Prayer is an amazing thing.

Hey Mom!

Holy freak congrats to Jade!! Dang that’s cool! Tell her I said good luck and she’s going to do awesome out there! And Tim’s gettin’ out there, eh? That’s pretty cool. Everybody’s going on missions. Weird.

Holy cow I can’t believe that Mitch is already leaving. I was in Kamëz when he got his call wasn’t I? That was a long time ago. Time flies looking back on it. Mitch is going to be a killer missionary. It’s funny because kind of the same thing happened to me. I remember being really excited at my call opening cause I was going somewhere that nobody had heard of and that was cool when everybody was around. But after everybody left and I had a little while to think about what had just happened and how crazy this really was, I freaked out. I remember that I thought to myself that in no way was I ready to do this and to leave and learn a language for two years. So I prayed that night. The next morning I kept praying before I studied my scriptures and I will never forget the feeling of peace and confirmation that came. I knew that I was supposed to be going to Albania. From that day, I have never doubted that this was the right thing to do. It’s been so dang hard, but I know that it is right. So I can relate to him about that. Prayer is an amazing thing. It is probably the biggest help we have as missionaries. Even this week we had a couple answers to just very small prayers that we couldn’t have done without the Lord’s help. He listens. And He answers. Sometimes the answer is, “no,” but He always hears.

This week was an interesting week ha ha. We had some really funny things happen. Okay so there’s this member named Dori, or as we call him Fratello Poçi (Brother Poçi in Italian), and he loves the missionaries. He’s been a member for just a little over a year and he has a small mental handicap that makes him just a little bit slow, but I love this kid. I actually sent you a picture of him today. So he’s been begging us to go do some missionary work together and we finally gave in this week. He wanted to go tracting so bad, so after Institute one day we took him to go tracting for an hour on his birthday. We haven’t gotten in tracting for at least a week and a half, maybe two, but of course we take Dori with us and the first door answers and we do our thing and tell them about the message and then the guy is like, “So. . . .do you want to come in and teach us or something?”

“YES.”

“Okay hajdeni.”

And we got a member lesson tracting. It was a good lesson. It didn’t really result in anything, but it was just awesome that the spirit that Dori brought with us helped us to get into the very first door we knocked.

I had another experience that was really hilarious/annoying that I wanted to share with you, but I’ll have to save that for another week cause I’m out of time! I love you mom! You are awesome! Oh! It was actually Mother’s day in Albania on the 8^th of March so Gëzuar Ditën e Nënës! Të dua forte!

-Elder Swenson