The Bell Towers of Notre Viborg

This week has been pretty interesting. I kind of left you all on a cliffhanger from last week, so I'll start with that. It was actually a pretty cool day! We started early getting our groceries and came to email but the Missionary Portal was down, so we couldn't access our accounts. We then had a Ward Mission Coordination meeting in Viborg with lunch, so we just went to Viborg early. We used our afternoon to do some proselyting there and met with Willy Nysom (Vill-oo New-some) who is our Ward Mission Leader. After the meeting, we did some shopping/browsing on the Viborg Gågade. There were some volunteers talking about 3rd World hunger, so we talked to them and we ate flavored worms together! That was fun! We also got to go in the Viborg Domkirke which is the main church in the city. It's also where the Danish King was coordinated for a long time. It's way pretty and super cool! The bell tower was sadly closed, but I asked if we could go up anyway. The lady working there gave us five minutes to run up and then come back because they were closing. So we sprinted up a lot of circular staircases and ladders to the top! It was really cool! Kind of squishy, but exciting nonetheless! We then had a pretty relaxed day after that and not much happened. That's where I took the most pictures too, so look for those at the bottom! :)

Tuesday was pretty good. We had an appointment with Helle but she cancelled with us and said she didn't want to be baptized. Our only contact with her is through Carl, so it's hard for us to get a hold of her. She has a private phone number so we can't call her, so Carl calls her for us and it just gets complicated a lot of the time. So that was the big thing from Tuesday. We also had splits with the Zone Leaders so we took the train to Viborg, got some Cocio's (which are amazingly delicious chocolate milks), and spent the night there.

Wednesday was spent in Aarhus. I was with Ældste Smith again, which surprised me, but it was awesome! We had a lot of really deep conversations about understanding other people, how you can explain to them the actual experiences of your mission, and a lot of other different things. We taught one of their investigators named Sten who loves reading the Book of Mormon and it was great!! We focused on Repentance and he loved seeing the stories and applications of it!! We also found a lady named Julia in a park who we talked with for a half hour. She believes that people give credit to God for things that they do themselves, but she was very open to talk and was interested in learning more!! I hope they see her in church soon. She'd be a very positive investigator. We then ate dinner and headed back to Skive to hit the sack. It was a really cool day which was very full of thinking.

Thursday was our first district meeting in Herning and our district activity!! We drive for district meeting now, so we left with enough time to get there and buy some pumpkins. We all met at the Herning church and had an awesome training about studies and questions. We discussed how asking and searching for answers to questions make our studies much more effective. After the meeting, we carved pumpkins!! It was way fun! Some people changed shirts for it, but most of us were just in church clothes. We have some really fun pictures from it, and we had a great time with each other. Sadly, Denmark does not have good pumpkins, so basically all of them have already been thrown away. We then took the Herning Elders home with us for splits. It was also a gorgeous drive back to Skive. We took some country roads that had a lot of trees with different color leaves. And I saw my very first Stop sign in the country, so that was cool! We also had an eating appointment with Birgit Andersen and the Herning Elders! It was a blast! She's way funny and we enjoyed it a lot!

Friday we were on splits with the Herning Elders. We spent most of the time in Viborg. Ældster Saviano and Bailey met with Elna while Ældste Jamison and I went tracting. We weren't able to find anyone, sadly. Ældste Saviano also filled me in with Elna's situation on abortion and how we should continue pressing forward with her. We came back to Skive and witnessed a house fire get put out as we ate lunch, so that was intense. No one was hurt and it doesn't look like much was damaged, so that was good! Once we dropped the Herning Elders off to go home, we watched a broadcast for the Europe Area from Sunday. Elder Ballard spoke about miracles and how they are still a big part in the missionary effort today. It was really cool and very true! Friday was also my 100th day as a missionary, so I made some cheesy 100 glasses of course!

Saturday was a very hard day for us though. We haven't been able to find any new investigators, so we fasted that we would be able to find those who are truly prepared for the message of the gospel. At the very beginning of the day, Karsten texted us before 6:30 and asked if he could come running with us!! We actually haven't been running, but we did that day! We got up super quickly and ran for 20 minutes with him. He enjoyed it and even asked if we were planning on coming by later as well!! It was an awesome start to the day and we were very excited!! Then after we had studies, he sent us a long text and told us not to visit anymore. He said he didn't want to be a Mormon and we could have our books back. That was crushing for me. He's been so close to his baptism so many times and something always comes up to ruin it. So we decided we'd wait to contact him later in the day so hopefully he had time to reconsider. We went tracting and talked to as many people on the street as we could. Basically the only profitable thing that happened was helping Carl mop his floors. So at least we could be of some help to him. We also talked to a girl walking past our church. She's studying Spanish at the Skive College (we think that's where) and was happy to talk to us and took a Mormons Bog! It was a small tender mercy to show that we are doing our best and the investigators will come eventually. We asked Karsten if we could come visit him, but he never responded and we haven't heard anything from him since.

Sunday was also quite rough though. We didn't have any investigators in church even after inviting and reminding all of them. We spent another couple hours trying to find investigators with no avail. We stopped by Elvis but he had guests so he told us to come another day. We had one man home who said he was sick but was reading the Book of Mormon, so we gave him a Restoration pamphlet to read as well and we're going back later. We were knocking an apartment building and I didn't feel right about it. So we went to another area and knocked into a previous investigator who had lost contact with the missionaries a long time ago. He was happy to have us back, but didn't seem too interested in actually changing his life, so we'll see how that goes down. Basically it was a day to learn patience and how to listen to the Spirit, which was a very valuable lesson for me.

It's been kind of rough this week, but it's set up to be a great week next week! We also learned that Viborg is going to open as an area soon, so we won't be working with anyone there after that. We're kind of in an awkward limbo in deciding where to work because of that, so we're trying to get that worked out. 

My spiritual thought for the week is Alma 26:22. It reminds me a lot of James 1:5, and it also gives some things we can work on as we wait for an answer! It shows how God wants to give us knowledge and help us out, we just need to be willing, open, and living in a way that he can talk to us! I'm trying to work on that more as a missionary.

I apologize this email was a bit jumbled and rushed. We're headed off for some P-day adventures. Thanks for the support and love! 

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Ældste Bryant Jepsen

-Us in the Viborg Domkirke

-Walking up the Tower spiral stairs

-New hair cut and style

-Some good carving pictures

-Our district Pumpkins! (Guess which is mine! I shared with Ældste Saviano)

-Ældste Jamison and I took pictures with a lot of smoke!

-My 100th day glasses!