Happy New Years!

This week was surely a crazy one. Christmas Eve was nothing short of amazing when we went to the Curtis' and had a very traditional meal of pizza and mashed potatoes. I really didn't mind at all because they are like 2 of my favorite things. Also because the Curtis family is just so stinking awesome it almost kills me.

Christmas was just kind of whatever. Only it didn't really feel like Christmas sure i got to see my family but through a computer. I hope everyone is feeling super bad for me while reading this because it is kind of sad. But life moves on so oh well!

Wednesday might have been my favorite day of the week. We had exchanges and I got to go with Elder Nielson who, apart from Elder Barr of course, has become one of my best friends on the mission. He is an ambassador at Utah State and we are so similar in almost every way. Except that he has to stay true to his phili sports team. We had a little tiff about the Boston Celtics. Ha! We did really good work as well so had a lot of fun. Nielson is a great guy and we plan to go on a double date when we get back. So girls if you are reading this and would like that chance then those letters better start flowing. Look at how pathetic I am begging for letters on my blog haah.

The rest of the week was just a regular week. Soeur Grandfils is awesome and she gave us a whole ton of food. She also said she loved us which really made me reflect on everyone in the ward. It's so crazy how important ward members are to the missionaries without families like the Curtis family and Soeur Grandfils I don't know what I would do. It's such a great blessing to have all the wonderful members of the church. It's awesome.

As far as this week goes we have another nice day off tomorrow because it is new years. YIPEE!! time to make some nice missionary resolutions! Tonight we are having guys night out with the Elders from Louise which is the southern half of Brussels. It's going to be so weird to just like hang out with guys tonight... AHHH!

Love you all,
Elder Oliverson

Black Santa

We went to the party for noel on saturday and the funniest thing happened. the guy who was supposed to play santa didn't show up. and so we had to get an african guy who spoke english and french to do santa. it was so funny to see an african guy who had to play santa. only in the strombeek word would that happen.

we have lots of investigators but they are all super busy with their finals for school. so lately we haven't got a lot of lessons but it will pick up after the exams are over. keep note of the french things and thanks for the packages. i'll e mail you all the details next monday! love you. Merry Christmas
elder oliverson

We went to the Eiffel Tower! Finally!

So this week has been one of the craziest thus far on the mission. Monday we just had a nice relaxed P-day oh except for the fact that we went to grand place to check out all the stuff for Noel and it started pouring. It seems that every time I go out without an umbrella I get soaked. I ended up just putting my glasses in my pocket. My hair was literally dripping on the metro. I looked like a mess, it was great.

Tuesday we went out and taught this super cool guy named Fabrice. I must admit it was one of the best lessons I've been apart of. We just testified of the truthfulness of the book of Mormon. If anyone could have felt the spirit in that room they would be changed in an instant. It really shaped my week a lot. Some times I have difficulties using some of the more complicated grammar in French. I found myself flowing and just using the subjunctive like it wasn't anybodies business. The most often used subjunctive trigger is afin que. I use it in prayer a lot but I was just talking and it made sense and I just used it. It's hard to explain on here, but it is an awesome feeling. I feel like my ability to understand everything really skyrocketed this week. There must be some people praying for me back home haha.

Wednesday was a very frustrating day. Our whole day got shot because we got stuck with an elder waiting for his companion at the train station. So frustrating. We ate some great fries though. Belgium is all about beer, chocolate, fries, and peeing babies haha. It's great. I love it. It's like every time i see mannekin pis i see little Crew or Fin just peeing away! Haha.

Thursday was so super awesome that I would need to put like 4 more adjectives to describe the awesomeness. we woke up at 4 which was not so super awesome because we had to catch a train to Paris. The best part about it was we rode first class with the zone leaders. That means we got free breakfast, yay! i had some yummy speculoos sandwiches. yummmmmm. when we got to paris we had 3 hours till the conference started so we went to the Eiffel Tower! Finally! It is just really huge! I feel like i'm actually serving in the paris france mission now that i've seen it. The conference with the leaders of the mission was so dang cool. There were a lot of good things presented about being a successful missionary. It isn't about baptisms it's about loving people which was really cool.

Each week I like to pick a different Christ like attribute and work on it. This week I picked charity. Now before this week I though charity was just giving to people who are less fortunate. If you look in bible dictionary that proves to be totally wrong.

Charity is the pure love of Christ. It is the love that Christ has for the children of men and that the children of men should have for one another. It is the highest, noblest, and strongest kind of love and the most joyous to the soul (see 1 Nephi 11:23)

I love this definition so much. This is an excellent scripture. Sorry i couldn't pull up the bible dictionary one but this works too. But really this week I have tried to focus on really having that pure love like Christ did. It's really shown me a lot. Shown me how much the people I love actually do mean to me. I invite all of you to study a Christ like attribute each week and try to apply it in your lives. It helps a ton.

The other days kind of dragged on till Sunday where we got invited to eat at an Italian guy's home. His name is Antonio and he has a wonky eye but i think he may be my second favorite person i've met on my mission

So as people around me know, I love Italian food so much. I was so excited to go eat. We had such good food like wow like honestly wow it was so good i nearly died from joy. Rapture. There's a good way to describe that food. But the food got stumped by what happened after. So we shared a scripture from Alma, it was alma 7:11-14 I believe. Now one line stuck out to me big time while we were reading this. It's weird because we read the scripture a lot because it's about the atonement and I just never really took much though to it. Anyway, it just talks about being born again, nothing we don't hear all the time. But for me I felt I really needed to put a lot of emphasis on this part about repenting and being born again. The wording is a little different in the French one though. When my time came to testify of this scripture I just said that I was so thankful for the opportunity we have every day to literally be born again. It hit me like never before the truthfulness of that statement. We really can be new people everyday because the lord has suffered for us. It was so strong that it made antonio cry. It was hard hold tears back for me. Maybe it was the thing we all needed. I hope all of you have the chance to read those few verses in the next week and really apply the atonement in your life because repentance is such a wonderful gift we have. use it. As missionaries we use it daily.

I almost forgot to mention that I gave my first blessing to a sick person ever. And it was in French haha. So scary. There was this lady at church who is apparently having a really rough time with some things. We were just all chatting in the foyer after ludovic got the priesthood. Oh ya ludovic got the priesthood and it was the coolest thing ever. so samuel grabs me and said we needed to give a blessing to this lady. So we just went and I almost forgot the words and it was scary but i ended up ok haha

There's me on a soap box for a little while, sorry! Ha really this week has been so great and so quick WOW!
I love you all.
Avec Amour
Elder Oliverson

This week has also been hard because of all the hobbit posters. i will talk more about that next week

Thanksgiving chicken dinner

Well, the week is finally over. I guess we will start on Tuesday with our exchanges.

Tuesday: So we had to exchange companions for a day and I was more than a little nervous. Elder Garcia, who I would be exchanging with, might be a little strange. He is nice, kind of, but strange. We made the exchange and then it was just me and him. Immediately he just took over and started replanning everything that elder thomas and I had planned to do. It was very frustrating. The funniest thing that even happened was when he got angry at these people for calling us Jehovah's Witnesses. Man he has a temper. you just had to be there.

Wednesday: We had our lovely zone conference on Wednesday and it was just wonderful. President and Sister Poznanski are such great people. I'm very pleased to have them as our mission leaders. After the interviews and training we had a lovely Thanksgiving chicken dinner. It was about as good as thanksgiving gets in Brussels has. Even though it was only Wednesday. Then came the time for the chicken bowl. Now correct me if I'm wrong but a whole zone of missionaries playing football sounds like a recipe for disaster. I knew there was a blown knee waiting to happen. Luckily we all survived and we all ended up muddy but jovial. I tried playing quarterback without my glasses but that didn't work out as well as i hoped. i blame the people for not catching the ball. I mean i guess the worst place to hit them is in the hands isn't it? This ended and without even thinking twice me and elder thomas were on our way to tie any loose ends we had with ludovic. It went smooth as usual and he passed his interview with flying colors.

Thursday was a lovely day of course. We celebrated our American heritage with my first taste of Macdo. yuck. I payed more euros than i should have for something that was certainly sub par. Well now i will try my hand at quick and see if anything better comes from that. I sure hope it does because I was not pleased at all with the European Mcdonalds. I'm shaking my head while writing this, that's how bad it was. After some hardcore work we had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner lined up with the best family in the whole wide world. they are the curtis family and they are so awesome. It was just so much fun having another chicken dinner. ha. so much fun. When we were stuffed to the point where buttons could burst we lined up to take a picture. I was put in the most awkward situation i've had on my mission. 3 of the curtis kids tried to sit on my lap. contact with children is a very touchy subject in the rules of a missionary. We are to avoid things like holding kids and having them sit on our laps like people avoided the plague. So i threw both my hands up and showed that I could take no part in this lap sitting that was wanting to be had. it was funny and i feel bad but rules are rules you know. I am very grateful for wonderful families like them and for all the wonderful members of this wonderful church. everything is wonderful

the next to days just went. they were just days. i likened these days to the 23rd of december. it's not christmas and it's not christmas eve so you are just looking forward to all the wonderful presents that are to be had.

No worries, Sunday was certainly like Christmas. We prepared all the stuff for the baptism and i prepared my talk on top of all that. I really had so much going on that I went up there gave my talk and we soon after left the chapel. Nearly all of our investigators were at church and we also found a new one who is looking to (I'm using his words right here) "do what that guy did" that guy he is talking about is ludovic and doing what he did is called baptism. Ludovic brought his mom which was so cool. she really liked the spirit there and decided she wanted to see us and be taught. It is just so awesome seeing ludovic's testimony grow. Ah I can't even describe the feeling. I'll describe it as cake. Cake is really good. I just said cake so you could put in your mind whatever cake you want. and the best part about this cake is that it is super healthy for you. So you have this super delicious healthy cake and you just eat it, all of it, and it's that feeling when you've eaten the right amount. Ya that's how his baptism felt. It almost felt surreal. When we gave him the holy ghost it was also just such an awesome feeling. this feeling was like getting a free gps system because really that's what the holy ghost is. It's like we said, "Here Ludovic have this gps system that will guide to anywhere and tell you anything you need, oh and it's free." If we were to look at the holy ghost as some technological gift the overview would be something like this

Can tell you anything you need to know concerning your life
Can guide you to make right decisions at all times
Works as long as you have faith
Will always be there if you keep yourself worthy
Can be charged every sunday when you partake of the sacrament
Is very simple and easy to use

Wow now that does sound too good to be true doesn't it?

All joking and lame analogies aside it was one of the greatest days of my life. Just the spirit during the whole day was choice. It is something that I hope to feel a lot more in the future. ludovic is a great example to me. I'm very proud of his decision.

Just a few pictures

The Craziest week of my life, and the glory days of playing football.

Well the craziest week of my life is now over. I guess I'll start on Monday. Monday we had this lesson with Christian. Christian is a French speaker who Elder Thomas had met with once before. He has had a really hard life and loves American stuff. Anyways, we taught him a cool lesson about some of the gospel principals and in the end we committed him to baptism on the 8th of December! He works a lot so we will have to see if we can meet with him in enough time to teach him all the lessons.

Wednesday: Wednesday we had a lesson with Natacha. We brought a really cool Priest aged kid with us named Jeremie. We taught her prayer, reading the scriptures, and keeping the sabbath day holy. After our lesson Jeremie told us he now wanted to serve a mission after talking with us for so long and seeing that we were actually people. It was way cool to see that happen. After this Elder Thomas and I walked to our tram so we could finally go home (Natacha lives way far away) to our surprise there was just a van sitting in the middle of the tracks. We were both very confused at how the van got there and what they were going to do to get it off. All the sudden there comes two enormous trucks and also a garbage truck. Why the garbage truck was there I do no know, but it was so I feel the need to mention it. They pulled out these huge chains and drug the van off the tracks. The van was off the tracks and now I could see a couple, who was on the tracks, making out. Now call me crazy, but I don't think the middle of the tracks is somewhere where people should be doing that. My vision quickly turned to this man standing about 10 to 15 feet away from us. He looked super suspicious and so i gave him a little more than a glance. Turning so that I could see him from the front I saw that he had A HOOK FOR A HAND. Yes, it was true he had a hook for a hand. He was a regular Buster Bluth if I've ever seen one (any reader who knows who buster bluth is without searching it deserves a special something, so e-mail or write me and i'll send you something) Thomas doubted that he truly had a hook for a hand but we did our detective work and came to figure out that he truly did

Friday: Elder Andersen was so awesome! Ah! He really built our faith. Afterwards we were about to miss our train so we briskly walked to a train to connect to our (I like to call these trains bullet trains because they are really fast and because i can't remember the name) bullet train. We were on a metro which connected the 2 when we realized we had 9 minutes left. by the time we got off the metro we had 5. we sprinted through the train station. And by sprinted I really mean sprinted. I felt like I was back in my glory days playing football. I was juking people out left and right. They had no chance. I may have thrown a few bows here and there, but i made it to the train nonetheless. Me and Elder Thomas were the only companionship that made it. We were left with 2 other elders and a sister. the rest had to take a train at 10:00 and got home at about midnight. I think that our companionship can be deemed as most athletic in the district. Maybe we should take a new route in contacting and just challenge people to athletic competitions and if they lose they must hear every lesson from us. After that the spirit will just take over and we will have baptisms left and right. I have played the scene of me running through the station numerous times. I think I might need to drop all the baseball offers and try out football, I mean sure I'm super small and didn't play my senior year, but I can juke out standing pedestrians like nobodies business! Ha!

It's been a great week and we get to baptize ludovic in 6 days! I'm super excited! We have a turkey bowl this week and a member is feeding us thanksgiving dinner so I'm super excited. I also ate a baked potato! We have this awesome senior couple from idaho called the Okelberrys. They cooked us dinner and I ate bacon and a baked potato. They are so awesome and I am so glad to have them. I am actually e-mailing from their computer right now. I am blessed I love it I love you all I love the church
Avec Amour
Elder Oliverson

I made the NEWS!

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