Syster Brink in Sweden: sugar rush

dear family i got the birthday package this week, thank you so much! it was so much fun to open it and blow up the balloons and read the card and everything :) as you can see, I had a lot of fun.

it's been a good, busy week here in dragon city, and i don't even know where to start! last week for p-day we went bowling and yes, I'm still terrible at it. all good fun though.

to answer my parents questions, most of the time we walk places, but when we're not in town we get around by bus or car. we have to share the car with the other four elders in the area, so it just depends on the day. i have only had to take a train once while being here and that was for zone training. super different from karlskrona and jönköping where we would take the train at least twice a week! we like the car though :)

other news this week, we committed three more people to be baptized this december! we have a lot of work cut out for us, seeing as sister taylor and i now have 6 people to teach and prepare for baptism! we're excited though, because we know heavenly father will qualify us (learned that at conference yesterday!) and he will help us with the things we can't do on our own.

we were able to teach armin and his mother this past week and they are so sweet. Armin was recently baptized (like 2 or 3 months ago) and his mother isn't a member. She only speaks persian so we have to have Armin translate for us or we use google. she's the sweetest woman though, and she even came to conference these past couple days. we were able to pull it up in persian and she watched the women's session and the saturday morning session. she loved it! even though there's a language barrier, i really enjoy talking with her :)

we also taught a group of students from the high school. they interviewed us about our church and we taught them the plan of salvation. they were all really nice and asked some great questions. one of the last questions they asked was what our favorite part of being a mormon was. I answered that it was knowing that i was a part of something bigger, and that because I am a child of God it means that I can become like him one day.

Patrik, one of our friends, has been learning about the church for a while. He just finished the Book of Mormon this week and said he enjoyed it. He came to conference too, and stayed for both preisthood session and saturday afternoon session. We've been having really good lessons with him and he's pretty cool. He really does want to know if this is true and seems to have an earnest desire to find out. I'm really excited to see how it all goes for him! He'll be moving to Lund in ~2 weeks, but he'll be back and forth here in sundsvall during that time, so both us and the Lund sisters will be teaching him :)

Conference was awesome. It's tradition to get a giant bag of godis (candy) for conference, so we did that and my blood sugar was spiked the entire time. Some of the talks seemed to be pointed right at me and a few of the messages felt so personal that at some points it felt like the words were taken right from my patriarchal blessing. There was so much about keeping the sabbath day holy, being a loving parent, and being centered on christ. I really enjoyed the comments from the three new apostles, Elders Rasband, Renlund, and Stevensen. I had the opportunity the other night to ask the Lord about their callings and learn for myself so that i could sustain them wholeheartedly. Heavenly Father seemed to know exactly what I intended to ask before I even got the words out. As I said my prayer I could simply feel that the callings these men had recieved were correct and that I could safely follow their council in the coming years.

me and SaySay, our super cute little vietnamese friend :)

I'm so happy to be a part of this church, to know about how Heavenly Father works with his children and to be on the streets everyday telling people about it. this week has been so sweet (in more ways than just the godis) and I'm so excited for the next one!