October 13, 2014

Elder Bascom and Elder Wilson

Hey! Well how's it going? I'm super jealous that you all got to take a trip down to California! Way cool. And dad even trusted Indie with driving the boat, what the hey is going on over there?! Well thank you so much for all the pictures they were great! I was so pumped to see Max and Indie repping that UCLA blue! Tell Marcus to go to UCLA for sure that would be so cool! Marcus could be in my bishopric or something it would be so fun! Well it looked super beautiful and sunny over in California. It's been getting darker and sadder over here haha we are losing the sun more and more each day and it's usually cloudy and overcast. It hasn't snowed here in Espoo but in central and northern Finland it's been snowing. Hopefully we hold strong down here in the south though a little longer. Well mom I never really found out who it was that gave the testimony in the Woodlands ward but whoever it was they were inspired for sure! That is super cool that there is now a Woodlands Stake I can't believe that! 

Elders Wilson and Hughie (MTC comps)

Well life over here in Finland is still good! Last P day we had a way fun day. We played basketball with our district and then went down to Helsinki to Pizza Hut and had a buffet it was way sweet! It reminded me of America and College Park because I ate pizza hut for lunch every day in high school. I had forgotten how delicious and greasy it was. Then on Wednesday the new missionaries had their interim training thing so all the trainers and new missionaries were down at the mission home and Elder downs and I went over and did a language school so that was cool.  All the new missionaries and the trianers get language school at that interim training every change. So I got to chill with a lot of the missionaries over there. Then on Friday we went over to a place called Kotka which is just east of Helsinki a couple hours for splits. We did splits over there for the day which was way fun. Kotka is a small town right on the ocean and a really beautiful place. I had a cool experience while we were over there. We went to visit a sister of their branch who is an elderly sister and has a few kids but they are all older and have moved away. She's gone through some really hard times lately and has had a tough life but has remained a faithful rock solid member of the church through it all. Even though the church is like a 45 minute drive from her place. Well we visited her and she was really sick so she asked us to give her a blessing and I had the chance to do that. It was a really sweet spiritual experience.

The next day we went over to another city a little further east and north called Mikkeli. Mikkeli is a tiny little town and it reminded me of being in Seinäjoki. But the cool part was that I got to be with elder Hugie for the day! Elder Hugie was my MTC companion. We had a ton of fun together, he's such a good guy. It was kind of fun to do small town missionary work again as well. Then saturday night we got home kind of late and had church Sunday. A cool thing happened though yesterday, we met a lady on a train a few days ago and we exchanged numbers with her. Then Sunday morning she texted us and said that she wanted to come to our church. So we sent her the address and she came with her daughter! That was the first time anybody has ever called me before after exchanging numbers haha it was nuts. She lives in the other ward boundaries so we passed her to them but it was way cool! We also had our two normal investigators in church which was good. We had a great lesson with our 18 year old investigator about baptism and asked him why he was waiting. He said he wanted to wait for his brother to be baptized first who is sort of investigating the church down in Helsinki but we just told him that he had to be the example here and that there was no reason to wait anymore. So hopefully he starts to get more serious about being baptized. 

Well I think that's all from the week! I love you all so much!