Shall We Hit the Road Running?

By Phillip

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.

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