Alright, so we got our transfer calls and I’m headed off to Turku! I’ve been serving in Tampere ever since I got to Finland so it’ll be interesting to see another major city here! My companion is going to be Sisar Johns, and she was just companions with Sisar Anderson (my MTC companion) and so I’m excited to go see and hear more about what Sisar Anderson has been up to! And I’ve met Sisar Johns at zone conference and she seems awesome so I’m really excited for that!

As for this last week, it was Juhannus! In some parts of Finland the sun barely goes down on Juhannus but where we are it was for a few hours. But according to the members it’s still really light even without the sun being totally up (we didn’t get to see – we still had to go to bed at 10:30 and get up at 6:30). And so on Friday night they all stay up late and go swimming in the lakes and have bonfires and party. But they also joke around that it’s always colder and windier on Juhannus because God doesn’t want them to be out drinking and partying. And so it rained a little bit and Saturday was super windy and a little stormy, but we got to hang out with members and played board games and ate a lot of food so it was awesome! And almost everybody leaves the city and goes out to their mökki (a small summer home by a lake) for Juhannus so the city was super quiet and empty for a few days. But almost everybody is back now and things have returned to usual.

This week we also learned that our proselyting area is getting a car! And this area really needs it, taking the buses takes so long to get anywhere and this is going to help making meeting with people easier and more possible. I’m so excited for the Tampere 2 area! A little disappointed that I won’t get to enjoy the car…we have buses in Turku…but mostly just happy for the area.

One thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot this week is our agency. A lot of the time the adversary tries to trick us into thinking that we are stuck and can’t do anything because of how we are feeling or the circumstances around us. And there are times when these things are tricky to manage and make it harder for us to be happy or excited or hopeful, but that in no way means that we can’t be! Heavenly Father gave us our agency, our ability to choose, and that’s something that the adversary can’t take, so he tries to make us think that it’s gone more often than it actually is. But at the end of everything, we choose how we act, whether it’s according to our feelings or in spite of them. We can choose to smile even when it’s hard, or we can choose to get up and try again even if we think it won’t work, or we can choose to think about the good things instead of the bad. Yes, it is tricky sometimes, but it’s incredibly more worth it to remember that it’s up to us to choose who we want to become and who we want to be. And the little choices we make add up to help us keep moving forward.

Now for the pictures!

We saw like 3 rainbows next to each other while we were out tracting in Nokia one evening this week.

We found a giant mushroom! My foot is in the picture for a size reference.

Some pizza we tried. Pizza crust in Europe is very different from the states so we’ve been on a hunt for a good one, and so we tried this place and it was pretty good!

Fun fact: Finland’s #1 export is lumber so on our train to district council in Jyväskylä we always see these huge piles of lumber as shown in the picture.

I hope you all have a great week!