Follow the Spirit

From: Jennifer Juker <jennifer.juker@myldsmail.net>
Date: Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 10:14 AM
Subject: Follow the Spirit

Nära och Kära!

Crazy how times fly when you are working hard for the salvation of souls! =)
Last Monday we spent the day out biking around! We got to see a lot of cool sights and play some card games in a cool gazibo next to a lake. It was a lot of fun. We ended the evening with visiting Annick. She is from Berundi and speaks like 5 languages. We visit her on monday evenings and do a family home evening with her. This time we talked about EFY because Pauline was with. It was a whole lot of fun! She taught us how to make swedish pancakes and she is like a pro at it. They were perfectly cooked, perfectly round and perfectly delicious!

I tidags I finally met Daniela! She is wonderful! She was raised Christian and really loved learning about the restoration. She asked exactly the questions that lead us to explain each new part of the plan of salvation. It was one of the first whole lessons Syster Spjut and I taught together and it worked out so well. The spirit was there and the questions were answered and she felt it. It was awesome! She begins SFE (Swedish classes for immigrants, shes the teacher) soon so meeting with her will be tricky but she still wants to meet us. =) She talked about what I thought was a child whinning in their room and wanting to come out. Only to find out it was Turbo, he is a big dog but really well trained. I was happy to see and meet him as we were leaving. We then took our lunch hour to do some shopping. It was a workout uphill both ways against the wind in skirts. It was an interesting experience but we are glad to report no food was lost and we didnt die! We then met up with our Visiting Teaching companions and did our visiting teaching. Cat was having a more down day so we were able to bring some light into the day and when we left we were all laughing and smiling it was great to see the cloud lift again. We then visited Amber and Mike, they invited us over for dinner and shared a nice spiritual thought about a missionary who was ran out of town and the priest who kicked him out told him that he needed to rip one rip out of a paper and create a cross or he could not preach there. Its an awesome story and it really works. You can tell the complete story of Christ with one tear in a paper. Their children have really taken to us and like to show us everything in their house it is really sweet. They both told us that when they get big they want to be missionaries! 
I onsdags we visited Hans right after studies. He has quit snusing and gone to chewing gum! He is making progress and is praying in the name of Christ now and we are hopefully going to sing a duet in church so we can invite him to come and see us. We then updated our area book a bit and did some thank you cards before having an english lesson with a couple of the youth. Myriam wants to go to BYU so she asked us if we could help her with her english. She and a friend came and we were able to help her with that. At the end of the lesson her friend asked about how we can answer questions about the church. We had another appointment we had to go fast to so we set up an appointment for later in the week. We had Amber and went and visited Henri, a less active member. He had actually read his homework and had questions about what he had read! He is making progress! It really made us happy. We reviewed the restoration and he learned somethings he had forgotten. Amber was able to practice her swedish and testify so it was great all around for all of us!

I torsdags was an interesting day because the train schedule changed on us and we didnt know it. (SJ didnt know it) We went to Linköping for our district meeting. When we left Katrineholm the weather was a great sunny day but by the time we got to Linköping it was rainy and wet which was a little on the depressing side of things. As we were getting ready to leave there was a knock on the door and a package was delivered! I got cute skirts from Mom just in time to choose my outfit for the day! It was great. District meeting we talked about extending commitments and following up. It was very relavent and we were able to role play a bit. We ended up taking a later train and then missed a connecting train and then were invited to go with the Norrköping Systers to their bishops house to learn how to make cinamon rolls and the like. It was a lot of fun. We got to strengthen them and their desire to do missionary work as two of their sons are out on missions right now as well. We made it back for our appointment with Åsa in the evening. She is less active and is wonderful! I love visiting her and uplifting her. It goes both ways! We always leave her place happy and laughing! We talked about the blessing animals are in our lives. She has a cat who is very dear to here and so we connected about animals because Kasier is important to me. She told us she is always glad to see and hear from us. Which made us feel special! As we were on the way home we ran into Myriam and Scarlet and were able to follow up on the english we taught them earlier in the week. It was great.

I fredags we had a bit of a rough start after studies in the morning as our evening plans cancelled on us and I was having some personal problems. We talked a bit and it got better. We were able to have a wonderful lesson with Myriam and Scarlet. They came up with questions that they get asked a lot about their religious beliefs and we talked through answers and then roleplayed it. In the end they both expressed interest in serving full time missions when the time comes for them. It felt great to be a positive influence for those two, they are so sweet! We then visited a potential investigator who owns a candy store. He had lots of questions since I was the new sister in town. So we were actually able to teach him quite a bit about the restoration and about prophets today. He wasnt all that interested in changing but he had a lot of questions to ask and we were able to answer. We then did weekly planning at home and it worked out pretty well in the evening.

I lördags we had recieved some revelation for how we could explain things to Alex. He has been investigating for a while and we were not entirely sure how we were to help him have a desire to do something. So during weekly planning we came up with an analogy about a cake. Now with a cake if you bake it you can smell it and you can see it and it looks and smells good but you wont really know that it is good until you take the chance and eat it! We decided that is exactly like the gospel! We cannot know that it is good unless we are willing to change a little and do something to show Heavenly Father that it is worth it to us to know. So we took it to the test and did it with Alex. It was a clear analogy and he really understood it. He didnt sign up for baptism just yet but he is spending this week praying about it and the Book of Mormon. It was a great example to us of following random inspiriation to help with our investigators. Amber needed some help with Young Women manuals and swedish so we delivered them their thank you card and were able to help her with a manual. We practiced our song that we might sing on the piano at the church before going over to Aminas house. Amina is muslim and we are helping her with swedish. She is reading the Book of Mormon Story Book in swedish and its helping her to understand swedish more. Its really been a help for her. She is doing ramadan now so there long fasts when they dont eat when the sun is up. She always seems to give us native food so we were pretty sure that wouldnt happen because she was fasting but we were wrong. She cooked us food and just sat there and watched us eat. She helped teach us a lot about the history of why they do it and other things of their culture. It was really interesting. We gave her another story to read and she asked if Amber could come over and they could practice their swedish with each other. It sounds like a great idea so we are working out the details now. 

Igår was a wonderful sunday all around. It was practically perfect weather and the spirit was strong in our meetings. We were asked to help out with Primary unexpectedly. So we had already studied and then the call came. So I got some bathroom revelation and decided to teach the Plan of Salvation and have the kids color themselves and teach them I am a child of God. It went really well and at the end they wanted to draw and color their whole family. It was great. We then met with Alf, our new ward mission leader to get a sense of what he wants to do. Hes got fire and is ready to get the "sleepy branch" up and running again in way of missionary work. We are really looking forward to working with him. We visited Cat again, as she wants to make our sunday visits a tradition. We both felt inspired to share with her what we had learned about Faith, Hope and Charity. It was really great and Cat had a lot of good imputs as well. The most awesome lesson of the day was with Rosmery and Leif. They had visited Jönköping and Syster DeTinne-Cassel talked with Rosmery about baptism and she shared with them her concerns of the whole situation. The whole time Leif was telling her that all of her concerns would be resolved by doing it. It was quite an interesting lesson because Leif seemed all for it. He has faith but not sure of what its in. He loves his family and will do anything for them so he seems to think and support the idea of baptism. Rosmery talked about concerns about raising their daughter. It was awesome to just testify about how the gospel is really what will help them in all aspects of those worries. The spirit lead the discussion and they are praying and discussing the pros and cons so to speak of joining a church. It was awesome!

For your Challenge this week I'm challenging you all to not forget about Sweden even though Steven is coming home =) Can you do that? 

Love you all and thanks for your love and support!!!

Love you

Syster Juker