Make up your own title

Hello! This week has been really cool so hold onto your pants. Before the stories you need to look at these sweet pictures I took off the southern coast of Fyn while we went to Svendborg's church meeting. Just across the a little stretch of ocean is an island. The sun doesn't get much more than about twice that high every day because the days are so short now. Yes, Denmark is beautiful. Anyway... One of the neatest experiences I've had on my mission so far happened last night. After a few random occurences made us late for an eating appointment with the Elderly couple serving in Odense we missed our bus and had to take a later one. We were disappointed to be late but it turned out to be for a good reason. An older gentlman followed me to the back and sat in between me and Elder DeMordaunt and asked me if we were ''Missionærerne''. I told him yes, and he immediately asked me for a visit. I asked him what he knew about our church and he said that he knew it was the true church. I was stunned at this point and after further conversation he told me that he saw something about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on his fjernsyn and that he had looked it up on the net and recognized me as one of the missionaries that it talked about. He has been a member of the Frikirke but he had learned of Joseph Smith's story and wanted a Book of Mormon and the address to our church. He plans on coming next week at two for the first time. He was knowledgeable about our faith and very prepared. I set up an appointment with him for tomorrow and actually considered inviting him to baptism then and there on the bus. As I began to explain our purpose as missionaries however he told me to wait until Tuesday to continue the conversation about church because he had to get off. I was content with giving him a Mormons Bog marked to 2 Nephi 31 and telling him we'd see him soon. I kept waiting the whole time for someone to tell me that it was a joke and that this guy was secretly a member from the 1st ward in Odense that I didn't recognize because he literally was answering every question I asked him in the best way possible. I really thought this kind of thing never happened, but this man found me thanks to some random bus ride and asked me to join the church pretty much. His name is Kim, and yes that's a guys name in Danmark. Another thing I was thankful for was the fact that I could understand him and respond with ease. We taught a lady named Christina this week who talks in a way that I couldn't understand a word and she couldn't understand me at all (turns out she's half deaf so that part wasn't my fault) but I understood this man almost perfectly which is good cause I don't think he could speak English. Christina is also awesome! She has told us she wants to be a member of our church and actually told a few people at church that she was a member. We'll make that happen soon enough :) She's working on giving up smoking and really likes what we're teaching. She is an artist and is actually painting a picture of Christ based off of a picture on the pamphlet that Ældste Larsen gave to her. She told us that Christ has helped her in her life and that she wants to join a church and that ours is the only one she likes because of what we teach as well as the fact that we don't put other churches down. My good buddy Andreas is also considering baptism! He's 21 and loves the youth in the church and all the activities. We're working on making sure he comprehends all the commitments and meanings of everything. He was ADHD so sometimes it's a struggle to focus the lessons and to make sure everything is happening for the right reasons. Also I saw this on the street and learned that in Danmark they have a funny tradition where whenever a man turns thirty and hasn't been married yet they put this ugly looking statue thing on his yard to mock him... If an unmarried woman turns thirty however all of her friends grab cinnamon and attack her with it. So occasionally there are random piles of cinnamon outside peoples houses. I don't think that would be fun. So Christmas is also already being celebrated over here. I'll send a 2nd email with those pictues because it was awesome and happened right outside of our apartment. Keep on being awesome and I still want to hear from all of you! Jeg elsker jer, Ældste Durrant This crowd was just outside our apartment. I took this from our window. We went down with them to watch Santa Claus and the mayor (cause you know they're really tight with each other) they had over 100,000 lights that were turned on at once (But Santa could have been lying cause he was speaking Danish and everyone knows Santa doesn't really speak danish) This is what the crowd looked like after they turned the lights on. It was pretty sweet to watch them all turn on at once. The picture doesn't quite do it justice. This is the ''Store Juletræ'' that we can see from our window. I like it. Obviously the Danes don't follow the rule about waiting till after Thanksgiving because they don't have Thanksgiving. But ya know, I like Christmas so thats ok. You all have fun with the Thanksgiving feast! Sorry I glemte to put a cool title on the last email, feel free to make up your own. See ya!

First things first . . . and Into the Psychiatric Ward

Before I tell any cool stories. I just want you all to know that my city has a bigger Christmas tree than yours :P

Well hello there.

This first full week with Ældste Merrill has been an interesting one to say the least. I'm sure you all remember the Naked Billionaire from a few weeks ago. Well my original plan was to wait until we were on splits and then send Ældste Merrill to go talk to him without any sort of warning. But that plan was foiled...

He was confined to a psychiatric ward.

That's all fine by me I mean I already knew he was crazy, but the hard part was that he contacted the ward and asked for a visit from the missionaries! I thought I was done with this man but now we got a paper with directions to the Psychiatric hospital and orders to go talk to him. This was especially interesting because we were in the middle of CUV (Young Adult Activity) with Andreas who is a really interested 21 year old who was making friends with all the other members there and enjoying the Book of Mormon lesson. Ældste Merrill leaned over to me in the middle of the lesson and said he felt really strongly for some reason that we needed to leave right then and go visit Christian in the hospital.

=(

Well I'm not one to say no to a spiritual prompting of my companions so we up and left... turned out that Christian was actually so unstable at that point they weren't sure he could handle a visit from us. We returned empty handed but hopefully whatever was supposed to happen happened.

Next day was splits with the zone leaders and I drew the short stick to visit Christian again. We called first this time and they let us talk to him. We told him that we were the missionaries he had requested and asked when we could stop by. He patronized us by telling us that we were good kids but that he wasn't really interested in our church. What?!?! Oh well. Like I said. Crazy.

So now me and Ældste Vandenberg just had the appointments we thought were going to take up our day all fall through. I decided we could try and renew efforts on finding a referal that we couldn't quite locate before and try to reach this man who had been given to us by another missionary. The address was incomplete but we managed to get to where we thought the referal was. No luck. The nearest upgang (apartment type thing) we found had a lot of names and so we tried buzzing ones that had the same first name as this man because we really wanted to do everything we could to find him. No luck. We started heading back to the train station and decided to talk to the people we saw on the way because maybe that was the reason we had come clear out to this random part of our area. No luck. At this point it was getting hard to stay diligent, I mean we had just spent a very long time and gotten nothing out of it, and after all these extra efforts trying to find this referal we barely made it back to the train station in time to catch a slightly later train back to Odense that we hadn't planned on. Well it turned out that train didn't stop where we thought it would and we ended up at HALFWAY ACROSS DENMARK! What the heck, this train went clear to Vejle before it stopped, which isn't even on the same island as my house! Anyway, this placed us in the right place at the right time. The same thing had just happened to a girl who was trying to get back to Odense, and she turned to us for help. After finding the right train to take us back to home, she began to talk with us and seemed very interested in why we were here and what we were doing. After talking to her for over an hour about who we were and explaining a lot of things about the church I realized that if we hadn't been trying all these extra things earlier that day we never would have been placed in this situation with someone who was so positive. It was definitely an unexpected little miracle. We're hoping to see more from this girl again in the future! I think she kind of liked Elder Vandenberg though so we'll see what happens.

Regardless we found this funny sign. So it was worth it.

Also this rock is a memorial to the battle of Nyborg. We found it walking through the city and realized we were there on November 14! The exact day the battle had taken place. So that was 

also cool.

Anyway, we also got dropped by an investigator. So that was hard. He had even gone on vacation to Utah at one point and looked closer at the church. Blah.

Love all of you guys! Remember to do member work cause it's awesome and I love hearing from all of you and even though this is fun I still miss you guys! Celebrate Thanksgiving extra hard for me. We already had our missionary thanksgiving so that was cool. Anyway, see you all later!

MKH, Ældste Durrant

Yoho yoho a mission life for me

Someone tell Rachel congrats on getting called to Korea! That is way cool!

So I got a new companion this week, Ældste Merrill. Sad to say I pulled the whole not being there at the station when he showed up thing... NOT MY FAULT! Me and the two Ældster I was on splits with were on time for the bus but it was so full of people the bus driver said there wasn't room and we had to walk... I was only a minute or two late though. He's great though, he's our new district leader and everything is up an running in Odense still! He's from Fresno California, so that's cool. But he doesn't like sunshine, so that's kind of unfortunate.

Anyway, I was sad to see Ældste Larsen go, I know he's probably going to keep his promise of stalking the blog that these letters go on so I won't get to emotional about my mission father going home haha. Me and Ældste Merrill got right to Work though, Friday we taught three lessons and saw Jens, an inactive man. So that was a productive day. We taught our investigator Fredjuf so was so close to baptism before! We're working on him to get him to pray but it's hard to get answers from him, not to mention our member bailed on the lesson so it was just us three that were there. We also taught a man named Thomas who has a multi handicap and is in a wheelchair with only the use of his head and fingers... He Refers to himself as Mormon though and reads every night from the scriptures. He can only leave his care center for EIGHT HOURS A MONTH so he hasn't been to church or gotten baptized. I wanted him to get the experience of sacrament meeting though so we set up a Skype channel for him this week. The third was this 20 year old named Andreas. He is a very interesting kid who claims to be Atheist but tells us he loves going to different churches to learn about them and the way they treat other people. And at the end of the lesson he wanted to pray and he said it... so I don't know exactly what he wants but he told us he felt really good at the end of our lesson and asked if he could come to church and bring a friend! We also dropped by Jens who is an older man who has just started coming back to church. Can't remember if I told you much about him but he is really great and reads all the time and has a great testimony. But he always says he isn't a good mormon cause he can't walk on Water haha. He really believes that the Book of Mormon and Bible are the handbooks to life though and has even shared that with a few of his friends and got one lady to pray and she felt as though she recieved an answer! Jens told us he'd see us at church which would be his third week in a row!

So after all this you'd think that we would feel pretty good going into church right?

Even on Sunday morning we got a random text from some lady telling us she lived in Aalborg and wanted to come to church because she had talked with the Elders in Sjælland. So imagine my disappointment while church is starting and ZERO PEOPLE CAME! :( It was lame, we could have had so many people there to help but none of them showed... So that was sad. I feel like a lot of the time these people who would enjoy church a lot are kept from coming because it's so easy to find ways to make it inconveniant. If they could just put a few things aside for a few hours on Sunday a domino effect could happen. But they didn't... so it won't... at least not till NeXT week. I mean Thomas didn't even answer our Skype call, and I know he can't be too busy.

Anyway, other than that I painted someone's house. So that was cool.

Not a ton this week, mostly getting transfers over with and getting back into a routine! And I cut my finger while making breakfast burritos... good thing my parents pack

ed literally 4 thousand band-aids when I left :)

Med venlig hilsen!

The eye of the storm

So there was a record breaking storm here in Denmark this week! That was fun. According to the newspapers the next day there were winds reaching 120 mph, and I saw a ton of crazy wind damage. We got word from our mission president to stay indoors for the day but we had already gone out and so we got to battle our way through crazy winds with the Seden Ældster. Ældste Sullivan almost got destroyed by a flying branch, and we almost got attacked by a tornado of glass. One of the shops on the gågade had it's windows smashed in, the glass got caught up in a little dust devil type business and the result was a horrifying glass tornado that chased us down the street. The biggest damage though was the huge tree right outside our apartment that got torn out of the cement and dumped right onto the ground in front of where we live. Eventually we made it back and had all the Elders on Fyn gather in our apartment and we made Abælekage with Ice Cream and played cards and watched all the crazy Danes that were still outside get blown off their bikes. Like literally blown off the bike.

The tree was a good 30 feet. I was impressed it fell over.

The storm was just the beginning though. This week has been really crazy, it's my companions last week as a missionary and Halloween and the storm and a zillion other random little appointments and people asking for help and so we haven't been able to get a whole lot done. Our numbers this week were really low. For example this week a member had us move our P-Day so he could steal us for the day in order to say goodbye to Ældste Larsen. He was flabergasted that I hadn't yet tried a real Danish hotdog (apparently the ones at the cheap muslim joints didn't Count) and so he bought us both Ristet Hotdogs WHICH WERE AMAZING and then took us on an adventure. He said he would have taken us to legoland but it closed the week before. So we went to this big Danish arcade, and Ældste Larsen won 7 stuffed animals in 5 tries with the claw machine. I never thought those Things worked.

 

 

Then we went Go-Karting, Laser Tagging, Bowling, a few other Things as well. Best. P-Day. Ever. But Ken had a Price for taking us on all these adventures. We had to go through his Danish fear factor... it was terrible. He forced warm leverpostej (which is straight up ground liver) Down our throats mixed with salt licorice and spicy peppers. I couldn't get the spicy one Down and it came out all over the sidewalk. Then we each had to eat this massive pastry thing so that we felt like we were about to explode, topped it off with this gross salt licorice stuff and a ton of ice cream, and then we had to do the cinnamon challenge with our eyes closed not knowing what to expect. That was terrible. Then came this big old fish that  was still intact scales and all just staring up at us with it's freaky eyes. And we topped it all off with this gross cheese taht is supposedly high end stuff but just looked sweaty and moldy to me, I survived though, and it was a great day to say the least. We looked legit in our Go-Kart racing clothes (they were so powerful we had to Wear helmets)

 

 

As far as missionary work goes though we put on a Halloween get together with the same member that fed us all that Danish garbage to try and get people out that were investigating the church or had recently converted. Unfortunately our main investigators Fredjuf and Mik weren't able to make it. Fredjuf has been worrying me because he didn't show up to church Again! We had a pretty good lesson with him this week though where we think he finally understood what baptism means and told us that he would pray about the message we had been sharing in order to get an answer. He is just such a hard guy to read that I can't tell what his intentions are or anything. He also didn't show up to the fireside we had last night. We did have a recent convert from Slovakia that was there though. He was baptized six months ago and is going to college in Danmark. He's a really cool guy and we got to watch The Other Side of Heaven with him and a bunch of members and other investigators. IT'S A SWEET MOVIE! I hadn't seen it before and I don't know why I never did. It's a Disney movie about a missionary! How cool is that?

 

Anyway yesterday marked 4 months since I entered the MTC. I can't decide if that feels like yesterday or four life times ago. Everyone says the first month of your mission is the slowest, and I feel like I've had three of those so far. The first month in the MTC, the first month in Washington DC, and now I just finished my first month in Denmark. So hopefully I don't have to switch countries until I serve in Sønderborg and get a baptism. Because they have to go to Germany in that area to find a baptisimal font. Anyway, I get my new companion Ældste Merrill on Wednesday. I'm excited to take over our area and introduce my new companion to everyone and everything in Odense, because it really is a cool place.

 

And I had a cool experience with Ældste Henrichs the other day. We were on splits because we needed to do a lot of Things in our area. Me and Ældste Henrichs went to go visit Jens Ulrich Petersen who is listed as an inactive in the Ward but reads the scriptures all the time and hasn't been coming to church simply because it was too hard. Now he has a car and a way to get there and so we've gotten him to church two weeks in a row! Anyway we had a long lesson/discussion with him and got out late. We had to wait a good 25 minutes for the bus and so while we were sitting there we started to sing. Elder Henrichs has an insanely good voice and was trying to teach me head tone when this lady walked up by the bus stop, stopped and looked at him singing, and then came and sat NeXT to us and told him he had a very nice voice. We started talking, and eventually she asked why we had been living in Danmark lately if we came from America. We started talking about religion and figured out she had been studying with the Jehovah Witnesses for the past five years but hadn't gotten baptized because she had doubts about the bible because it always contradicts itself. We gave her a book of mormon and then got on the bus. I realized we had no way to contact her so I wrote our number on a pamphlet and gave it to her and told her to ring us if she had questions or wanted to talk about the book. SO HOPEFULLY SHE CALLS US! It was just neat because the odds of me and Henrichs being at that bus stop when we where were really low and then add us singing right when she walked up and I think it wasn't a coincidence. We saw her open the book on the bus and look through it and even read a page or two so we have hope!

 

Anyway, long letter... but I love and miss you all! Write me and keep being awesome!

 

Vi ses! Ældste Durrant