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The Norwegian Miracle
“What a tender mercy for the Lord to inspire a mission president to suddenly transfer the only Norwegian missionary on the African continent to the area where this dear sister lived and needed a Norwegian translator.”
When I was a mission president in South Africa in 2005, I felt a very strong prompting by the Spirit to move our Norwegian missionary, Elder Joseph Henriksen, all the way across the mission—in between normal transfer dates—to replace a missionary who needed to have surgery. I had just interviewed Elder Henriksen in Queenstown, a two-hour flight plus a two-hour drive away from Cape Town, and on the flight home the Spirit kept telling me that he was the one who needed to move into the Strand Branch and replace the elder needing surgery.
As soon as we returned to the mission home, I called Elder Henriksen and asked him to pack his bags. . . . We picked him up [the next day] and talked to him about his new area, where they hadn’t had a baptism for 18 months. I explained to Elder Henriksen that he was the one the Lord had selected to be there and to make a difference in that branch. We introduced him to his new companion, who drove him another hour to Strand, a beautiful beach area on the Atlantic Ocean, about 50 miles south of Cape Town.
The first week in his new area, Elder Henriksen was thumbing through the area book and found a referral that hadn’t been contacted in the seaside town of Hermanus, another hour south of Strand, but in their assigned area. There was a small branch in Hermanus with about twenty active members, but he and his companion were the closest missionaries. Not wanting to waste time, but feeling prompted to contact the referral, he and his companion looked up the addresses of all the members in Hermanus so they could visit them as well as contacting the referral. Then they set aside a day to visit Hermanus.
When that day came, Elder Henriksen and his companion taught a first lesson in the home they were referred to, then began visiting the members. They knocked on the door of a member lady who expressed great surprise at seeing elders at her door. “I didn’t think we had missionaries in Hermanus anymore!” she exclaimed. Then she told them it was the greatest day of her life. She had just received in the mail a 300-year history of her ancestors. She was excited to be able to do temple work for hundreds of family members who had gone on before. Then she told them that her only problem was that she couldn’t understand any of it because it was written in Norwegian.
Elder Henriksen looked at her, smiled and said, “I’m Norwegian!” What a tender mercy for the Lord to inspire a mission president to suddenly transfer the only Norwegian missionary on the African continent to the area where this dear sister lived and needed a Norwegian translator. While he served there, he was able to visit her once a week and complete the translation. This experience strengthened the faith of everyone involved.
But the story doesn’t stop there. Because of what Elder Henriksen saw and felt in Strand and Hermanus, he telephoned one morning and said, “President, if you will leave me here six months, I promise you we will have twenty baptisms in the Strand Branch!” I reminded him that they hadn’t had baptized anyone in that branch in a year and a half. But I felt inspired to leave him there for the six months. Well, he didn’t just baptize 20 people, he baptized 21 in just six months! The Strand Branch grew so fast that it soon became the Somerset West Ward in the Cape Town Stake with three sets of missionaries, and there were soon two full-time missionaries in Hermanus as well, where they had several baptisms in that small but growing branch. The Lord truly knows how to make sure the right person is in the right place at the right time.