Nokkrar trúboðamyndir í viðbót (Just a few additional missionary pictures)

I have just received the following three pictures from former missionaries and an Icelandic member or two who went through their photo albums for me. In this entry I thought it would be fun to name all the people. So in this first one from a 1980 zone conference in Iceland we have on the top from left to right: Bret Leifson, Court Skabelund and Mike DeYoung. On the middle row L-R: Danish AP, Curt Hutchings, Orell Anderson, Kevin Barton, Ted Davis, another Danish AP and President Jensen from Denmark. Bottom row L-R: Grant Grow, Arthur Hansen, Bob Farris and Bryan Beck. Bryan is one of only two missionaries (of the 163) who has passed away since the mission opened in 1975. He died of cancer some time ago. The other who died was David Chadwell, who I taught in the MTC, who also died some time ago a few years after he was married.

This next picture was taken in early 1993. On the top from L-R: Danish AP, Chris Smith, Eric Ball, Mark Patey, Andre Geurts, Thomas Eastmond, Joe Staker. On the bottom L-R: Ben Johnson, Kristján Mathieson, Phillip Papenfuss and Nathan Taylor.

This last one I really like. It is from May 1980. From left to right on a great day of baptisms in Iceland: Snorri Einhversson (ha ha), Bryan Beck, Jóhann Karlsson, Gerhard Guðnason, three Icelandic girls, the little one named Halla, Bret Leifson and Ýrr Bertelsdóttir, the mother of Halla. I remember Snorri, Jóhann, Gerhard and Ýrr from my mission from 1984 to 1986. All together, a good looking bunch of Icelanders and faithful servants.

Helmingur Trúboðanna (Half of the missionaries)

I have been gathering a collection of photos over the last 3 or 4 years of all the missionaries who have ever served in Iceland as Mormon missionaries. There have been 161 of the young missionaries to have served thus far since 1975. I have at least one photo of all but 13 of them. Still working on getting at least one of these elusive thirteen.

Here is a collection of 14 pictures which include about half of all those who have served.

1975-1989






















1976-1980























1979-1982

1983-1985

1984-1987

1988-1990















1989-1992

1990-1993

1993-1996
1999-2005

2000-2004












2003-2005

2004-2007

2006-2009

Nýjar upplýsingar um jarðskjálftann (New Information about the Earthquake)

The earthquake in China was an 8.0 on the Richter scale. The epicenter was in Sichuan Province. About 90 kilometers away is a city called Du Jiang Yan. I girl at BYU sent me a few pictures of the damage to her family's home today in Du Jiang Yan. It had been condemned and will need to be rebuilt. Many families there are living in tents at the edge of the city. The following is a portion of an email I received from this girl in my office at BYU, "My hometown Du Jiang Yan is only 92 kilometers away from the center of the earthquake; therefore, my hometown is one of the cities that has been damaged most severely. Over 4000 people died in my hometown alone and 80% of the households are so seriously ruined that they need to be demolished."

In contrast, the earthquake in Iceland was not as strong--in the 6.0 category--and did not kill anyone thankfully. But there was still a lot of damage. I just received a few pictures of the Nóatun grocery store showing some of the damage there. Lots of things thrown off of shelves and broken glass.

I wrote to the current senior couple who are serving in Iceland right now and they wrote me back the following about the members who were in that area: "Most of the damage was in Hveragerði and some in Selfoss. In Selfoss, Barður had some glass things break, they were able to clean up the damage. No one was injured. Johan and Þorstina seemed to have a good deal of damage in their home. Things fell off the walls, much internal damage. In fact Johan said that his walls weren´t at right angles anymore. They are not cleaning up because insurance needs to come and take pictures. They also had a trip to Paris planned and will leave on Tuesday for a week. When they return, many have offered to come and help them clean up. Sveinbgörg had many things fall out of her cupboards. She said she has 4 plates left out of a servive for 12 china and everyday ware. Her children have been very good to come and help her clean up things in her home. She said after the earthquake they were told to stay out of their homes. She said she had walked up and down the street for as long as she could and then she went into her garden to work. She said she was kneeling to work in her flowers and for about 20 minutes while working, the earth just kept moving around. She mentioned that she has felt many after shocks, as have many of the people in Selfoss and Hveragerði. Valla said they just had a few trinckets that were broken. Margret Annie did not report any damage either, but she was further away from the center of the earthquake. Greta was in Spain at the time with the kids. There was minor damage to the road from Hveragerði to Selfoss, a couple of new bumps and one small crack across the road. We have felt no aftershocks in the Reykjavik area. We were very blessed that there were very few injuries, and nothing serious. Since it was a good day in Iceland, some school children were outdoors playing and a ceiling came down in their school. Also some men digging ditches took a late break and so they were away from their machinery when the quake occured. All is well with us here. We are happy to report that everyone is safe and many of the messes have been cleaned up and now they are back to their regular lives. We will send more reports if anything major occurs."

Sigh of relief....

Jarðskjálfti (Earthquake)

Not knowing more about the causes of earthquakes than that the tectonic plates are involved as they move, I used to think it was strange when I would hear about an earthquake occuring in Iceland like it did last week. I thought it was strange because the plates are pulling apart in Iceland, not coming together and colliding. That is why when you go to the visitor's center at Thingvellir in Iceland, there is a display there which shows how much the land has separated in the last 1000 years. I saw that back in 2004 and was reminded again how unique Iceland was as a landmass.

I searched the internet today looking for a unique picture which showed what the earthquake had been like in Iceland last week. I found this seismograph image which is said to be showing the "P wave and the surface waves." I don't remember enough from my college geology class to remember exactly what those were, but it is easy to see that some serious movement was going on. All news reports say that the damage will be expensive to repair, but no one was seriously injured.

As missionaries in Iceland, every one of us used to wish for some kind of cataclysmic event there to help people realize they needed God. I suppose we didn't really want people to suffer much of what that type of event would bring, but something Elijah-esque would be okay. A famine, bank and money problems, an earthquake or two, with a volcano eruption in a populated area thrown in for good measure. Oh, wait. All of these things have happened in Iceland, if not during this last 12 months alone, then we can go back to the volcano that covered a good part of Heimaey of the Westmann Islands back in the 70's. And okay, the famines were not that recent, but some serious suffering was going on in those days.

But even when those things do happen, the missionaries continue to move along, working as hard as they know how, and continue to find just the one here and two there who can sense the gift they are being offered. The key then, I suppose, is to try to avoid having to receive a "shaking" from God in the spiritual sense by trying to sense the gifts that are right in front of us.

He exists. He loves us. He has ALWAYS given his truth through his Son, in person, to prophets who then go forward with authority to preach the purest Word. We can know him today and hope to avoid a spiritual shaking. As Nephi was commanded in the Book of Mormon in 1 Nephi 17:53 "And it came to pass that the Lord said unto me: Stretch forth thine hand again unto thy brethren, and they shall not wither before thee, but I will shock them, saith the Lord, and this will I do, that they may know that I am the Lord their God."

Trúboðaskór (Missionary shoes)

Back in 1984 when I went into the MTC, I remember thinking how cool my missionary shoes were. I thought they would last forever they seemed to be so well built. This picture shows pretty much what they looked like at the beginning of my mission. The sole was about 3/4 of an inch thick (it seemed) and looked like it could last even through an entire two-year mission in Iceland. I ended up being mostly right. They did last my whole mission and I could have worn them home. The missionaries of my day had a tradition though. Sometime in the last week or two of our time in Iceland we would take the bus down to one of the nearby rocky beaches with two pairs of shoes. We would wear our old worn out shoes to the beach and then change into the pair we would go home in once we had arrived at the beach. Then after a bit of nostalgia-filled expressions of shoe appreciation, we would tie the shoelaces together of the faithful pair and chuck them out into the ocean.

We thought doing so was an appropriate rite of passage, one that all missionaries there should go through. Maybe I would not do the same thing today, being the environmentally conscious fellow that I am now, but there was something very satisfying about sending those shoes to the cold Icelandic depths. In a way it was tangible evidence that we would soon be able to leave the cold behind and rejoin lives that were somewhat distantly remembered by that time but were dearly missed. It was also a physical act that allowed each of us to symbolically and in reality leave the pain and hardship of the past two years and start another life, one that focused a bit more on each of us as individuals after two years of the opposite. I remember the beach being very rocky that day, as most Icelandic beaches are, and the water and constant wind very cold.

I wonder where those shoes are today 22 years later....

Næðingur frá fortíðinni (Blast from the past)

Okay, so the translation leaves something to be desired. The one disadvantage of not having Icelandic be my native language is that when I want to translate a unique English colloquialism like this one, doing so ends up proving quite difficult. The Icelandic-English dictionaries out today are better than we ever had on my mission. They provide tons of common phrases using many of the individual words in the dictionary. This helps a lot when we are trying to know the proper ways to express these unique phrases. I am happy to know though that even advanced speakers of their second language often do not understand these unique phrases which do not translate word-for-word.

I got a very cool picture in an email today from a returned missionary who served in Iceland named Rob Mikkelsen. He was there from 1976-























1978, about seven years before me. I've attached it here. This is a picture of Gerhard Guðnason the day he was baptized in the summer of 1978. He has German and Icelandic roots. The missionaries in the picture from left to right are Doug Brinton, Jerry Ohrn, (Gerhard), Rob Mikkelsen, David Knechtel and Kevin Barton. I don't know the whole story behind Gerhard's conversion to the Church back then, but I know that every one of these missionaries was very happy that day. They are even happier today because 30 years later, Gerhard is still active. I saw and spoke with him two months ago on my trip and he is doing well. It is people like Gerhard who help to keep things stable in the Church in a land, like so many others, where people come and go spiritually. Golden for these missionaries and all who have known him since.

Eldur og ís (Fire and Ice)

As missionaries in Reykjavík we frequently found ourselves downtown on the Torg for a number of reasons. The woolen outlets were easy to find, each attempting to draw in as many tourists as possible. We'd browse on occasion to see what was being sold. Without fail there were the tourist books which frequently had titles like, "Iceland: Land of Fire and Ice" or something very similar. I guess it was what made Iceland unique in a lot of ways. You could find glaciers right on top of volcanos.

It isn't hard to imagine the cataclysm that must have occurred to make the rocks look as they do in this first picture. Broken lava flows are everywhere in Iceland, frequently with a freezing river running around each twisted mass of rocks.

It was sometime during my mission that I started to think about the earth, and land in particular, in a different way than I ever had before. The way each land on the earth looked was interesting and varied, to be sure. But the real reason that the earth has any land masses on it at all is so that man will have a place upon which to work out his salvation. Whether a person's "plot" of earth is in Iceland, Utah, Cypress, Banff Island, or anywhere else in the world, the Lord gave the land so that each person could have a place to work out his or her salvation. In Noah's day all of the land was taken away for a time so that those left would remember their God. "Behold, the Lord hath created the earth that it should be inhabited; and he hath created his children that they should possess it." 1 Nephi 17:36.

Iceland provides a unique set of trials for those attempting to come to God. The trials are different there than for those who live, say, in Hawaii, or Australia. And yet, each land gives the same opportunities to know one's God. I found it easy to get to know God better in Iceland.

Skeljar (sea shells)

I don't recall ever seeing seashells while I was a missionary in Iceland back in the mid eighties. I went to the beach with my companions a few times, but it was never to get in the water, of course. We weren't supposed to get into the water. It was too cold anyway, so that was okay. But then in 2004 when I went the second time to Iceland, I spent a little time walking along the shores of the Westmann Islands off the southern coast of Iceland. The main island isn't that big so there weren't a whole lot of places to stop and see the sea, so to speak. One of the beaches had a bunch of little shells strewn all over it like in this picture. I got this picture from a missionary couple who lived in Reykjavík there in 2006 and took the picture sometime while serving there for 18 months. I don't know what beach it was from though. To me it looks just like the one I walked along when I was there in 2004.

I spent part of my early years growing up in Florida. We would go to the beaches on occasion and see lots of different kinds of shells. But they were never like these. If you look closely at these, you will notice that most look "thick". I brought a few home and added them to the aquariums I had who's occupants lived in much warmer waters than these shells came from. It made sense to me that these shells would have to be thicker in Icelandic waters to keep out the cold when compared to the Florida water shells which often seemed so delicate and thin.

After having collected a number of these shells to take home, I began to think of how similar most Icelanders had been to these shells. Most had a pretty thick shell and were trying to keep warm in a land that had been cold spiritually for a very long time. Trying to break through those shells was hard when the people had spent so much time growing them so thickly. But on occasion, one or more would come out of their shells on their own and gladly feed on the spiritual food that was being provided. Those were the people and the experiences which kept us warm as missionaries as well.

Svipuól (Whiplash)

Whiplash. For every missionary who serves in a country which is not their own, there comes a time when you feel like you've lived in that country for a very long time. I got sent up to a little town called Akureyri in the north of Iceland when I had been on my mission for over a year and a half. I only had five or so months left when I got there before I would be required to go back to the deserts of southern Utah. I had begun to feel that my life before my time in Iceland had been a very long time before. The Icelandic language was comfortable to me. The way the Icelanders lived and the things they believed had become relatively clear to me. I knew what soccer teams were their favorites and how they felt they fit into the international big picture. I had spent a good portion of every day speaking a language that, just 18 months before, I had not even heard of.

When I arrived in Akureyri, everything was very similar to what I had experienced in Reykjavík. The mountains across the fjord looked similar to the mountains back in Reykjavík. There was snow all around. The people spoke Icelandic in the same way with no change in accent. It was a small town comparatively, so things felt a bit more laid back. But all in all moving from Reykjavík to Akureyri wasn't as big a change as I had been thinking it might be.

I began working with Elder Miller, the missionary in the back of this picture on the left. He was a hard worker and wanted to be a good missionary. We worked hard together in the beginning of a mild winter there at the end of 1985. Not too long later, Elder Miller went back to Reykjavík and I stayed in Akureyri and was put with Elder Holt. We got along fine and tried to work hard in a town with no members, no real investigating non-members and no place to meet on Sundays except our apartment. Before long Elder Holt and I had a routine down and were systematically going through the city to find any who might be interested in our message of restoration.

One day Elder Holt and I were in a grocery store downtown just picking up some things we needed before going back to our apartment late one afternoon. I had already gone through the line and was waiting for Elder Holt. All at once I noticed a dark-haired, dark-skinned woman looking back and forth at me and then at my companion. She quickly decided to approach me and asked in English if we were Mormon missionaries. I was very surprised since we were in an out-of-the-way town with no members. The woman told me that she was a member of our Church, originally from Argentina, but now living with her husband in Canada. The two of them were just visiting their family in the area. That suprised me too, because in those days in the mid 80's there were very few foreigners living in Iceland, let alone in Akureyri in the middle of nowhere. The woman went on to tell me that her husband's family lived across the fjord and ran a chicken farm! I was blown away. I was so deeply immersed in the Icelandic culture, language, land and people that I was feeling a bit of whiplash mentally and culturally.

Before we left the store, the woman had invited us to dinner at the brother's home across the fjord in a few days. We of course accepted. They came around the fjord and picked us up by car. When we got there we were introduced to the whole family. None spoke English or Icelandic except the brother who owned the farm. He spoke a bit of broken Icelandic. Their aged mother lived with them and had talked to missionaries like us years before and had even accepted a Book of Mormon once and read it. Trying to communicated during dinner and afterwards was very difficult. I had always up to that point been able to switch from English into Icelandic for the last 18 months when I had trouble communicating with someone. But now neither English or Icelandic helped. And myyears of Spanish during junior high and high school weren't coming back to me. Cultural whiplash big time.

The dinner was superb but completely different than anything I had eaten my whole mission. After dinner they had us go with them into their living room where they proceeded to get out the guitars. I didn't have any idea up to that point how extreme the cultural whiplash was going to get. These folks knew their guitars! They began to play and quickly I realized that these were no amateurs. After playing a bit (with our mouths wide open) they shared their secret that, on weekends they performed in restaurants and hotels all over Iceland. They raised chickens AND were professional musicians. Their music gave me chills. All the events of that entire evening were so other-worldly compared to the last 18 months that Elder Holt and I were quite overwhelmed with the differences. We had never heard Icelanders be very musical on the whole, but these Argentines were pros. It took us days to stop thinking so much about it afterwards. We reimmersed ourselves fully back into the Icelandic culture all around us. We stopped trying to remember our high school Spanish and went back to trying to memorize ten new Icelandic words every day before we went out to find people to teach. A wonderfully unsettling time at the end of 1985. No matter how many languages or cultures a person becomes to know well, there will always be thousands that are nearly completely unknown to us. God did not intend that our sphere of influence cover all people in all cultures. But we do have a sphere of influence, some of us in more than one culture. What are we doing with our influence?

Myndir, myndir, myndir (Pictures, pictures, pictures)

Pictures, pictures, pictures. As part of my attempt to catalog and organize all the pictures and information I have been getting from the current mission couple--the Wohlgemuths--in Iceland, I have started to organize a collection of photos (of people mostly) from all periods of the history of the LDS missionary work in Iceland. I am getting photos from all eras, but have a lot of years where the photos are few and far between. Any photos you want to send me of people in the Church or associated with the Church would be appreciated. The photo I have added here is of me on the far left and then Víðir Óskarsson and Klara Gunnarsdóttir. They were married not too long before I arrived in Iceland in 1984. Klara's first husband was named Páll and was in the Branch Presidency in the early 80's. On a hiking expedition he and another member fell from the side of the mountain they were hiking on and died. These two then married and are now living in Selfoss, about an hour's drive from Reykjavík. This picture was taken in 1986 in their home that was then on the Westmann Islands off the southern coast of Iceland. The Westmann Islands is the site of the first group of large numbers of conversions from the early 1850's through the 1890's. Missionary work continued in Iceland from 1851 until about 1914 when WWII halted formal missionary work among the Icelanders until 1975.

Of all the places in Iceland I have visited, the tiny main island of the Westmann Islands called Heimaey is one of the most picturesque. I visited there right before the end of my mission in June of 1986 and then again a few years ago in September 2004. I'm in the process of converting a ton of my old mission slides to digital images (now that that is possible). The first photo above is from an old mission slide that was 20 years old. The one at right is from 2004. Its what you see when you come in on the ferry from the mainland on a two hour ferry ride. If you click on the picture and blow it up, you'll be able to see a little house on the mountain at the top left of the picture. Apparently there is a fellow who lives up there and takes care of the sheep that cling to the cliffs all around. The mountain goats in the U.S. would have a hard time keeping from falling into the sea here, but the Icelandic sheep seem to have no trouble. How would you like to live in that little house? I hope the fellow doesn't sleep-walk.

This one shows a large part of the only town in the whole set of islands. There is really only this one flat part that they could build on. Part of it was covered by a volcanic eruption back in 1973. But since then things have been quiet. The eruption partially closed off the habor entrance, but that ended up being a good thing because now the harbor is protected better from bad weather and the periodic ferocity of the ocean. We rented a car the morning we arrived (taking the 7 minute flight from the little airstrip within sight of the island) and caught this lady on her morning walk out of town. You leave town and most of what you see is just this yellow grass and cliffs. Quite a beautiful place to visit. Incidentally, the island has no fresh water supply, which, more than once in its history, nearly caused the residents to abandon it. Now their water is supplied by pipeline from the mainland the two or more miles it takes to get it there.

Right now there is only one couple living on Heimaey who are members of the Church. Their names are Óskar and Una. They have a bunch of kids at home. The kids' grandparents are on the island as well, so it ends up not being too bad for them there. Both Óskar and Una spend time off the island each week either working or going to school. Any members or missionaries who go there seek them out since they do not get a chance to be "sustained" through normal church attendance and/or home and visiting teaching. I am amazed they have stayed strong.