This Thanksgiving week was perfect! I spent it in a very different way than I usually would back at home; a day packed with missionary work. I wouldn't have had it any other way. I have an infinite amount of things to be grateful for, and I want all of you to know that I am grateful for each of you. I feel like the luckiest person in the whole world to have such a supportive family and enthusiastic friends. Thank you so much.
I have had many highs and lows this week.
This is one of the lows from my journal:
"Right now, I feel complete sadness in a way that I have never felt before.
We taught Jolanka today. We have met with her two times and the lessons were great; the spirit was there, she agreed with many of the things we taught her, and she invited us to come back. I was so excited and hopeful to continue to teach her and eventually baptize her. I love Jolanka. She is always kind to us by offering us food, hugging us, and telling us that she is grateful for us and loves us. I prayed for her every single day and we were going to invite her to be baptized as soon as we gave her the Book of Mormon in Serbian. (The Church Headquarters took a while to send it to us.)
When we began, we had a member come with us to teach Jolanka. Her name is Maria. She bore her testimony and told Jolanka her favorite part about the church. Then we began to discuss the Book of Mormon with Jolanka. When we were describing it, we couldn't get our point across. She wasn't understanding what we were saying because she doesn't know a lot of Swedish and we know absolutely nothing about Serbian. For a while, we struggled communicating with her, then Maria helped us translate. Jolanka was getting very frustrated because she had things that she wanted to say to us and questions she had, but she had no way to communicate them with us. She stopped talking and told us that she couldn't do this anymore- she could not meet with us when she couldn't understand our Swedish and she couldn't convey the feelings and thoughts of her heart through Swedish to us. We tried to ask her for her patience so that we could continue to meet and teach her, but she said that it was too hard. I cried as I bore my testimony to her for the last time that I KNOW that the Book of Mormon is true. I continued to cry as she gave me a hug goodbye and kissed me on the cheek. I cried for the rest of the night. Not for me; not because I lost an investigator or have one less person to teach, but because I love her with my whole heart. I feel so sadly that we can no longer meet with her. I feel horribly that our differences of languages kept us from progressing with her. She was on the path to being baptized. She was so close.
I love Jolanka and I have an optimistic hope that some time in her life, she will think of what we taught her and that she will call the missionaries and in time be baptized. That would be the happiest day I could imagine. I hope that I can meet her again and tell her how much she meant to me."
But along with the lows come the highs:
-We met a young man named David. We talked to him on the bus and he invited us to fika at a Coffee Shop in town. He is very interested in religion. When we met him, he told us that he is interested in meeting again. He is really nice and he loves talking about life after earth.
-We celebrated my companion's 20th birthday this week. Syster Christensen and I went to Sushi and had a great time. I really feel very blessed to have a great companion that pushes me to be a better person.
-I was able to help a lady with genealogy this week. She appreciated the help and she is going to come back next week with more information.
This week was fantastic. I feel grateful to be a missionary! I love you all very much.
Med Stor Kärlek:
Syster Hosenfeld
When I was helping her with her genealogy, I saw that Cody Meyer and Ryland Hosenfeld have been doing work on familysearch.org. I just want to give them a shout out and say: Keep up the great work! Genealogy work is really important and I have only realized how vitally important it is until I have been out here on my mission. I am sure that more than just Cody and Ry have been doing it, but those are the names that I have seen while showing investigators around the website. :)
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