Week 35: How to Cope with Constant Moving

May 31, 2020

Week 35: How to Cope with Constant Moving

The Odense trio (From left to right: Ældste Leland, Ældste Jensen, Ældste Moore) 😎🤠🤓

Dear family and friends. I moved once again this week - the fourth time in about a month. I expected to go insane with the amount of times that I jumped around from island to island (kinda like island hopping back in Hawaii, if you know what I mean). To the contrary, I actually became so numb from all the packing, leaving, re-packing, and re-leaving that I no longer cared where I would be sent. The sequence I experienced went from Sjællend to Falster to Sjælland to Falster to Fyn. What a fun ride, ikke? Also, just to add to all the craziness, I was put in a trio with Ældste Jensen, my MTC comp, and Ældste Leland, the man I heard so much about from ZL Brown. My mission literally began as I jokingly guessed from the beginning - with a sandwich. I named it the "Jensen-Ogden-Brown-Ogden-Jensen Slider". If you haven't had the opportunity to taste it, I would strongly recommend it. ;)

Okay, here's some important pretext before I hop in to this email too quickly. I will be referring to the Danish Online Mission as the DOM from here on out because I'm too lazy to type it all out every time. The DOM is having some success in unanticipated, unexpected ways. We've been able to reach out to members that we didn't know too well and call extended family members and close friends from home. It's been a lot easier to set up appointments with friends and members. This week, we called Frank & Charlotte, Gitte, and Rehné to share Easter scriptures and traditions. It was nice to see their faces again after being unable to for quite some time. We also rang to many members in the ward: familien Nørrung, familien Andersen, familien Larsen, familien Kjeldsen, Inge, Lotte, Maria, Natasja, Charlotte, Michael, Egon, and Helle. Ældste Østergaard was also with us during many of these calls. All of them included some sort of Easter message, except for Natasja's because we attempted an "online split" (going through someone's friend list on Facebook and picking three people who could be interested at some point). A few of them also included painful goodbyes, but I'll be coming back to Roskilde someday for sure. That's a promise. I posted a short testimony in the Roskilde menighed group and greatly appreciated the floods of messages wishing me the best in Odense and beyond. I will forever cherish my time in Roskilde.

A lot more sports have been played in the recent days. That has also come with extra exercising. We found a basketball court to shoot hoops and a nice park with parkour equipment to work different muscle groups. We really enjoyed flipping massive tires, throwing long ropes, climbing on monkey bars, and using multiple types of workout machines. I continued doing the famous hitting of tennis balls against walls. With regards to tennis, I discovered that brick is best for practicing aiming and driving. Concrete is best for practicing serving and slicing. Thought you tennis players would like to know in case the courts are closed for y'all as well. I'm proud to announce that my shooting skills weren't as rusty as I expected them to be. I really missed basketball so much. The last time I played a game was about 6 months ago, so that was a sweet reunion. We ran more laps as well and I set the Nykøbing record with 33 laps in 20 minutes (each lap was about 158 meters, according to Google Maps, so I ran around 5.2 kilometers in that time frame). I felt like throwing up after cause it had been a while since I ran that pace. It's funny to say that it was painful and relieving at the same time.

Back to the business side of things, we had another district meeting and zone conference. The DOM also had a mini "music and the spoken word" devotional on Easter Sunday. Episodes of DIME news continued to air to keep spirits up. The Nykøbing four man was called upon to make a commercial for the upcoming edition streaming live to all missionaries in the DOM this evening. We appreciated daily video chats from leaders of our ward who shared spiritual thoughts with us. I wanted to share some points that Amber shared with us one day for her weekly spiritual thought. It had to do with the unexpected events that happened in the last week of the Savior's life. She listed that he (1) left Lazarus to die and came later to revive him, (2) came into the city riding a donkey, (3) washed each of the apostles' feet, (4) wore a crown of thorns on the cross, and (5) was resurrected and visited his apostles. As shown in these points, Christ often works in unexpected ways. He is now with the DOM! He is helping us find ways to reach out to those at home and those who may not be contacted as much in our areas. The good news is that many things we are learning about technology will be applied after the quarantine is lifted. Combining our original ideas and new ideas together doesn't sound half bad after all.

I hope everyone reading this knows that God loves you. He is watching out for you. I wish you all the best. Know that I'm praying for you.

Jeg elsker jer højt,

Ældste Moore

P.S. Happy belated birthday to Mollie!! Hope you had a wonderful day celebrating your glorious entrance into teenhood!!