Week 20

Subject: Brännesla Nätel? No idea how to spell that

Hello all!

What a terribly strange week! We spent a gazillion krona at the grocery store because Sis Robinson's bike tire was still flat and we had to go to the expensive one. Then we spent most of the afternoon fighting stinging nettles and mushy weeds, trying not to destroy the raspberries. Now we are experts at identifying stinging nettles by sight, sound, smell, taste and feel. Not very pleasant. Sis R got some nice welts on her arm. Ok. Not really by taste. They are all over the place here, turns out, lining the bike trails. Dangerous. We also had some of the young men from the ward come over and fix Sis R's bike tire. It had five holes in it, they said. They did a really good job patching it up, but the next morning it was half flat. Slow leak! So we just carried the bike pump with us everywhere and pumped it up every time we had to go somewhere new. I liked to tell people it was my night stick or billy club when they asked. Don't worry, we just decided to change the inner tube on Saturday, and we did it ourselves. Our apartment is swimming in tools! So exciting!

So, we had a lot of appointments fall through this week. That's been depressing. A run down of what we've been doing: Bike contacting. Very interesting. You have to get over any geek complexes pretty quickly. Helping an investigator quit smoking. Challenging a family to baptism who Sis R felt like she stayed here for. Getting our challenged laughed at by said family (we are not deterred!). The daughter really wants to be baptized, actually, and we'd love for them to be baptized all together, but they've already been baptized. So they don't feel like they need to again. I have many thoughts on that one, but I will spare you all, and I only have 10 minutes left. We are going to Stockholm today and have only a little time.

We also had a cool experience (I hope) where we had a guy come up to us and start talking about the church. We set up an appointment with him and got his address. Then, later in the week, we called the guy that I had talked to in the train station on Saturday. We set up an appointment with him and got his address. We set them up one after each other and turns out they lived in the same street! We felt like the Lord was telling us something. We still don't know who we might find there, but when we got there it was student housing! We've been looking for some way to talk to the students from the university here! We'll see how it goes. We actually had a great teach with two graduated students from Africa (Ghana and Uganda). They know the bible really well and are very smart. We went back last night to tract and at 1A we got caught in what Sis R terms "an old man trap". An 65 year old man answered the door in nothing but his briefs and proceeded to talk to us for 45 minutes. We tried to get away, we promise! But neither Sis R nor I are bold enough just to say, "ok! See ya!" and close the door. He chatted with us about how he'd already lost 30 kilo and wanted to go down 20 more by just eating pita bread and vegetables and how we needed to only read the Bible. Not even commentaries. It was really a non-stop stream with no break. Amazing! Well, we'll try again some other day.

Love you all! No time left! Laundry to switch!

Syster Maxwell