Syster Brink in Sweden: Oh the Places You'll Go

dear family and friends,

well, its that time of the week again! this week we had lots of fun and plenty to do.

For pday last week we went to the mall of scandinavia and it felt a little like walking into the great and spacious building. There were, thankfully, no people there pointing and laughing at us. But I did definitely feel like I took a step into the world and realized just how "out of the world" I've been living for the past while.

we did splits with the Västerhaninge sisters and I got to go to västerhaninge with sister Hatch. She's super cute and she's on her last transfer of being trained. I had so much fun with her! She's really relaxed and knows her way around missionary work and also she's like, super talented at swedish. We taught lots of people and helped set up for sister's conference.

me and sister hatch

Sister's Conference was great. Sister Beckstrand is super creative and puts them together with the cutest themes. This time it was Dr. Seuss themed. Lots of good reflection and learning and I also got to see my favorite sisters :) There was a training about post-mission life and we read "oh the places you'll go" together. I sat there reading and got stuck on the parts that said:

"There are some things down the road between hither and yon that will scare you so much you won't want to go on."..."Simple it's not, I'm afraid you will find, for a mind maker upper to make up his mind."

all those things ahead of me leading me to exaltation.

Wow. Dr. Seuss speaking right to my heart. For the past while I've been getting a lot of people asking, "So, how does it feel?" and honestly I don't know how to describe it. I'm just going to do a rain check on the response to that question until I find the right words.

We also went to the wesemeyers and moved some giant stumps and burnt a huge fire to help them set up for Valborg.

elder burton, me, and rahaf getting ready to move some stumps.

Speaking of Valborg, that was on the 30th. The last day of April is "swedish burn day." We also had stake conference. We hopped on the train to get to the saturday evening of stake conference and made it one stop down the line before they made us get off and told us there wouldn't be any trains going north for at least the next 2 hours. Ouch. So we were stuck in a teeny tiny town called Rönninge where the streets aren't marked and nobody there knows how to get anywhere. We ended up having the Woods, a really sweet senior couple, come and rescue us and take us to stake conference. We made it for the last 30 minutes. I'm just thankful we even got there. Then after stake conference we all headed out to a field by the chapel and got all smokey with some other missionaries, people from the city, and President and Sister Beckstrand.

valborg!

Yesterday we had stake conference via web broadcast and it totally reminded me of how every time we tried to do that at home the stake center would always (without fail) lose connection to the tabernacle. Guess what happened? Glitches in the system made it nearly impossible to sustain the people they called to stake positions and the opening song skipped like a broken record, hahaha. We did get to listen to most of the talks and then when the stake president got up to speak we lost connection entirely. So did all the other buildings that weren't in the chapel they were broadcasting from. So we sung a closing hymn an said a closing prayer. It was still a really good, uplifting meeting.

We didn't see as much of the inside of our chapel this week, but we did get some good things going because of all that restoration teaching last week. We've got some people pretty solidly progressing towards baptism!

I love you guys! today I'll be heading off to the biggest IKEA in the world. I'm gonna buy myself a shoe horn.

have a great week! write me, send me letters, take pictures, I want to hear from you guys!

-syster janessa brink

just for fun :)