Week 3

   

Hey mom!! So good to here from you and dad thank you both so much for the email I love P day because I get to here from you and actually respond! Everything has been great here this week has gone fast! My tailbone is much better now with my sweet seat cushions haha thank you so much! I stack them and use them both so its very comfortable now thank you! Everything is going great my shirts are looking nice and I cant think of anything that I really need right now I think everything is going well and for my next package I dont even know just any cookies of yours are good! We have tons of food in our apartment and I have enough tic tacs to last the millennium so I think Im good on that front haha but anything you send is GREATLY appreciated. I am so sad to hear all that about Brittanie I cant even imagine... that sounds crazy, but tell her that I hope shes feeling ok and I'm praying for her every day. By the way, I know the grammar in this email is terrible I have the keyboard on this computer set to finnish and I can't change it back hahaha so the english will be choppy, but I will type some finnish too! That is so crazy about Kollin Galland too that breaks my heart I hope him and his family will all be ok. Mom would you tell sister Moore thank you for me, she wrote me a dear elder it was super sweet of her so tell her I appreciate it so much!                          

I loved your quote this week mom I have one for you too.. When life gets to hard to stand, kneel.... I love that and I think it goes right along with what you were saying. Ive been learning a lot about the power of prayer here at the MTC in fact Im teaching about it tonight! Like I said last week we had our first TRC where we do a little spiritual message with some people that speak finnish and it was a little frightening at first but once I got in there it was so much fun! It was extremely difficult but I found that I understood them pretty well and when I'm teaching something it starts to flow pretty nicely. 

I've been learning tons of Finnish this week and its really nice to expand our vocabulary and grammar techniques but at the same time it makes you realize how difficult it is haha so it's a bit overwhelming at times, but were doing the best we can! We basically all just speak Finenglish all day every day (we just speak as much finnish as possible and throw in english words we dont know) but tomorrow we are doing our very first SYL day! We are going to speak finnish ALL DAY LONG it will be extremely vaikkea (hard) and Im sure some of us will be brought to tears by the end but Im so excited to just try it. I feel like I learn a lot when we SYL (we only speak finnish every lunch period) so I think it will be a great learning experience. Well I have realized that I am extremely blessed to be going to Finland at this time rather than even five years ago. Finnish has only been a written language for the past 100 years or so and since nobody really wants to learn finnish there's not really any text books on it but.... a few of our awesome teachers got together like a year ago and literally wrote an entire Finnish Grammar book that is AWESOME! (you get really excited about stupid stuff as a missionary) But we seriously all love this book, we call it the mahtava kirja (the awesome book) and our teacher, Veli Stewart, who got home like three years ago says that he believes it's probably the single best book for an english speaker to use to learn Finnish from scratch in the whole world! Its pretty amazing how quickly we are all learning and it is so rewarding when I read a verse of the Finnish Mormonin Kirja and understand the entire verse! One of my teachers, Veli Arneson, is seriously the coolest guy of all time. All of the elders in my district have a massive man crush on him haha he is like the coolest, nicest, smartest guy ever and he's a fantastic teacher! Well everything is still good with my companions and everything, we all get along great and have a ton of fun. We got in three new missionaries yesterday to our branch so we were all so pumped!! We got two Hungarians and one Estonian, they are all really nice and one of the Hungarians is from Ireland! I just feel bad for the estonian though, I cant imagine being the only person learning estonian for nine weeks haha but we are all happy to have some new faces and now our branch is up to 19! 

I haven't seen Chloes friend around anywhere, but we did get a bunch of new Russians and Ukrainians in yesterday so maybe shes here somewhere. I haven't seen Davey either so maybe he's on the main campus. Well this Sunnuntai (Sunday) was a great one. Every Sunday the Branch president just asks two missionaries to give short five minute talks in sacrament meeting like on the spot and he asked me to speak. So it was a little scary, but I got up there and I even told the story of dad giving me man lessons and everyone loved it! (works every time) So it went really well and then me and my companions taught the lesson in our district meeting and it went great! So I got a lot of teaching opportunities on Sunday, but it was an awesome day! We live in the apartments and play basketball on outdoor hoops over by that little creamery in Raintree. I feel like I'm losing weight but I am eating a ton! The food is great I'm just losing all my muscle mass hahaha, but overall another great week! I'll send some pictures now but I'll leave you with a little finnish testimony.

Minä tiedän että tämä kirkko on totta. Minä olen kiitollinen vanhemmatsta ja minun perheesta. Minä olen tunti pyha Henkeä ja minä tiedän että Jumal vastaa meitä roukouksia. Rakastan Teita!!! 

by the way, look up the word for (chapel) in finnish..... its insane its like 20 letters long hahaha I tried to say it in a lesson this week and just started laughing hahaha anyway I love you all!!!  

A few study materials

P-Day Go Texans!