Mosiah 3:19

(Aldste Cummings)

Hej på er!

This week went by so quickly. We had so much to do with teaching lessons and going on splits and the like. Our area includes the whole county of Skaraborg so we often have to travel a lot to meet people. It's super fun though, and it's teaching me how to use public transportation which is a great thing to learn for the future.

Transfer calls came yesterday! I will be staying in Skövde which I'm extremely excited about. I love this area and I'm glad I get to stay and help along the people I've met here come closer to Christ. Sadly, Elder Martineau is leaving. He was a great trainer, I learned a ton from him. However, he's going to Gubbängen to be a zone leader in the Stockholm zone. He's going to do a great job!

This week, I've been thinking a lot about learning and progression in this life. As missionaries, we teach people about the gospel and invite them to make the necessary changes in their life to accept it and receive it's blessings. It's a big commitment and a big change and it often takes a little time.

Something Elder Martineau says when teaching people about God's plan for us is: "Evangeliet är till inte så att vi kan ha ett bättre liv efter döden, utan att vi kan bli en bättre person imorgon." Translation: "The gospel isn't so that we can have a better life after death but rather that we can be a better person tomorrow." And that daily self-improvement continues forever throughout eternity.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ teaches us that we can change by making those little steps, we can "put off the natural man and become a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord"(Mosiah 3:19). Change is always a process and everyone always has things they can do to improve themselves. That's why we have the gospel. To teach us that through Jesus Christ and his atonement, we can make little changes in our life to be a better person tomorrow than we are today.

Love,

Äldste Cummings

Devotionals, Talks and Other Stuff

(Sister Ellsworth)

Alô ao todo mundo!!

Another week has come and gone. We had a blast with miracles! First off on Monday I brought my poor companion to the Mission Home and she died. Hehe. The next day I went with some other sisters to go get our new companions. I'm serving with Sister dos Santos now and she's awesome. She's from Porto so I'll finally be learning how to speak Portuguese!! Haha. She loves to laugh and have fun and has a super strong testimony.

On Wednesday we went to a Devotional with Elder Owen and Elder Durrant. It was awesome! We learned a lot and we were excited to try new contacting and teaching technics. During the week we starting contacting people using the new phrase they suggested which is: "Would you be willing to hear a brief message about ....." There was one day when we were walking towards the chapel and I looked to the side and I saw a woman sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car. She was older, about 50, and it looked like she was sleeping. I had the thought to go talk to her but thought, no she's sleeping. Then I was like.. What the heck am I doing?! Don't ignore spiritual promptings!! So I stopped in my tracks and ran back to tap on the glass. I told her that we were doing a project to help people have more hope. She gave a smile smile and declined. I could tell that something was up so I asked her what was going on and she gave me a surprised look. Then told us that she had been diagnosed with lung cancer. I gave her card of Christ and she offered to let us come by and talk to her for a bit. #MIRACLES

On Sunday my companion and I were emergency speakers lol. It happens more often than you think... But we talked about prayer and scriptures. I realized that I while I was speaking you could see exactly who was reading and praying. You could see it in their faces... It made me think a little bit about our personal preparation for the Second Coming. Recently and ever since Adam the prophets and apostles have asked us over and over to have daily scripture study and to always have a prayer in the heart.

Have a good week!

Sister Ellsworth

D&C 18:10

(Aldste Cummings)

Tjena!

This week has been pretty busy and things are only going to get busier. We had zone conference on Thursday and it was so great. President Youngberg is most definitely inspired. The big takeaways that Elder Martineau and I have started to apply in our own work is experimenting with new contacting approaches on the street and working with local church members individually on personal mission plans so they can start getting more involved. Elder Martineau and I have a vision for Skövde. The only sad thing is that one of us is probably transferring to another area next week.

Yesterday, we witnessed a miracle. About 10 weeks ago, Elder Martineau randomly visited a less active member we found on the phone. His name is Amir, he's about 25, from Iran, has been living in Sweden for 7 years, and was baptized about 3 years ago. He doesn't actually have "uppehölls tillstånd" which is actual permission from the state of Sweden to stay in the country so his boss sort of takes advantage of him by forcing him to work nearly 100 hour weeks in his pizza parlor. He can't quit because without a job (which is very difficult for an immigrant without tillstånd to get), he won't get any money, and will most certainly be denied tillstånd and sent back to Iran.

Well, he found the time to come to church two weeks ago and absolutely loved it. He told us that he had decided to start coming back to church regularly. Within that week, he received tillstånd from the government! Now he can quit his job, go to school and get a degree and start a real profession. Yesterday at church, he was ordained to the priesthood and I could not have been happier. It was so amazing to see how much God loves His children. Seeing Amir there, seeing how happy he was, how much faith he had, and his desire to come closer to God made me feel just a tiny bit of what I imagine God feels when He watches us take steps to come back to Him.

It was such a beautiful experience. God really loves each and every one of us regardless of who we are or what we have done. His greatest joy is seeing His children returning to His arms and becoming purified in Christ.

Love,

Äldste Cummings

John 7:17

(Aldste Cummings)

Hey all!

This week was pretty interesting. We did a lot of work meeting folks and finding some more on the streets of Skövde. A few highlights that I can think of include:

1. I was on splits with Elder Helm from Borås. He accidentally called someone in our contacts who told us she wasn't interested a few weeks ago. She didn't pick up the phone but she did send a text saying that if we ever contacted her again she would call the police. That was kinda funny.

2. Elder Martineau and I made a deal that if he ate a teaspoon of wasabi then I would eat the rest of our jar of low-quality bread and butter pickles by the end of the day (there was about a pound of pickles left). So he ate the wasabi and had a terrible experience with it. So then I had to eat the rest of the pickles which was a different kind of pain. The wasabi was a quick intense pain. The pickles were a long, mentally and emotionally draining process. I was literally dreading putting more pickles in my mouth by the end of it. A lose-lose really.

3. It was Elder Martineau's birthday on Saturday! He turned 20. So we made banana bread and lit some candles and then got sushi later in the day.

The scripture I chose this week is something that we've been emphasizing lately with our investigators and something that I have seen in my own life. The Savior teaches us a very logical concept: We learn truth by first acting in faith and experiencing how it effects us in our lives. Or to put it more crudely: You can't knock it 'till you've tried it.

I've had countless conversations with people who try to convince me that the Book of Mormon isn't true. I listen to what they have to say and then ask them if they've read it. And the answer always is that they haven't. The truly sad part, however, is when they refuse to read it. How can you possibly know if something is true or false if you haven't taken the time to learn about it or apply it in your life?

The gospel may seem a little backwards to people who expect to know if something is true before they act on it. But like Alma teaches in Alma 32, that requires no faith. The Lord requires us to have faith in Him and take the first few steps, then we can know by our own experience that the doctrine is true.

Love,

Äldste Cummings

Transfers, Baptism, and Holy moly its cold!

(Sister Ellsworth)

This week was good! We got a call from Miguel and he passed his baptismal interview and was baptized Sunday after church! He's a great guy. The way we found him was a miracle! We were having a few weeks where a lot of our investigators weren't progressing and a lot of appointments were falling through. Our faithful District Leader promised us that we found find someone that was prepared for baptism. The next day we lost even more appointments but then we got a call from a random number saying he was at the airport on the way home from Angola and wanted to talk to us. He got to Costa da Caparica and sat down with his suitcases to talk to us. We marked him for baptism and he was baptized two weeks later! It was an awesome experience.

​Miguel and a random member lol

Tanya!!! She's a recent convert and we're training her to be the next sister missionary! haha!

​Rodrigo!! He's one of our super good friends. He's from Brasil!

As for my last transfer I'm going to stay here in Costa da Caparica! I'll be serving with Sister dos Santos. It's gonna be good!!

As I was listening to the testimonies during Sacrament meeting this week one of the members talked about how this week she felt frustrated about not receiving answers to her prayers and that she felt sick of always having faith. Then she shared an experience about how the Holy Ghost comforted her and reminded her that these experiences are what will help her grow. I smiled and remembered all the times I felt too tired. I think in my journal I wrote that I was exhausted more times than I can count but it's so worth it. I look back on the last 17 months and it's the best thing I've ever done. I learned so much, met so many awesome people, and really come to know who I am and who I can become. I love being a missionary!! Haha

Love,

Sister Ellsworth

D & C 122:8

Hej hej!

This week was pretty great. We did lots of finding work and were able to talk to tons of people. Our most positive investigators where out of town so we didn't really get to meet them. But that enabled us to spend a little bit more time with some investigators that we haven't really been able to devote a lot of time to because of other things going on. We had a couple of break through lessons with some people. It was just a really good week.

We made pumpkin bread! The don't sell pumpkin puree in Sweden so we had to buy a pumpkin and roast and puree it ourselves. The bread turned out great. A little reminder of home.

This weeks scripture is a pretty special one for me. It's one that has helped me through a lot of things in my life. We all go through trials and sometimes we wonder why it is that God has allowed us to suffer so. We feel that the pain or grief is undeserved or unwarranted. Yet this simple verse can change our perspective completely if we are willing to let it.

For context, the verse follows a string of verses containing  very serious trials that could potentially afflict Joseph Smith but then continues to end with:

"The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?"

We must always remember that the Lord Jesus Christ was the most perfect person to ever live. The most undeserving of pain and suffering. But he suffered more than we ever could. For us to assume that our lives are unfair is to consider ourselves greater than Christ Himself. In the face of affliction, we must humble ourselves and look to Christ Jesus for our example and our strength.

I hope you all have a great week!

Love,

Äldste Cummings

Puzzles, Sacred Cigarettes, CTMM

(Sister Ellsworth)

Hey!

This week was fun! Sister Selman and I went on another adventure. So here in Portugal they have Chinese stores that sell super cheap junk... Kinda like the dollar store and it's literally a missionary's favorite place. We went hunting to find something to help one of our investigators understand how the Restoration works and that being part of any church doesn't save you. So we found this little puzzle book with lots of little puzzle pieces. It worked out that we took one piece from each page to create a new puzzle that didn't make any sense at all. Kinda like this:

So on our way to our lesson we found two of our friends and one asked why I was carrying around a kid's puzzle book. I explained that the puzzle was broken and asked them to fix it. The Jose and Zé, two grown men started to try to put the puzzle together without 90 percent of the puzzle. It was so funny to watch them argue about where the pieces go. Then we explained how we created the new puzzle using parts of the old puzzle, in the same way how people created churches using parts of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Then we gave them the rest of the puzzles and explained how God restored all the pieces of the Gospel.

We also met with one of our investigators that has problems to stop smoking and we came up with the classic idea to make some celestial cigarettes. We took an empty box of cigarettes and decorated it with pictures of Christ and inspirational quotes. We passed Rodrigo by and told him that we had a surprise for him and we wanted him to guess what it was. He laughed and said... "Hm... What is the most rediculous thing I can think of..... Something you guys would never do... I know! Sacred cigarettes!" We looked at each other and started laughing and showed him the box. He looked at us and was like.. Seriously? and then busted up laughing!

Other than that it was a week of lots of work!

Love you guys,

Sister Ellsworth

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