Solothurn - Week 7

Hey everybody! What a week. This week was definitely one of those grinding weeks where you push harder and harder and less and less happens. Last week and now this week are the school vacation in Switzerland, a missionary's nightmare. As soon as school gets out here, everyone packs up their bags, and goes out of country. Of course, they don't bother telling us beforehand. So, we spend the whole week trying to confirm appointments that we had already set up and then naturally having them fall out. We had 9 of them this week. Crazy. You have to ask yourself if people really are just that ignorant, or if they actually just have no respect for your time and your job. Questions left to be answered.

So, a cool experience from the week! We had a really cool experience last Monday. When we were out for PDay, we had a member of another ward call us and ask if we could come with her that night to her friend's place. She lived right next to us. This friend was baptized a member of the church as a teenager, but left 4 or 5 months later because of the pressure of her family to disown her. Long story short, her mom took her to a soothsayer, and the soothsayer told her not to marry the guy she wanted to marry, but she did anyways, and it ended in messy divorce. She took all the blame for it, and beat herself up so bad for it. Since then, she's been haunted by evil spirits, who tell her she's worth nothing and shouldn't continue living. It's been 15 years or so. She told us she was able to deal with it pretty well for a long time, but that lately, she had been really struggling with it. So we were with this member and her husband at this ladies house and from the second you walked in, you could just feel the darkest power of the adversary in the apartment. I've only felt that feeling one other time on my mission. So, everyone was asking questions to try and figure out the whole situation. I didn't have as many questions, but after a while, I just felt like I should pop out a Book of Mormon, and I threw it open and landed in 2 Nephi 2. A familiar scripture, 'There must be opposition in all things,' ran over my eyes, and I read it to her and talked about it. Many people would just say that she's crazy, and that its all in her head. But if there's one thing I've learned, it's that there is a God, which means there simply has to be a Satan, and his evil spirits. It's a real thing and pretty intense. I think that helped her a little bit to realize maybe she's not totally insane. So it came time to give her a blessing, and she asked me to give her the blessing. During the blessing I felt prompted to tell her about a million times that she was a daughter of God and that she could only be bothered by these spirits if she allowed it. Afterward, the dark feeling was gone, and she felt better. We got a return appointment to come back and teach her the gospel this week. It was just another great chance to exercise the priesthood. I think I learn twice as much as the person I bless when I exercise the priesthood. It's fantastic every time.

2nd cool thing: I got to talk to Elder Carr on the phone for about an hour last Monday in the evening and it just felt great. I love that kid, and Munich sounds like it's doing pretty good.  Another pretty cool thing that's happened this week to follow up last week's email. I mentioned last week the prompting that I had to write more things down, and this week, I've spent all my spare time after planning at night writing down memories and feelings I've had, thoughts about lessons I've learned from my companions, and from other missionaries. It's been a really cool experience to take a week and look back on my mission and to see how far I've come. I've said it before, but I never pictured myself in this stage of my mission. I always imagined staying a little young missionary who just spoke the language as best as he could and relied on his trainer for everything. But those days ended really fast at the beginning before they threw me out on my own with a new missionary and said essentially, 'Go for it!' Now as a more seasoned and refined missionary and moreover person, it's easy to miss the lessons I learned and the person I've become if I don't take time to look back and write things down. That's blessed me a lot this week.  Well, I'd love to hear how you're all doing. I hear my BoSox are looking at a good year! We can only hope. 

I love you all, and hope you're doing well. 

Make good choices and have a fantastic week.  Elder Hadfield