Week of April 6, 2014

Jambo! So this last week was pretty good. We didn't teach a whole lot, but I'm excited for the weeks to come here. It'll be great. Couple of interesting things that happened though. Just a couple of things that are note-worthy- On tuesday we were walking to an appointment, and a guy came up to us because he was looking for peace. He was a native american who had served in the canadian military and had some ptsd problems. We taught him about the atonement and how Jesus Christ can help him through anything. We set up an appointment with him to meet the next day. Native people have pretty great names, this guys name was Jay Rabbitskin. After we talked with him, we went to our appointment which was teaching a family we found doing service. They didn't speak much english, but they spoke Swahili, and we soon found out they were devout muslims. It was great getting to tango with them haha. The way to teach them is to share about our religion, then have them share a little about theirs. I don't know how much we got across, but I learned a little swahili in the process :)

Wednesday we taught the Birds. It's always interesting teaching two parents, and then 6 little girls under the age of 11. Always have to use our creativity with that one. But we taught them about following the prophet and it seemed to go well. Sadly they weren't able to make it to conference, but it was understandable when their dad has to work till 6 am. Friday I taught my favorite less-active up here. Kim daniels. She's great. She's sitting on the fence of coming back to church, just wish the ward would help out. She works at the jail as a programs counselor so we can always go over there and have our venting sessions. Good times.

Saturday, We had a ping-pong tournament/BBQ at the church in between conference sessions. It was great! I did all the grilling, Sister Daniels let us borrow it. It was great. And Sunday was also conference. Shocker. But then we gave a member in the bishopric who had a bad concussion a blessing which was stressful for me, then went over to the best member family-The Yawneys. Bro. Yawney taught me a little guitar and we ate some indian food. It was so good. They're solid. 

So conference was great. I can't share all that I got out of it, but I obviously loved Elder Holland's talk. Because if there is one thing that I have found on my mission, it is that people know Jesus as a "comfortable God" but he's not. so he smashed it! it was great. I also Liked Elder Anderson's talk on the Church's standards. our recent convert is struggling with some of the church's standpoints on gay marriage so hopefully that helped him out. I loved Pres. Uchtdorf's talk in Priesthood on remedy's for things that hinder our priesthood power. All great things. I could go on and on. Mainly I got out of conference that we should -Follow the prophet, -Communicate, -Serve, -Stand up for what we believe in, -Be courageous, and -daily prayer and scripture study builds our foundation of Christ. 

I'm excited for these next couple of weeks. We get to go an hour out of town to Melfort for a service project/zone conference so that'll be fun. But the week after that is a huge one. We have transfers and on top of that we have my first mission conference and we just found out that D. Todd Christofferson is coming to that. And that's in Regina, Saskatchewan. So they're pulling the whole mission into that. All 150 missionaries, across 3 provinces and 1 state to one city. It'll be nuts. Well, that's this week. The snow is still here. It's finally up into the positives though. Today is +4! yay haha. So hopefully this snow'll be gone by the end of this week. 

Love you guys, and thanks for all your support.

-Elder Sorenson

Signing off