WEEK 7 PHOTOS

#1- a few elders lost a bet, so they shaved their legs. Heres the before picture.

#2 - Starsi Peck thinks he can take selfies

#3 - Our pioneer day picture. Blue and white for days. We totally didn't even plan this.

#4 - I was ready for that

#5 - My companion, and the Slovenes. We're all going to the same mission, but they're speaking Slovenian, and we'll speak everything else :P

#6 - An after picture of the shaved legs.​

Week 7-Shaved legs, being humbled, and cool Croatian (MTC)

Alright here goes! The final countdown *cue music*

Next week we will have our flight plans, and the end will be in sight! 

This week has been incredible and I have absolutely loved it! On Sunday we had the Nashville Tribute Band come for our Pioneer Day devotional which was fantastic and I loved it! I would highly recommend listening to their songs wherever you can find them! We also got to listen to a talk by elder Bednar called "Listening to the Spirit" or something like that. Also incredible and I highly recommend it.

This gospel is so true! I've been loving it, and learning so much every day! This week we seem to have focused a lot on the plan of salvation. I would invite you all to study and ponder the plan of salvation, and what it means for us. It is quite incredible, and it really is the 'why' of the gospel. Put simply, the restoration is the 'how', the plan of salvation is the 'why', the gospel of Jesus Christ is the 'what', and the commandments are the 'so what' or the 'what now' of the gospel. It all fits together wonderfully and I absolutely know that it is true. 

I've had some pretty humbling days, and it definitely hasn't all been easy, but little by little, day by day, I can see that I am being changed and made into the person Heavenly Father is making me into. And He can do the same for you too, if you let Him. 

One cool experience we had this week was Skyping a native from Croatia! He was super cool and knew English, so he helped us with some words we didn't know in Croatian (since we have to teach in Croatian, no English allowed) and he was just so amazing! It was incredible to hear his testimony, and just to let him know that we could be seeing him again in three weeks! He's the branch president in Zagreb, so if I ever serve there, I'll probably get to know him really well :) 

Oh here's something fun in Croatian-the verb imati means to have and you conjugate it to say I have, you have we have, etc. Then you just add a negation to say the negative of that, so the word nemaš = 'you do not have'. #hrvatski #croatian. 5 letters = 4 words. Love this language! Oh also we got 4 new Bulgarian elders this week added to our zone!

Mislim to je to (I think that is that) other than pictures! Loving it here and thanks for all your prayers!

Starješina Christensen

WEEK 6-I love studying, but not grammar, Elder Bednar, and one small prayer

I'm starting to lose track of the weeks, and they go by faster and faster every day. 

Don't know if I've said this before, but Sundays here are fantastic! We get so much time just to study the gospel, and I honestly love it! We focused our studies on chapter 4 in preach my gospel: how to recognize and understand the spirit. There is just so much that I found that I could improve on, and I'm sure if I studied again, I would find even more. I've found that if we want to know more about something, and put in honest effort, Heavenly Father will bless us with what we want. It's an amazing thing to see, and I challenge each of you to do that for just one topic or idea, no matter how big or small. It works!

We also had a surprise visit from Elder Bednar on Sunday, and he taught us so much! He had a ginormous Q&A session, and I learned so much not only from what he said, but how he said it, and how concerned he was for the individual question that was asked, and how concerned he was that he had answered the concern. I learned so much about his character, and what I can do to be more like that. 

We got our countdown going this week! We're down to 24 or 25 days left I think!

Also ran, quite literally into an elder going to Argentina who ran a 9:12 2-mile! Needless to say I'm trying to keep up, and if anyone breaks any records now, it'll be him, but it's been great to have someone to run with everyday who pushes me!

Oh my companion, Elder James, told me on Thursday or Friday this week that he heard me talking in half Croatian/half English in my sleep! So I've been dreaming in Croatian, but I don't remember it haha!

Now for my one small prayer. On Friday I wasn't doing so great. Just really negative and not feeling the spirit at all. We got to lunch, and I started eating, but I realized I hadn't said a prayer. So I stopped, bowed my head, and just said, really quickly how I was feeling, and shared with my Heavenly Father what I was feeling, not necessarily with words. I just asked if I could have a better rest of the day because it was not fun. And as soon as I finished I got this reassuring feeling that I just needed to keep on trying, and that He was pleased with my efforts. I didn't think much of it, and went back to eating. I realized at the end of the day, that it had been pretty great, amazing, and wonderful since that point, and I was just so grateful for that. I know that Heavenly Father answers prayers, and he can change us so much if we let Him!

Sorry no pictures this week! Will try to get an especial lot next!

As always, love you all, and thanks for your letters, thoughts, and especially prayers! They are felt, and they do help!

Love,

Starješina Christensen

WEEK 5 Photos

#1: Starsi (Elder) Pace, one of the new Slovaks, and I. I got to host him last week, so that was cool.

#2: The zone. I could name most of these people, but it will suffice to say we're all going to eastern Europe. It's like a really weird family but not. haha.

#3: српски (serpski (serbian)) name tag

#4: Both of them​

Week 5-New name tags, less English than I thought possible, and talking LESS in lessons!

Let's see here, last Saturday night I finished memorizing our purpose, the first vision, the baptism invitation, and moroni 10:4-5, so as a reward we got our cyrillic nametags! pictures forthcoming! They sound the same when we say them, but it's fun to see peoples faces when they have no idea how to say our names :) Also ordered a mission t-shirt which looks pretty sweet. Also was feeling a little antsy and had some extra time, so we went to a room, and I played piano for about 20 minutes and the rest of the day I felt so much better and excited and ready to take on the language and anything else, so maybe that's a sign I need to get back to that more. 

On Sunday we had the opportunity to watch the Joseph Smith movie and it was incredible. Felt the Spirit so strong! I know Joseph Smith was a prophet and that through him, everything in the gospel was restored! I'm so grateful for his example and drive to follow and become like Jesus Christ. If you have the time, look up the song "brother I'll follow you" by Nashville Tribute Band, or "Apostles" by the same. Both are incredible. Or "The Impossible Dream" from the musical "Man of la Mancha". All are incredible and fantastic in the light of the gospel. 

We've been learning so much about not only the language, but about the gospel (keep in mind, in Croatian) and also how to become better teachers. One of the biggest things has been to ask more questions, and see how the person we are teaching is feeling. It also means that we don't talk the whole time, and that our investigator can help us understand what they are thinking. It also invites the spirit like crazy.

Tuesday we had a pretty intense class that taught us most of the things in that last paragraph. Our teachers also told us that from now on, if we talked to them in English during class, they wouldn't understand us. So we basically can't use any English during class, and it's forcing us to speak it a lot more. Anyways, that's all I've got for now. Thanks for all your letters and support and prayers! Until next week, doviđenja!

Старешиа Крисшћенсен​​​​​​

WEEK 4 Pictures

#1: The sisters Losee and Yergensen caught slightly unawares. The are the only two sisters in the MTC learning Croatian, so theres only 4 missionaries in our class, and thats our entire district. It's pretty sweet.

#2: The Bulgarians, Croatians, and Slovenes. Elder James and I are 3rd and 4th from the left on the top, all the other elders are Bulgarians. The two sisters on the far left are the other Croatians, and the three sisters on the far right are the Slovenians. This plus the Polish and new Czechs and Slovaks is our zone.

#3: Good old Starsi Murley. One of the two best Canadians in the zone.

#4: The Bulgarian, Croatian, and Czech Elders. From left to right, Elders Maurice, Clark (both Bulgarian), Murley (now in Czech), Evtimov (Bulgaria), James and I (Croatian), Archibald, and Wright (More Bulgarian)

#5: The temple

#6: One of the last pics with starsi Murley before he left

#7: The Czechs and Bulgarians that left on Monday & Tuesday​

Week 4-Croatian grammar, new missionaries in the zone, and teaching by the Spirit

​This week was wonderful as always! We've been learning lots, teaching more, and growing more and more both spiritually and in the language every day. I realize I haven't talked much about the language. It's pretty cool and I love learning more about it. In Croatian, there are no articles, because the word endings dictate that for you, hence why Russian people when they learn english always say "I want to go to store" instead of "I want to go to THE store" haha. Also we spend a lot of our time on grammar in Croatian, so that is great. I'm actually learning a fair amount about English grammar, cuz I always hated that, and never learned it, so now that's coming back to bite me. 

At the end of last week we each had individual coaching sessions with our teachers, and I had a long talk about what I am doing, and what I could do better, and in the end, we decided that I was trying to do too much, and cram too much study time into not enough hours in the day, and it was tiring me out both physically and mentally because it was just not possible to do everything that I wanted to do. 

On this Monday we saw Elder Murley off, and he is now in the Czech Republic. He was the last one in our zone to leave that was here when we got here. So now we are the oldest missionaries in the zone, and we got some new Czech and Slovak missionaries on Wednesday! We also had a couple really great lessons on Monday, and I could feel the gift of tongues bringing words I didn't know I knew to use to help answer our investigators questions. Even if my grammar was awful, the right words and ideas were there, and it felt wonderful. 

**THE GOOD STUFF**

Wednesday was another wonderful learning experience! We were teaching Almir again, and when we were preparing we had no idea what to teach, and I was feeling really exhausted mentally and just done, but we still had to teach. I said a quick prayer to myself while I was failing at focusing and preparing our lesson that we would be able to have the Spirit and to help Almir with his needs. When we went into the lesson, I still had nothing, but at one point I felt a voice in my head, not my own, tell me that we should read a chapter in the book of Mormon aloud with our investigator. I thought that was a good idea, but had no idea what we should read, so I shrugged it off. About 30 seconds later, my companion asked if we could read 2 Nephi 31 aloud with him, and then we did, and even though I had no idea what it was saying, I could feel the spirit working on him. Afterwards we were able to ask him how he felt and what he thought about what we had read. He said he felt peace and comfort as we read, but that he didn't understand very much of it. I was then able to let him know that that was the spirit, in messy grammar Croatian, and in our very next visit, he accepted the challenge to be baptized! 

Anyways, that's all for now! Thanks again for all your letters, prayers, and love! I love feeling the support from that every day and it lifts me up beyond any of my own capacities and makes me more than I can be! 

Love, 

Elder/Starješina Christensen