From Denmark with Love: Hard Work but Someone's Gotta Do It!

This Friday morning began with driving to an auto shop where we left the car and 4 snow tires to be put on. From there we walked to the mission office, where we had our interview with our mission president, President Sederholm. He is a great man, who loves the missionaries and missionary work.

He is also very wise and gave us some good counsel. We are technically under the direct leadership of the Stake President, but we are still missionaries. It is an interesting and unique mission which is still evolving. It is a little like a child-rearing book. There are some wonderful general guidelines, but nothing definitive about how to fulfill our missionary role here at the Copenhagen center. We have over a possible 200 YSAs on the roles who are not attending church, and we want to help gather as many in as possible.

The Telfords (who we replaced) were absolutely wonderful and we were so grateful for the training and help they gave us during the overlap back in October. They stayed to help us at great personal sacrifice, and we would have been lost without that important help. But we still find that in so many ways we are feeling our way along as we go.

We are serving with adults here. Many, if in the states and married, would be elder's quorum presidents, YW and YM and relief society and primary presidents. Many have been on missions and are used to taking the lead. So we are still trying to figure out just how much to advise and how much to support and how much to just be there for any and all YSA activities.

After our interview we returned to our apartment to do our homework for our Danish class, but we ended up missing it altogether because of the car thing. We needed to pick it up between 1 and 1:30 which was right in the middle of class. So we will study together this weekend and hope to be caught up with everyone on Monday.

After picking up the car, we went to the center for the remainder of the day. A low-key activity was planned for anyone who was free. We ended up having 9 there to watch a movie. We pulled out the left-overs from yesterday's meal, which was very handy. They looked at a choice of a dozen or more movies one of the young men brought, and rejected them all! I have to admit that we have seen 3 or 4 of them...we don't remember much about them. They were adventure or sci-fi types of films, and as each was presented comments ranged from, "It has bad language." to "There are some scenes in it that aren't appropriate."

They finally trooped to the back room where there are about 25 or so films in the library. They came out with Harry Potter number 1, which we all happily watched while munching popcorn and drinking hot chocolate. I know what you're thinking...."This is a mission?"

It is! And we love it.

(We do have more serious work to do....honest.)

Just a couple of pictures from some of our walking time today.