Meeting President Watson

July 7, 2014

Elder Wilson and his new companion Elder Stephenson

Hello! Well it sounds like you guys had an awesome 4th of July with the family! I'm jealous I couldn't be there to see all the sweet fireworks and whatnot! We had a little celebration of our own but it was just us 4 elders and our buddy M from the ward here who is like 18 and we just all chilled at this little outdoor pavilion thing right outside of the other elders apartment and we bought tons of sausages and went all out with american chips and root beer and stuff and just had tons of food and we just all sat around and talked about how awesome America is. So, it was pretty fun I had a good time! I’ll include a few pictures of our sweet little grill and stuff haha. But, earlier in the week we had tons of fun too! Last Monday we went up to this place on the ocean with a little pavilion and grill and stuff and did pretty much the exact same thing with all the YSAs of both Turku wards, we threw a frisbee around and just ate food and all that good stuff which was way fun! A bunch of the youth are all leaving for the army and missions soon so it was our last activity all together which was way sad, but it’s cool to see all these kids moving on to the next phase of life and getting ready to go on missions and stuff like that. Our good friend in our ward here that always comes out with us to lessons and stuff actually left for the army this morning so that was pretty sad. But, we still have awesome members here and everything is going well. On Wednesday we woke up early and went off to Tampere for our big zone meeting to meet President Watson! It was awesome! President Watson is an amazing guy and him and his wife are super super nice. President Watson served his mission in Finland and then went home, got married and all that and then worked as a nurse for a while and then got in to medical business like he worked for some medical insurance company and found the best doctors for people to go to and stuff like that. So pretty cool that he worked in the medical field, I can't wait to get to know him better and tell him that's what I would like to do as well. He said that he has forgotten most of his Finnish, but has been studying hard and I’m sure he’ll be way good at Finnish really soon. 

Oh, I found out some exciting news this week, I found out that they have buttermilk in Finland so I'm going to make some of Dad's famous pancakes this week! I'm way excited! The buttermilk here is called piimä and they just drink it as a normal drink, I’ve always heard people talk about how nasty it is so I never tried it and so I never knew that it was just buttermilk haha. But also I made some american pancakes for a couple cool guys in the ward here this week with just a normal store bought mix but they thought it was delicious! They wouldn't believe me when I told them we put butter on the pancakes but I convinced them to try it and they loved it! Well in addition to all the fun stuff we had a way good lesson with our investigator about the plan of salvation and a member came along which was way good. The member has studied a lot of French and our investigator's mother tongue is French so it was cool they talked a little bit in French together. Our investigator just has a tough situation since he owns and runs a little restaurant by himself, he has nobody that can cover it for him on Sundays so that he can come to church so we're trying to figure out what to do about that. We also got in contact with a few less active guys this week who I have been trying to get in contact with for a long time so that was way good! Hopefully we're able to keep meeting with them regularly. Well yesterday we had an awesome Sunday! We had our normal fast sunday, went to church and all that and then in the middle of church this family asked if we could come over to there place right after church to eat with them and they had some relative that would be there that is a non member so we went over there and it was great! The relative isn’t super interested to learn about the church, but she was very nice and participated in the spiritual thought and everything like that so it was a ton of fun! Well that is pretty much it for the week! I love you all! Have a great week!