Let’s time travel back to Mid-December of 2015, our first
week in Sweden.
The week began with a series of flights from Phoenix
to Newark
to Munich
then to Stockholm.
Each flight brought
us deeper and deeper into the reality that we were moving out of a big portion
of our comfort zone. By the time we
reached Munich we were relating too closely to the imagined ‘perfect day’ as
voiced by one of the characters in the film Dan
in Real Life described as 'waking in a place where you don’t know the
language or the customs'. After disembarking in Stockholm, a land where forty
years ago I could hold an understandable conversation on many topics in the
Swedish language, I found myself surrounded by tumultuous chatter in a definite
Swedish timbre, but there the recognition ended. Although I could speak an
awkward Swedish, I could not decipher any of the Swedish conversation around me.
Now that I’ve
gotten you to Sweden, I should explain something about the organization of Latter-day Saint (Mormon) Missions. The Sweden Stockholm Mission covers the entire country of
Sweden. It is divided into missionary
zones, each zone being divided into districts.
Every three months the Mission President holds Zone conferences to
instruct and edify the missionaries, two in Stockholm and one in Göteborg. This is significant because we arrived on the
day of the first Conference.
These
conferences keep everyone at the mission office busy, so we were very grateful
that among all the checklists that were created for that Zone Conference
someone remembered to pencil in “Pick up the Hurlbuts from the airport.” As it
was, between deplaning, finding our luggage, (we didn’t realize there were two separate
corridors of luggage carousels, and, of course, we chose to wait in the wrong
one), determining where and how to go through customs, we took so long to emerge
in to the arrivals area that our driver had to dash out and reload the parking
meter. This left us wondering, how long
a person should wait before venturing out into the wilds of Stockholm on our
own trailing 18 months of luggage behind us. Fortunately, our driver, the
genial Äldste Koyle serving as the financial secretary of the mission, picked us
out of the crowd, before we did anything foolish.
We arrived at
the Mission office about 3:30 PM. That’s
sundown in Stockholm’s winter. Here we rolled
up our sleeves to help Äldste and Syster Koyle with some of the final
preparation’s for the next day’s Zone Conference. They took us out for dinner
[Longhorn Steakhouse – “Snälla du, har ni någon BBQ Sauce?”] and to our hotel
room for the night, a room that comes with features so European that thoughts
of Dan in Real Life rear up crying out, “No sir, you are not in Kansas any
more.” So that’s our first day in Sweden.
Day two has us
going to the emigration office to register our presence in Sweden for long term
residency. Then it’s back to the office
to finish off the last minute preparations for Zone Conference 2. We are taken along to help serve the
dinner. This also gives us a chance to
meet some of the missionaries, as well as the Mission President and his
wife. Another highlight of this day is
the opportunity to see the Stockholm Temple, very close to the chapel where the
Conference is in session.
(pretend that this picture has snow on the ground)
After another
night at the hotel we wake to day three, a day dedicated to driving from
Stockholm to Lund where the bulk of our service will be. This is an eight-hour drive that affords a
good glimpse of the autumnal Sweden, since there is no snow on the ground as we head south. When we
aren’t passing through rainstorms, the skies around us are gray and lowering
lending a similar color scheme to our surroundings. The highways run mostly through rural areas
with an occasional dip into a town or city. The highlight of this was driving
along the eastern shore of Lake Vättern into Jönköping at the southern tip of the
lake.
But winter
days are short in northern climes, and even though we are heading south, it is
dark when we arrive in Lund. Our Zone Leaders are there to meet us and help us
get settled in, which can be interpreted as moving our suitcases into our
apartment. They then, take us over to the Young Single Adult (YSA) facility, which will be our
base of operations. Here we meet some of the students waiting for Institute class
(religious studies) to start. But – No, no, no – we don't get to stay. We are whisked away to the Lund meeting house to attend the
baptismal service for a mother and her teenage daughter. Here, we are introduced
to some of the members as well as the missionaries in our district. Having attended plenty of baptisms before It
didn’t seem to matter that we only recognized a handful of Swedish words during
the service. It was an interesting blend of the familiar with the foreign, the
most important familiarity being the presence of the spirit. The Zone leaders
then take us back to the YSA Center to catch the last part of the lesson, being
given in a mix of Swedish and English. We get back to our apartment more than
ready to crawl into bed.
Day Four: The
final Zone Conference takes place in Göteborg, a four-hour drive from Lund,
but, since this is our Zone, we feel it is important to attend and learn our mission
president’s priorities for the mission. So, after a quick shower and a quicker
breakfast, we are on the road again. The conference is a good blend of spiritual
instruction, housekeeping business, Christmas celebration, and family reunion -
the latter as missionaries get to reconnect with various companions they have
worked with before. For us the conference ends with a four-hour drive back to
Lund, where we drag our tired bodies into bed. Having left early and arrived
home late, we have yet to see anything of Lund in the daylight
Lund is twenty minutes north of Malmö.
Day five is
Saturday and the first real day we are on our own in Sweden. The key activity
is one that has been weeks (though it feels like months) in the waiting.
On the
fourteenth of November we moved our furniture into storage and became
temporarily housed with our daughter Natasha. Between that time and the end of
our first week in Sweden, we traveled up to Utah where, after a night’s
stay in St. George, we stayed a few days with our son, Darvil’s family in
Ogden, my daughter, Cassandra’s family in Provo, our Mission Training Center
housing, also in Provo, then back to Darvil’s house for the weekend (to see our
newborn granddaughter) then back to the MTC for more training, back to
Cassandra’s to prep for flying to Natasha’s home ( to see our newborn
grandson) before our departure to Sweden. That’s thirty-five days living out
of suitcases.
For me, the lifestyle of packing and repacking, adjusting possessions from one bag to another depending on what was going to be needed the next day; trying, but mostly failing to recall which bag I had most recently stored a particular item was close to delivering a very unhinged Äldste Hurlbut into the mission field. But, I do not doubt that this prolonged time of not having any home of our own, was calculated by some celestial clockwork to provide the necessary catalyst to nudge us in to embracing this new home in a foreign land more readily than otherwise.
Home Swede
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