Short But Sweet Letter

WELL HELLO EVERYONE AGAIN!!

 it never ceases to amaze me how fast time goes by! I LOVE BEING HERE! even though summer was a very green winter and winter is already starting to kick in with tempuratures in the night already reaching below 0c sometimes! well Norway is still so beautiful and that will never change! the members here are so helpful and they remind me so much of the ward back home! i love being around them and i love making jokes with them as i would back home as well! its a good thing i dont have a problem getting along with people and ithank our heavenly father for such a great simple talent! i really have no idea what to write in this letter! i have been in OSLO 3 times this week and so that took alot of time!! but we have had some great things happen!

 well....hmmmm i would like to say that as far as i know that baptism is still on and she is doing so well! we were able to meet with her two daughters this past week together but at the same time alone haha it kind of split off with the missionaries teaching the one daughter and the member and the mother talking to the other daughter who is a guess quite agnostic? and we sat and talked to the other daughter who is an HONEST TRUTH SEEKER!! she is so awesome! we ended up going through the baptismal questions since she asked what she HAD to do to be a member and so i told her that these questions would help her know what she would be commiting to:) she is so much more interested than she thinks but she wont admitt it;) haha i love having members on teaches and they make everything go so much smoother!!

 kontakting on the streets lately has not been going very well and its the first time in my mission that its not really producing numbers...but at the same time i try to not be out on the street the whole time either because if there is anything better to be doing ill go for that first! we as missionaries forget that kontakting is not the only thing on the list! sometimes you have to be creative(which i am not) and look for other oppurtunities! well also with getting a new companion we have been doing a lot of planning to help him get familiar with the area and letting him in on all the things going down with our investigators! he also is OCD when it comes to organizing and so he had to organize our appartment and coordinate everything before he could leave.... haha well i will let you know we have a clean and organized flat and he really likes to cook...so i am in luxury of having home cooked REAL meals for every meal time! he is great to be around and a real sincere elder! i think we will get along well and we talk alot and laugh so i think our transfer has high hopes!:)

 well no crazy stories this week but maybs next week!:) i would like to invite you all to read something!:)-- jakob 6:12. its probably one of the shortest scriptures you can read:) but its great! i love you! have a great week everyone!!

 elder farnsworth!

Wow What A Week!

WOW WHAT A WEEK!!

 THis week has been packed and sometimes i feel like i havent really done much? but then i look back from day to day and we have given quite a bit of service this week and it was so fantastik!! we cut wood for hours for a lady at her cabin and explain the church over a lunch visit! we helped a lady inour ward with mowing the lawn and getting her house ready to sell and after got invited to play golf with her and the young men and women! had a great time with them! we have had all in all a great week!

 well pday for us was actually on saturday since we got invited to go do some awesome stuff....PAINTBALLING! it was awesome and getting hit with some paintballs really takes the stress off and puts the sting in to missionwork instead haha:) we are just having a great time here in fredrikstad and our investigators our moving along so well and they are loving coming to church! we havent really been out contacting or knocking on doors becausei have really wanted to focus on less actives but sometimes it just doesnt seem to go anywhere? but i know it will pay off! once is active again:) so that was so awesome to have him be in church a couple times now!! people live so far apart here its insane!! so driving takes up alot of our time! its so great to see how devoted people are when it comes to coming to church! making an hour and a half drive every week or almost every week and taking part in callings! i love how this church works!

 one thing that i really wanted to say is how much my testimony has increased lately! i have seen how much more i know the scriptures and how much i have learned and how much i love studying the gospel! i know that christ died for me and he loves me! i have seen his love especially in hard times and in the good times as well! i know that the the prophet joeseph smith is a prophet of god and that thomas monson is and was called to be our prophet today! he is an amazing man! i love you all so much and i hope you all continue and to be strong! life is a challenge but there is always hope!:) have a great week everyone!!:)

A Great Week!

Well what can i say it really has been a great week! this week we got to have quite a bit of fun in finding and we had a lot of great teaches this week and i had a lot of experiances! well i just want to say that i know the lord is on our side in all that we do as long as we keep our part of the deal! "i the lord am bound when ye do what i say but when ye do not what i say you have no promise"! i believe that this scripture right here shows us a lot especially as i notice in mission work when we do everything possible the lord will bless the people you teach to open their minds and let you into their hearts! As a missionary every experiance you have will strengthen you in some way and help you bring people to him!

   well the people we have been teaching are being blessed more and more and its truely incredible to see the lord working in their life and yet the people dont yet see it. they start to say things that are profound and something they wouldnt say and then you see if they can clarify what they are talking about and it comes across in your mind....so basically your saying you are a member of our church?.... so we are having a baptismal date on... is the feeling that you start to get in your mind and its funny because they start to say this and you ask them more questions to open their mind even further and they are still completly with you and its when you let them think it out and the spirit hits you to ask them to be baptized and to show their faith to follow our lord and savior Jesus Christ! we promise everyone the same blessings of the gospel and we testify of how it will work in their life if they will only test it and try it for themselfs! people dont realize what a small and simple pray and do in their life when they ask with a broken heart and a contrite spirit! its by small and simple things that big things are brought to pass! god knows the whole picture or puzzle that we are working for and as we ask for his strength and advice is when we will truely be blessed!

   well we have been working with a great swedish man and he is such a joy to be around and is a very open and interactive guy! he is very stuborn and very strong sided in putting out an athiest view on everything....which makes it hard to tell him to only excersize faith and these points of view no longer excist they are just questions that dont really make or break what he tries to throw at us it is just an uneeded question for the most part haha! but we asked him if he would prepare himself to prepare for baptizm if he would find out if our gospel was true and he said he would! the smile of joy came across our face because we have commited him to it before and said no many times! he came to conference this weekend well to the sunday morning session and he loved Irying and president Monson he thought they were very powerfull talkes and i prayed so hard the whole time we watched it that he would feel that spirit of trueth and boy do i hope thats what he felt and i am sure thats what he felt! i just hope he can see that that is what he felt!

   well we got to have a really great experiance this week and that was that we got to be interviewed by the newpaper and so he came with us on a days work and got to see how us missionaries live our lives and how it all works! well he met us in the afternoon and i told him our beliefs and i taught him the first lesson while standing there talking while my companion talked to another guy trying to find a JW church for his sister and we found  out he was mormon as well baptized only in febuary and he got to be interviewed a little as well! being an african and proud to have the "holy spirit" and just about shouting it to everyone infront of the state church....which was hilarious! but we had some appointments set up and he came along with us and was very interested as well so it made it even better to have him there! we taught a lesson and had a member with us and the interviewer and just taught like he wasnt even there even though he was taking pictures and writting in his notepad that he bought that day and by the end of the day it was filled with notes! We had to make sure we were carefull of what we said as well to make sure he didnt get the wrong idea and made sure we clarified what we meant and our specific duties as missionaries! he asked us if he could see us in action on the gå gate which is just like a big street that cars cant drive down with stores and what not and we had not planned contacting but turned out to go very well in just one walk down the street we got three teaches which usually doesnt even happen in a day in MOSS! and he almost started to ask us tips! he is a writter that has to go question people on the streets and he knows how hard it is to find people to ask them questions so we exchanged ideas and ways to find! it turned out to go very well! he actually came to fotball the next morning and talked with us for a little bit!

    well conference was great and yes i watched it in english! no other language can do it justice! you just dont get the same messege out of it in a different language and also i just cant understand everything they say so i decided to watch it in english along with half of the ward who would also rather watch it in english! well the way it works to watch conference here is we watch saturday morning on saturday night at six watch P.S the next morning the saturday morning session after then a big dinner and then sunday morning after that so i have not seen the last session yet as we speak but hopefully i will get to watch it soon! in the first session one thing that i have started to do is memorize a scripture a day and Richard G. Scott spoke on that a little and its one thing i am going to work harder on! Jeffery R. Holland spoke in the priesthood session and as we all know he is just an incredible speaker and he had two quotes i really liked

*Sign on and Speak up

*Be on the Team

*Dont dribble out of bounds!

the last talk that really hit me that i loved alot is president Monsons in the morning session on sunday! He hit hard on morality and also depending on prayer and to use it often to excersize your faith in prayer! prayer is something i have loved so much on my mission you pray so much and for so many different things through the day! prayer is our own communication to talk with our heavenly father and i think we talk it for granted more and more! its a truely humbling thing to do! prayer will keep us close to him everyday!

i love it here and the work proceeds to push forward! i know the gospel is true and its why i am here to show my own faith that christ lives and we can live with him again through our sacred covenants with god that we can be with him again! i know my redeemer lives!

Eldste Farnsworth

Busy Week

hallo hallo family and friends! this week has deffinatly been a crazy busy week with teaching all over the place and just time flew by this week especially fast! for those that have served missions and know how hard it is to get member teaches and what not to show a little bit of how much we did this week we had 9 member teaches! three of which happend all in one day! so me and my comp were on our way home yesterday from dropping some people off at the church and we were talking about how much potential moss really has in investigators that really should be baptized and that are basically ready but just not willing to commit quite yet!... we have over 20 people that said they would be baptized... but yet just wont be baptized? its crazy! we dont even have enough time in a week to meet with all of them because no teaching appointment can only last for 15 minutes when investigators have so many questions! its good to see all of these people wanting to hear more and to learn more! as i pray everyday for a better understanding for all of these people you can see the lord bless me and my companion to decern the needs of others! he truely is the key to this work with the holy ghost they are the ones who convert the people not us! As i realize this it only makes me want to understand more and to teach to the needds of everone! its not always easy and at times you may not find the answer right away and have to wait to tell them! but no matter what the case is it will be for the better and people like to see that we dont know everything but we will try as hard as we can to find what they are looking for! as missionaries we are here for them to help and guide that and its great when people realize that we are here to represent the lord in his work to support his children here on earth!

  well i doubt this letter will be to long but a short little experiance happened this week and a great answer to our prayers! as we have been praying for this area outside of moss for awhile now and just trying to find time to get there has been difficult but we finally made it to the great college town of Ås! we actually met a member there and he showed us around and good areas to go knock and so we had a great idea of where we could go to find people in the best ways possible and we asked him to pray for us as we always do and i believe with our prayers and his it just enough payed off for us to have 3 great teaches which both lasted for about an hour and ended up all being in english...Ås is 25% immigration college town so there are many different races there of people and willingly invited us in! so we got three new potential investigators and hopefully we will be going back this week sometime to talk with them and set up other appointments! its very interesting how many lessons i actually teach in english and it jsut amazes me when i think about it! when you think of getting called you think and are told you will not use english but you use it when alot in this case in Moss because its one of the biggest places for imports and the its one of the main places the ferry from denmark comes in! so alot of the southern parts of norway have quite a bit of euthnicity going on, but yet its so great and get a chance to meet people from all over the world!

  speaking of which we met a convert from nigeria who was actually baptized in Drammen,Norway and moved back to italy and now is back with his sister and her family and he introduced us to almost 10 new investigators and we are starting to teach their family when she will give us a time to meet! so hopefully soon everything will start coming together for us and her family to meet! along with his friends he introduced us too!

   well our investigators that have dates for next week were all out of town this whole week....coincedence? must be! but i pray that all will work out with them they are such great people and just need to excersize that faith and they will be more than on their way:)! but like a said this week has been so busy with teaches and yet doesnt seem like much to tell! but just so you are all aware here is another answer to a prayer! so i have been trying to find a coat that wasnt like 500 bucks! we knew a guy who works at a company started in Moss called Helly Hansen which is a super nice outdoor sporting winter store and we had been in there to look at jackets before and we found one that was 3000kr so like 510 dollars and it was marked to 2000kr and we told him that thats the one we wanted and we asked if they would be on sale and he said not really and so we said we would buy it now since we needed coats! he said ok well my price is 500kr.......wo wo wo what... yea we got a 500 dollar jacket for like80 bucks!! its super nice jacket and super warm ill send pictures of it soon!

  well for personal study i have just finished the book of mormon and the peal of great price and starting on the book of mormon agian but going through this time i am making a time line of events and a history chart or geneology chart of people! i am going through it slow and marking my scriptures will "real intent" and its going well 1 nephi 13 is great never new how much was in there and along with 22! but i have been going through plan of salvation this week and have another weekly goal for everyone who reads this! so 2 nephi 2 is all about the fall of adam and eve but it also shows the neccessity of why! my challenge for you is to read 2nep chapter 2 and see what it means for you and why was it all important! i have reallized more and more how important it really is and its so awesome that we have this gospel in our life! i know that god has given us this plan so we can be happy and he gives us weaknesses so we can be humble and his grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before him and have faith in him then will he make weak things become strong unto them! ether 12:27) he gives us weaknesses in this life so we can over come them and thats one part of the atonement the enabling part and we need to remember that we can overcome anything or addiction we have in this life because of jesus christ! he is our lord and savior i know this from my own personal revealation! i know this church is true!

   i hope all have a great week and can overcome any challenges that are here or will come! i love you all have a great week!!

Eldste Farnsworth

Crazy Busy Week!

HEY GUYS!!!!:)

  well this week has been crazy busy!!!! i dont really have much time to write so i promise i will have time next week....sorry i wanted to go to oslo and have a good time so we went there for pday and went to an island and grilled food and played some football:) our main investigator is doing so well and will be getting baptized in the coming weeks if she doesnt leave to denmark for family...! i can not express my love for members and them coming on teaches! if you ever have the chance to go  out with the missionaries, I WOULD GO! its so fun to have members and to hear their side of the story and their conversion since WE ALL HAVE ONE:) so yes i cant explain how great members are! i really have no idea what to write.......its late and i cant focus but i will give you all an incredible letter next week but for now i just want to say how incredible a mission is and how much is entailed in a mission and everything that comes along! its so crazy the blessings that come along with being here and that i mean just by going on a mission you are blessed and then not to mention when you actually start working when you get out in to the field! when you put your faith in god and just talk to everyone (which can be super hard sometimes) and tell them what we have to share, the blessings comes because the lord knows that we are trying to the best of our capabilities! i have said this before but i want to challenge everyone to look for teaching moments or "missionary moments" and if you are not sure.....put you faith in god! dont know how to bring it up? remember that the lord has give us preach my gospel WHICH IS SCRIPTURE by the way as we have been told and it is not only for misisonaries it is a GUIDE TO MISSIONARY SERVICE! USE IT! i love you all so much and miss you! have a great week!!!:)