Takaltavi

March 25, 2015

Spring Break 2015

Oulu Service

Winter-  staying for awhile

Well I've got some sad news first. Often times in Finland right as it's finally starting to get a little warmer and the snow is starting to melt, there is what's called takatalvi. Which just means winter comes back. And that's what happened this week :( It's been below zero for days and we got like 12 centimeters of snow last night so it's looking exactly like it looked in January. It's pretty depressing. But they say that this should be the last flurry of winter and then it should get warmer in a week or so. But still, it hurts the soul a little bit. I'm way jealous that you guys are in full on Spring. It feels like we're living on opposite sides of the hemisphere haha but it will probably only be miserable for another month or so. So I think I will make it.

On a lighter note though, we had a pretty good week! We had some fun stuff going on. We had zone conference on Friday which was really good, we got to watch Meet the Mormons during zone conference so that was sweet! That's my second time seeing it now. We watched it at MLC like a month ago as well. But it's way good and it's going to be coming to Finland! They'll probably show it in some theatres in some of the bigger cities here so all of the members are pretty excited about that. We're going to try to use it as a big missionary tool, to invite investigators and members invite friends to the theatre to watch it, so should be fun! We also got to do some service this week for a family here which was fun. We just chopped and sawed wood, all sorts of manly stuff like that. There was also this pretty weird phenomena going on this week where when it's below 0 but the sun's shining and there's lots of snow the snow gets super hard. So even though it's all powdery and not packed down at all it's hard enough to walk on and your foot doesn't sink in at all, and you can ride bikes on it and stuff so it was pretty trippy. We were walking on giant heaps of powder like it was just dry ground, pretty weird. O! Also, I saw the northern lights this week!!! Super cool! On wednesday a member told us that they were going to be really strong and we saw them here in Oulu! They weren't very brightly colored but just blue and a little green but they were super clear, it was an awesome sight. They were really powerful ones, apparently people could see them all over Finland.

The investigators are doing well though, especially our Chinese college student that almost got baptized a while ago. He is progressing super well and getting very strong answers to his prayers and we set a new baptismal date with him so we're way excited for him. Also a pretty funny story, we tracted in to this older african couple this week and they let us in so we started talking to them and it turns out that the man did a study exchange in America a long time ago and was a graduate student at USC. So I told him I went to UCLA and it was just a really funny coincidence. A pretty small world. But all the other investigators are doing well though and we found 4 new ones this week so the works going well!

That's pretty much all of the excitement from the week though, but I've got some great pictures to send this week. by the way I just remembered Mom I loved that picture of you at Bentley's wedding. That is so weird and cool haha I can't believe he's married! Wow pretty crazy how life just keeps going on. Well I love you guys so much! Have a great week!