Wonderful Members in Turku

Finnish 7 layer bean dip

Big city of Turku

Turku Chapel

Hello everyone! Well I had another awesome week here in Turku! Man this city is super cool, I am loving it here! I have gained such an appreciation for the ward members and their missionary efforts here they are super good examples to me and just very dedicated. Well this week was more of just trying to find new investigators. By far the hardest part of missionary work, but we have nobody to teach so that's what we have to do all day haha. It is rough but we're starting to see a little bit of success. We gave out three Book of Mormons and have an appointment to give another guy a Book of Mormon in Turkish! so I think that little by little we'll start picking up investigators here and there and start building up this area big time! It has a ton of potential so I think by the end of the change it will be super productive. Well on Wednesday we had a district meeting and then went out to eat together because it was one elder's birthday. Then every wednesday we have a little meeting with our Ward Mission Leader and so we did that and he's a way cool guy! But ya mom you asked if we see the other misisonaries a lot, ya we see them at basketball and church and district meetings and stuff so like almost every day we see other missionaries haha it's super different than up north. We also do family nights here, all the YSAs from both wards come to the chapel every monday and we do a lesson and have food and stuff so it's super fun and they bring friends sometimes so all the missionaries go to that. So all that kind of stuff is way different here but in a good way! There's so many things we can invite investigators to and there's so many ways the members can do missionary work too! All the young men in our ward are super cool, they are all planning on doing their year of army as soon as possible and then going on a mission right after. Finns are very hard to convert or convince of anything but when they are already members they are super solid and very motivated. Well we didn't do anything super exciting this week, just kind of hard work finding people but we had a realy good Sunday yesterday! The sisters had an investigators in church and Elder Anderson and I taught the gospel principles class so she was in there. She's like a 22 year old girl from England. We taught a lesson about the Holy Ghost and how his promptings are usually very subtle and we don't ever notice the impact he has until later on in life. Towards the end of the lesson she made a comment and told us that when she decided to come to Finland for college she just like had a strong feeling that she should come here and so she got on an internet chat thing and the first people she started talking to that live in Finland happened to be members of the church. They were her host family when she first came to Finland and she was like "I'm starting to think that the Holy Ghost led me to Finland to find out about all this stuff" It was way cool! So then after church we went over to a members house to eat and they have a 16 year old daughter and 14 year old son and they were way nice and we all ate and had a super good spiritual thought/discussion and they started asking us about how they could do member missionary work better. We suggested that they write their testimonies in book of mormons that we could give out to people. In response they gave us 8 book of mormons that they had already written their testimonies in haha it was super cool. Then at the end the mom invited us to come back again next Sunday and they are going to invite their neighbor to come as well who they have been wanting to give a Book of Mormon! It was awesome and the first time a member has actually done something like that that I have seen! We are super excited for that. Well that's pretty much the week! I love you all and miss you! Näkemiin!

Gorgeous City