SUV and Institute

Each week on Tuesday evening we have a combined gathering consisting of a light dinner, Institute, and then Family Home Evening which includes a spiritual thought and activity.  Our group is relatively small, with approximately 16 young adults, and several of those are missionaries working with both investigators and new members in the area.

The young woman holding the baby is our regular Institute teacher, Steffi, who is Norwegian, and teaches in Danish.  Her husband often comes along and helps with the baby, and anything else needed.  Elder Parker and I teach a small, second Institute class at the same time in English, as we have a few students who do not speak Danish.  This has been a wonderful experience!  The young people we teach are very new members of the church and have so many questions about the gospel that it is a delight to help them learn.  We are studying Doctrine and Covenants this year which I love, because we learn Church History along with it.

Last night we were able to drive to a city named Horsens where we met with the Institute and SUV leaders there, attended their class, had dinner, and then FHE.  It was so fun to participate in their program, which functions quite like our own in Aarhus.  One of their students, Marcus, has just received a mission call to Provo, UT so we had a great time telling him about all the wonderful things happening in Utah as far as missionary work goes.  Many Danish missionaries are called to England or Greece or the Swiss Alpine missions, so Provo is very unique!  By the time we finished with him, I believe he felt he was in for a really wonderful Utah experience.

The young adult members of the Church are scattered over quite a large geographic area in our Stake, some cities having only a couple of active members.  It is really a challenge for many of them to be active in the Church and its programs.  The couple of SUV groups functioning have quite a wide range of ages from 18-30, and there are not many church members for the young people to date, if any at all.  Yet there are some very strong and faithful families, who are often the backbone of the Church here in Denmark, and some wonderful young people going forth to serve missions. 

One of our favorite things to do on our mission is to assist the young missionaries with the teaching of investigators and also new members.  Denmark is a "hard" mission, and not as many lessons are taught as the missionaries would like, but the work of the Lord is still going forward. We helped the sister missionaries teach tonight in our apartment about Lehi's Dream to a young man who says he does not believe in God, but who keeps coming to our activities.  He has been meeting with the missionaries for several weeks.  One never knows when something might just click!