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