ONE YEAR MARK

August 18, 2014

Elder Wilson - 1 Year Finished

Hey! So yes it's true, I hit my one year mark this week! Pretty crazy. I don't really know how to feel about it. I feel like the mission is all kind of a time capsule. Sometimes I feel like it's gone by insanely fast and I haven't even been gone long at all but it also feels, at other times, like that was a whole different life so it's way weird. 2 Years is a pretty long time, but it's all on the downhill slope now haha. We had a great week last week with elder Stephenson's interim training and all that good stuff. We went down to Espoo on Sunday night and met up with some elders that gave us some transportation cards so that we could use the buses and stuff and we went over to the elders apartment that we would be staying with and it was way fun! I was surprised when I got there, my former companion elder Wood was there at the apartment and he spent the night there on Sunday night as well because they had some district activity the next day so it was way fun. I got to talk to him for a while and we all hung out and played some beach volley ball in the morning so it was sweet! I hadn't seen him since I left Seinäjoki like six months ago so that's always fun to see old buddies around the mission. So anyway we had interim training on Monday and Tuesday and that was all at the mission home with president and sister Watson. It was way good, they talked about a lot of the doctrine behind different parts of missionary work such as finding or teaching skills or whatever and we did role plays and stuff like that. So it was pretty fun to get to know President Watson a little better and be with a bunch of other missionaries. Then Wednesday the new missionaries had a language shool thing and all the trainers had a language school as well but it was more like, how to teach the new guys better and how much to correct them and stuff like that, so it was good. So after language school we all got to go to the Temple!! It was super sweet! It was my second time going through the Finland temple, but man it was so cool. It is an awesome temple and insanely beautiful on the inside especially. It was way nice to just be able to relax and enjoy the temple for a day. After the temple we just headed back to Turku. The rest of the week we were busy with just normal stuff, we had some planning and district meeting and all sorts of stuff. On Saturday we did some service for the family that we helped move a couple weeks ago. They are doing a full refurbishing of the new house so we were tearing out floor boards and helping them mix concrete and fix a bunch of stuff so that was way good. They are a super cool family, they have six kids and this super adorable little baby who is fearless and breaks free from his mom and runs and jumps into piles of installation in the floors without floor boards and does crazy stuff like that all the time so we had to watch him closely hahaha Then yesterday we had a great day at church. We had a ward conference actually, so the stake presidency was there and there were some way good talks and everyone enjoyed it. I translated in Priesthood for a couple members that don't speak finnish and the stake preasident did the whole lesson and it was super cool, all about how dads can be better dads and how to strengthen families and stuff like that. After church we went over to a members house for dinner and it was way fun. They have a son that is like 23 and is super cool, we hang with him a lot and he goes to lessons and stuff with us and he's actually getting married to some girl from Utah next spring, she's coming to Finland in like a month to visit and stuff and then they will move back to America when they get married. They're a way cool family though, I was talking to the dad for awhile about my sweet 2010 Ford GT Mustang and all that good stuff. He's pretty in to cars and motorcycles so I was telling him about dad's Jaguar and he was like, he sounds like a good person to meet sometime haha so I think we have a place to eat dinner when we all come visit Finland together. Well that's about it for last week. This week we just have all the normal stuff going on and then on Thusday (my one year mark) I'm doing splits with elder Ahlquist (who is from my mtc group) and we're going to celebrate our one year day together! Well I love you all! Have a great week!