Week 73: Roosendaal

Hoi!
This week was lots of fun! I said goodbye to Antwerpen, especially with our two solid investigators Joris and Calithos! I'm excited to see how they progress, and I am sure Elder DuWors will do an excellent job with his new companion.

Now I am in Roosendaal! My companion is Elder Jeanfreau, and he is pretty cool. He is really smart, speaks great Dutch, and we get along really well. The only downside is that he is from Utah... :) Meaning that he broke my 17 month streak of non-Utahn companions.
The Ward is great, and I am really excited to be able to work with all of the awesome members here.

It is also the beginning of winter, so it got really cold the past few weeks. With how cold it is and how early it gets dark, the people become a little more closed off. Especially when it is dark outside. But we are adapting to it, and I am sure we are still going to find plenty of the Elect!
 Tranfer Day! Traveling for 20 minutes on the train. Definitely the easiest transfer day ever.

Roosendaal Centrum!

 
I thought I send a photo of Elder Jeanfreau. So here it is :)

I love you all! Have a great week!
Love,
Elder Thornton

Week 72: Here we go again!

Hallo mensen!

I hope that your Thanksgiving was awesome. Elder DuWors and I kinda forgot about it, so we ate spaghetti. Oops.

We had a really good week! Lots of exciting stuff. Calithos is still progressing well, and we are hoping to put him on baptismal date later today. 

Joris just came back from his vacation in America! He came to church and brought us some coveted microwave popcorn, something they do not have here. He is still doing really well, and we are also planning on setting a goal for baptism with him tonight. 

Transfers are this Wednesday! And I will be headed to Roosendal, right at the bottom of the Netherlands. My new companion is Elder Jean Freau (I hope I spelled it right) and we will be co-district leaders. I have been a single district leader for nearly 8 months, so hopefully it means that I will get a little more free time at the end of the day. I am going to miss Antwerpen, but I am excited to go back to Nederland and get to know a new city!

I had a pretty life changing experience this week. Even though I won't share a lot of details as it is personal, it has really made me appreciate the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. He suffered all of the pains of everyone, so that he can understand us all even better than we can understand ourselves. I pray for at least a little bit of that understanding so that I can better my relationships with my companions and others.

Pretty cool tank that we always bike past. I thought I would take my last chance before I head over to Roosendaal to take a photo with it.

The bike shed! 

I love you all! Have a great week!

Love,

Elder Thornton

Week 71: Meeting some Greek Gods...

Hoi jullie!

How's it going? We had a pretty good week. We spent a lot of time finding and also got to go on exchanges with the ZL's. We also found a solid new investigator! That has been something we have been struggling with. We have so many investigators, but all of them are super unreliable. We only one prescheduled appointment that went through this week, and we had 5 of them in a row on Saturday...

But the one that did go through was awesome! His name is Calithos! It's a Greek name, but he's actually from Groningen in Nederland, which was my last area! We met him while doing banner contacting in the Centrum. He stopped on his bike to look at our poster of Jesus, and we had a decent conversation, and then he said "I'll come back," and just biked away. He didn't come back before we left, but he called us! And now we have had a couple good appointments with him, and not only does he respond to our calls and texts, but he actually wants to meet with us. He says that he believes Joseph Smith is a prophet! YAAAAS! Next time we are going to help him connect all the dots

We also went on exchanges with the Zone Leaders Elder Reaveley and Elder Jensen (both from my MTC group) It is always pretty cool to go out with Elder's my "age." I hope I get to have another older companion. It has been so awesome to train, but it would be pretty nice to be able to not have to lead all of the time. Not that Elder DuWors does that. He actually super responsible and dedicated. 

I hope you all have a great week!

They have hamburgers here, but they put them in the bun... So I tried one, just to check it off the list :)

The beautiful view ​from​ our apartment! The leaves have finally turned colors, and it looks pretty great.

Love,

Elder Thornton

Week 70: Temple!

Hoi!

This week was pretty great! I got to go the temple this week, and that was especially amazing because it had been a whole year since I had been. It felt wonderful! And I got to do it for an ancestor who I had performed the baptism for in Nauvoo a few years back, so that was pretty cool. I feel a little bad that I made him wait that long, but he probably never expected to recieve his endowment in Nederland. 

As for Antwerpen, it is going pretty good. Our investigators have kinda disappeared... We had one initial investigator near the centrum of Antwerpen, and since he kind of struggles keeping appointments, we ended up doing a lot of knocking in his area. And, seeing that it is pretty much the slums of Antwerpen, the people are pretty poor. And as we learn in Alma, also super humble and open! But... They tend to struggle with reliability and keeping appointments... So we are trying to figure that one out. We have 5 investigators on 1 street. That is really abnormal. But we only have contact with 2 of them.

But they are super cool! I am excited to see how much progress they will make.

We also got a text from Joris this week! He is currently on vacation in Seattle, but he still attended church! He is the best! (He also said he would bring some microwave popcorn back for me, so I may be slightly biased) :)

 The river next to Antwerpen!

The Temple in Den Haag!

Cake with Isabel! Isabel is one of the investigators of the Lokeren Sisters, and I got the opportunity to do her interview! She is so ready! She has completely turned her life around since she started learning about the Gospel. She got baptized this Saturday! It was Sister Klenk's birthday so we had some cake.

I love you all!

Love,

Elder Thornton

Week 69: Halloween and the secret to winning a Bible Bash

Hey Family and Friends!

I hope you guys had a great week! It was pretty good for us. Halloween is a little more of a thing here than in Nederland, so we saw a few trick or treaters, but it made it pretty difficult to do any work since we didn't have any appointments that night. The next day was also a holiday, so we thought it would be a great day to find people at home, but it turned out that everyone was out and about, so it turned into a pretty long day.

We did some more banner contacting this week, and it went pretty well. One of the guys that we stopped ended up coming to church, but he said he was too busy to make any appointments before December, so hopefully that will work out.

Dijana told us this last week that the 18-year-old girl who came with her to church is in love with Elder DuWors, and she in continually trying to pair them up now... So they will definitely be taught by the Sisters from now on. It is a good thing that he is more handsome than me :)

We had a super good afternoon after a dinner appointment. We went out to knock in their neighborhood for a little less than an hour, and we only made it a few doors because of all of the people who wanted to talk to us. One of them was Dina, who is a 28 or so year old woman who knows the Bible really well. I have developed a pretty good knowledge of that on my mission, so we had a really good conversation and she wants a Book of Mormon, so we are going to bring that to her tonight. I am excited!

Related to that, we talked to a couple Jehova's Witnesses this week! And they tried to bash us... They got destroyed :). The first one we talked to tried to pull out a few scriptures on us and I totally tore them apart. The secret to winning a Bible Bash without actually bashing is just to supply facts about the scripture they gave, and put it into context. Or agree with it and supply another scripture that goes along with it, giving you control of the situation. And then testify! I always like throwing in some good metaphors too. While being nice, of course :). I think I like it a bit too much. But hopefully they got the point.

We got a little lost. So we thought we should a least take a photo.

Have a great week!

I love you all!

Love,

Elder Thornton

Week 68: Finally Autumn!

Hallo!

It has finally gotten cold this week! We have been enjoying some beautiful weather for the past few weeks, so I guess it is about time. But it has been a pretty great week. Lot of cool things. Also a lot of disappointments. We have a bunch of investigators, but almost everyone missed their appointments and fell off the face of the earth. So hopefully we will eventually be able to get back into contact. We had a few good lessons this week! They were all with Africans, and they went fairly well. One of them said that he was "mormon in spirit." We will make sure to make him a mormon in body as well :).

We also went to Brussels this week to finish up some legality work for Elder DuWors, and while I was waiting I got to talk to a bunch of the other missionaries. In summary of that conversation, I am "ancient" in missionary age... It made me laugh, because it doesn't really feel that long, and I still do have plenty of time to keep on working hard. But it is pretty cool to be that older example.

We had 3 people in church on Sunday! That was pretty exciting, since it doesn't happen too often. One of our investigators, Dijana, brought her friends with her. Dijana kinda has a short attention span, so we had to remind her that it probably wasn't a good idea to Skype or call in Sacrament meeting a couple times :) She is pretty funny...

It has been great, and we can't wait to kill it this week! 

 We used the banner in contacting this week! It went really well, and we are planning on doing it some more this week.

I forgot to say that we played Dungeons and Dragons as a district for last district p-day. Super nerdy... But it was pretty fun :)

Week 67: An appointment with Destiny

Goeiemiddag!

I hope that this week has been pretty great for all of you! We have been pretty busy, and found a few more investigators! One of our new investigators is Destiny. Fun Fact: A lot of Africans name their children names like Faith, Divine, just to give a couple examples. So we met Destiny on the street, and gave him a Book of Mormon, and we should be able to keep on meeting with him. We have a whole bunch of other African investigators! They are all super religious! They just really struggle with keeping appointments. This Saturday we had 5 different appointment and they all didn't go through... So it turned into a pretty long day of knocking. But it wasn't too shabby.

We had yet another miracle occur on the tram! We were just sitting there sending a couple texts to our investigator, and in the aisle next to us a guy asked his friends why there were so many churches, and how he could know what was right. They were struggling, so Elder DuWors jumped in with "Have you ever tried praying?" We ended up getting his number and an appointment for Saturday, so hopefully that goes well!

 Cookie race with Elder Jensen at the ward pumpkin party. I won :)

 We made some delicious food this week! With lots of leftovers :)

Another beautiful European street! No one wanted to get baptized, but they were pretty nice.

Have a great week!

Love,

Elder Thornton