The exciting thing this week has been the eruption of the volcano in Iceland which has grounded all planes in northern Europe. We have not seen any other impacts—no ash on the ground, no dark skies—but for the missionaries who were going to be flying various places, it has been a rather large impact. This coming Wednesday (April 21) was to be “transfer day”. Note the word “was”. There were 7 missionaries in the mission scheduled to fly home on Thursday (April 22), one of those being sister Engebretsen who is serving here in Trondheim. She got a call on Friday evening from one of the zone leaders telling her that all flights in Norway and other parts of northern Europe were cancelled as of Thursday morning and there was no scheduled time to resume flights, so her return was delayed for at least a week. Other missionaries who were to be transferred to other cities from where they are currently serving would be traveling on Wednesday to their new cities and there were 5 new missionaries scheduled to arrive on Tuesday from the Missionary Training Center in Provo. Now none of this will be occurring until the air space opens up again. In priesthood meeting this morning, the counselor in the branch presidency who was conduction asked if there were any announcements and I told him that Sister Engebretsen would not be going home this week due to the volcanic eruption. He said, “the lesson today is on ‘Prayer works’ and we have just seen that—we did not want her to leave, so the Lord caused the volcano to erupt.”
We spent about an hour on Tuesday afternoon with the sisters out contacting people on the streets in town. We don’t do much of this and never on our own, so every once in a while they decide we need to experience street contacting and ask us to join them for an hour or so. It was a nice sunny day for most of the time, with occasional sprinkles, so it was a nice day to be out. However it was not very productive as we only got one phone number to call back to a man from Yemen.
We spent time visiting a few less active members of the branch, had a good family home evening meeting on Monday evening. Sister Hansen, whose husband does the cleaning in the building baked a very tasty cake for the single adults as a “thank you” for the work they did the previous Friday evening in cleaning the building. We also had a well attended dinner on Wednesday evening before institute class. One of the missionaries, Elder Bartholomew, cooked dinner for Wednesday evening—a tasty stir fry. We shopped for the ingredients and he and the other elders did the preparation. The remained of the cake from Monday was enjoyed after dinner on Wednesday.
Thursday evening the Relief Society had a scrapbooking evening which Nancy attended. She did not do any scrapbooking, but just enjoyed the time with the sisters and showed off her family pictures.
Saturday was to be the baptism for Corrie Dam, a young student from the Netherlands, but she decided on Wednesday evening to put it off until May 1 so her parents can come from the Netherlands to be a part of it. We are excited that her parents desire to be here, as when she first discussed it with them a couple of months ago, they were very opposed to her joining the church. At first her father was going to come on Friday evening because her mother had to work this weekend. Then she suggested that if they both wanted to come, she would put it off until both could be here. The earliest time they both could attend was May 1, so she told them she would wait. We told her she was inspired because if she had gone ahead with the baptism on Saturday, her father would not have been able to fly so neither of them would have been here. Corrie and the sisters came here for dinner on Saturday evening (cooked by Corrie), then we had a good discussion on the topic of the Godhead. We have enjoyed watching the change in her over the past few months as she has gained a testimony of the gospel and has made the decision to be baptized. She is a lovely young lady (not to mention a wonderful cook) and we are pleased to have her joining the church. She is a great addition to our group of young single adults here.
The other excitement this week was that I found a man in the branch who likes to take and “isbad” (ice bath) by getting in the fjord in the winter. He told me he had been in the fjord the previous week and I told him to call me when he was going again, so we made arrangements to meet at the church on Saturday at 2 p.m. We went to a place called “sjøbadet” (sea bath), a swimming area in the summer, complete with a diving board about 10’ above the water and two diving platforms at about 20 and 25’ above the water—we did not use either of these. There was a set of stairs that went down to the sea, with the bottom few steps under the water. We went down the stairs, then ducked under the water and climbed back up the stairs. It was cold (Terje said it is still at zero C), but now I can say I have been in a Norwegian fjord. This summer I have a commitment to teach some of the young singles how to water ski. Here is a picture of Terje Dorr and I preparing to get wet in the Trondheim fjord (that’s me on the left). Not a typical missionary activity, but this is not a typical mission. (pictures are in the previous post)
There were 72 people to church today, down from the 90 who attended last week, but still an improvement over the normal attendance. We are hoping this is the beginning of a good trend. It was exciting to see two of our less active young men in church today and we are hopeful they will continue to feel the spirit as they come and desire to be active and enjoy the full blessings of the gospel. The missionaries continue to have 6 to 8 investigators in attendance each week and it is exciting to see them as they begin to feel at home in the church.
As I looked around the chapel today in Sacrament meeting, I reflected on the first time we attended here in August. We were asked to bear our testimonies and as I looked over the congregation, there was only one face that I recognized, that was Terjy Dorr, a man who had helped us when we stopped in Trondheim for church in May 2005 for a short while. Today as I looked around, I could call everyone by name and had good feelings about our interactions with each of them. Some are members and some are not, but we have grown to love them all and feel very much at home here.
Today was our fast and testimony day, as we had general conference on the first Sunday in April and last week was our branch conference. I was surprised when Nancy got up and bore her testimony in Norsk. She is doing well with the language, but does not speak it much, as almost everyone speaks English with her, so she does not feel the pressure to speak Norsk. I am proud of how well she is doing and the contributions she makes to the branch. After the branch conference last week, President Johansen said, “I had 4 people tell me to make sure that I don’t move the Sorensens”. It is nice to hear those things, but we know that it is the Lord that makes things happen, not us and we are pleased to be fortunate enough to be here in His service.
Sending our love to each of you,
Mom and dad/Gerald and Nancy/grandma and grandpa/nana and granddad
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