemed pretty interested in what we had to say, so she took a card.  While we were contacting, Søster Critchfield figured out how to make her newness into quite the effective tool.  She would courageously walk up to people and say in broken Danish, ''Hi I'm not from Denmark can you help me understand Danish?'' and then proceed to ask a language question.  That worked wonderfully! People were very willing to help and the conversation would naturally turn into one about religion.  I highly recommend that approach.  10/10.  We also had an appointment with a new to me but not new to the Hillerød sisters investigator.  She was a referral and absolutely LOVES the Book of Mormon.  She already wants to get baptized, but is just a little hesitant to set a date.  Updates with her to come.  We also said goodbye to our Turkish friend, Adem.  He's moving to Germany to pursue a buisness something or other, and it'll be a little sad to see him go.  His English was improving a ton! 

Our Wednesday started off with a wonderful lesson with our dearest Therese.  I'll get a picture of her next time so you can see just how absolutely adorable she is.  I love her.  We taught her about the beauty of repentance, and she loved it! She has come such a long way.  When the missionaries first met her, she had no conception of Christ.  Now, she can't imagine her life without Him. It's incredible.  We also received the tender news of President Monson's passing via an sms from our AP's.  We spent some of the evening hours visiting members and sharing a small spiritual message on our dear prophet. 

Thursday brought a subsitute for zone conference in the form of zone meeting.  Our whole zone got together (without President and the Senior Couples) and had a 2 hour meeting completely centered on goals.  Our mission was blessed enough to reach our baptism goal that we set at the beginning of the year.  We wanted to help 60 people enter the waters of baptism and 61 did! It was inspiring to see how hard all of the missionaries around me are working to accomplish our goals, and has also inspired me to set some pretty high goals for myself this year.  I'm going to need to be more diligent and hard working than I have ever been before in my life, but I am excited.  One huge goal I set for myself is to learn how to juggle.  I need to practice for 10 minutes every night, and so far so good.  I can get 3 clementines going in the air for about 2 seconds.  Baby steps, baby steps.  We ended off the night knocking on doors and having fabulous conversations with every single person.  It was a good day. 

Friday was yet another day of contacting and working with all our strength.  We went to a nearby city and made a goal of having every single person say ''no'' at least twice before we moved on.  It led to all lot more people taking cards and Books of Mormon.  I thought that it was actually so successful that I've decided to implement that concept into the rest of my missionary work forever. One person we contacted told us that the best bakery in all of Sjælland was just around the corner, so we of course had to go check it out.  It was qutie amazing.  

We began our Saturday be helping out a member in our ward whose daughter was moving quite last minutely all the way from Esbjerg in Jylland to Allerød on Sjælland.  We scrubbed and dusted, swept and sweated, and got her entire basement ready in under 3 hrs.  It felt good to do some great service.  Later, and appointment fell through so we hit the streets contacting.  As I said earlier, my goal this week was to be more bold and bold I was.  There was one man in particular who was qutie pesimistic and didn't necessarily strongly desire to hear our message, but I was determined to let him know what he was missing.  For the next 15 minutes I proved to him that God could actually exist and I knew it because I was willing to go find out.  I preached and I felt great.  His attitude by the end changed and after taking a card, we parted ways as friends.  I love this bold Raya.  She's a keeper.  

Sunday brought quite the surprise.  Half way through sacrament meeting I was summoned to the back of the room and told that I needed to translate the entire 3 hr meeting.  After some small hiccups of nervousness and inadequecy, I began to translate all of church from Danish to English.  I did in no way a wonderful job, but I did it.  It was quite the humbling experience because I had gotten a little proud of my language skills, and trying to translate definitely made me see need for further studies.  Regardless, it was still a great experience! 

I absolutely loved this week because I saw what a difference my diligence and my boldness could make.  I was motivated every single morning to get out of bed and go find people.  I also learned a lot about setting and accomplishing goals.  One goal I would like to encourage all of you to make is a Book of Mormon reading one.  The very last words of our dear prophet President Monson to us expressed just how important reading the Book of Mormon is.  I think that President Monson knew that his talk in April could very well be his last one, so he wanted to express what was most important - the Book of Mormon.  Every single thing in our religion depends on 531 pages.  I want to know those pages as well as I can, and I encourage you all to do the same! 

Jeg elsker jer rigtig meget og håber at I får en god uge!!

Søster Esplin

raya.esplin@myldsmail.net