#Because of Him-Oslo Week Thirty Four

To my lovers and haters!

Happy Easter! Shout out to Miss Kennedy Shanklin who had a birthday this weekend! I am sure it was a fabulous and completely stress free day for everyone in the family! Stay beautiful!

The Storm Goes Out

White Thunder has left the building ladies and gentlemen. For some really weird reason our most positive investigator decided to go all "I don't need the life changing gospel of Jesus Christ, even if it will bring me more happiness than anything else". More or less something like that. So yeah that was really weird and kind of sad. It came completely out of nowhere. We are hopefully going to meet one last time this week just to see what happened. Life goes on though. We had some other sweet miracles this week so no big deal.

Meeting with President

So for those of you who are wondering, I had my district meeting with the president in attendance and I feel like it went pretty good. The activity was way fun (shout out to those who helped with ideas) and I think that we all had on our A game. I could be wrong though, but he seemed pleased! Thanks for the love and prayers!

Elder Shanklin and Elder Nillson

Elder Shanklin and Elder Duncan (his companion)

Elder Shanklin and Elder??

EASTER

Soooooo Easter is like worse than Christmas in Norway. By worse I mean that nothing happens. The day before Christmas the streets of Trondheim were pretty busy during the day. The day before easter in Oslo (a city double or triple the size) the streets were empty. Ridiculous. So we did some door knocking which is weird for Oslo. Here is where my easter experience is going to break off into some sub-sections...

The Goods

Elder Shanklins Giant Easter Egg

Trust in the Fillippinos (Yes I know that's spelled wrong)

So Elder Duncan and I were out knocking on doors and just having a jolly good time. No real success. Even though one guy did feel very strongly that we were needed in Africa. Something like "Go to africa! The quakers are all I need" It was weird. He really didn't want my mormon.org card. So the night went on and at about 8:20 we decided to do our last door. At this door a nice fillippino lady came out and we asked if we could share a short message with here and here family. She said she had to go up and ask. So after a few minutes she came back down and let us in....well surprise surprise. Her family happened to be 6 other fillippino girls ages 19-25. So I can see in my companions face that he's freaking out a little looking for a fillippino man. None in sight. I was a little worried too but the spirit confirmed to me in a strong way that we were safe and that we should teach. So we did. And it went very well. Of course being fillippino they gave us food after and just wanted to talk the night away. Our Zone Leaders loved the story and totally approved of us teaching them. So all worked out. It was such a miracle! A few of them were more interested than others and I hope we can continue to teach them all!

Easter party

So we had a fun easter gathering on Saturday. We had a combined lunch and I made some awesome deviled eggs! Yep, chef Shanklin. And you ladies thought it didn't get better. It really was a super fun time though. We played some apples to apples and searched for eggs. Here they don't have easter egg baskets. They have these cardboard eggs that they fill with candy and hide. Sometimes one for each kid or just sometimes one huge one for the whole family.  Ours were the individual ones. We also did this fun game that Sister Frampton does in her family. Each person takes a boiled egg and two people face off. In the face off they roll their eggs at eachother and only one will break. You set it up tournament style and the winner will have a none cracked egg at the end. It was hilarious because Elder Weaver claimed he wasn't decorating his. He called it the "Clean hands, pure heart egg". He didn't even die it, instead he just put it in water haha. It was super funny. Of course he somehow ended up winning. he had a victory speech which included the line "there is no off-season" hahaha. Good stuff. We are all children at heart.

Deviled eggs by Chef Shanklin

Yummy Easter Dinner

Egg rolling contest

More egg rolling

Elder Shanklin with his egg

Preparing for battle

And the winner is.....

Church

Church was pretty normal. We had an investigator who came to church which was awesome! We taught sunday school for the youth and only one girl was there. That was fun haha. She was nice but it's hard to do a super awesome and fun Easter quiz if only one person is there. Oh well. We ate dinner with our senior couple afterwards and it was delicious. Good times. I did wear some nice brown H&M shoes I got. They compliment the blue suit way nice. Serving in Norway is great. Being stylish isn't against the rules, it helps you fit in so that people like you. Totally me.

Christ

So the spirit of Easter on a mission is just incredible. Obviously most of you have seen the #becauseofHim video which is way good. Another video I would recommend are the two easter bible videos. They really do a magnificent job of envoking the emotions that come with the Easter season. I love the very short scene in the first one where Christ is laying his hands on Peter to give him the preisthood.  A sort of filming of the famous LDS painting where the disciples are surrounding Christ. I know that the Preisthood is back on the earth. I know that there was an apostasy after the death of Christ that was healed through the prayer of 14 year old boy. I know that we will all reap the fruits of the resurrection one day. I know that salvation comes only through Jesus Christ.

"And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent"

Clear Eyes, Full Heart

Elder Shanklin