Juhannus

June 16, 2014

The Last Zone Conference with President and Sister Rawlings

Hello! 
Well I hope Dad had an awesome Fathers Day! I'm so dissappointed that I wasn't able to be there with everyone! It sounds like you all had a great time though and Dad you are the greatest father in the world and I love you! Well, I didn't have nearly as much fun as you guys I'm sure, but I had a pretty good week here in Finland! It's super weird I haven't seen night time in a super long time haha it's literally sunny all the time and I love it! It's just beautiful and bright and clear every single day all day long and it just makes you happy and it's awesome. This week we have the longest day of the year and it's a huge holiday here called Juhannus and the sun literally doesn't go down all day long! It's going to be sweet most finns celebrate by grilling makara (finnish sausage) and hanging out at their mökki which is like a little summer cottage thing in the woods and pretty much every single finn has one so were hoping that some member will invite us out to their mökki to feast with them. Juhannus will be awesome were doing splits that day with the other Turku elders and so we will take pictures of the sun out at midnight and all that fun stuff and that's also the day of change calls, so it will be exciting! The only downside to juhannus is that it means that the days will get gradually shorter and shorter until it plunges in to the black whole of winter once again, but I will try not to think about that too much. Well, this week was pretty hectic, we went up to Tampere on Wednesday because we had zone conference on Thursday. So, we had a zone conference that lasted like 9 hours and was way long and brutal, but it was President Rawling's last one so it was way cool. At the end the departing missionaries testified and the president and sister Rawlings testified and it was awesome. President Rawlings has worked extremely hard out here and deserves a nice rest, but he is pretty torn up that he's leaving. So, after zone conference I had my 8 month in the country language school thing which is the last language school you do out in the field, so it was just our zone language coordinator guy and me and 3 other people from the zone that were all in the MTC with me and we just did a little review on some stuff and talked about language study plans and stuff like that. So, the next day we headed back to Turku and elder Heaney (who is one of the APs) came with us to do splits with us on Friday and that was way fun! He's a cool guy and is going to be living with elder Jefferies at BYU in the fall so that's pretty funny. So, Friday we just played basketball as always (we play every monday and friday) and we had our member that we recently reactivated there (and yes mom he's still be coming to church every week) and some other members so it was a ton of fun. After basketball we had a lesson with a recent convert girl at the church and we all made pulla which is this delicious finnish dessert that is kind of like cinnamon rolls but it is SO good. Elder Jeffereies has a recipe for it so we all made some pulla and did a little lesson and it was way fun! Then on Saturday we had an awesome day because the sisters from the other Turku ward had a baptism so we all went to that! The girl that got baptized is an 18 year old girl and is incredible! Her dad is a member, but has been less active most of his life and married a non member lady so the daughter just never got baptized, but recently the dad started coming back to church and the daughter started coming too and she decided to get baptized so it was an awesome day! Well that was pretty much all the excitement from the week. Overall a very good week! This week should be tons of fun. Well, I love you all so much! Hope you guys have a good Juhannus there in some American way!

Springtime in Finland