Älä hyppää jäisiin penkeihin

Alright, so we’re explaining the title for this one upfront.

It says “don’t jump on icy benches” and I will explain why.

Two of our elders were a few minutes late to service, and so they were running to get there and for some reason it was faster for them to jump over a bench than to go around it. And they were running at the bench and one elder decides he can’t jump over the bench, so instead it would be safer to jump onto it and then jump off. So he jumps on top. But it’s Utah. In the winter. When it’s been snowing the last few weeks so there’s ice everywhere. And so he slips off, falls, and breaks his leg.

And so he and his companion had to go to the ER and he was in a wheelchair from Saturday until yesterday when he had surgery, and now he is not allowed to be out of bed for a week. So in class we’re always missing two of our elders and it’s been really weird. But the last thing we heard he isn’t going home, we should find out more about that within a day or two and get a better idea of what’s going to happen. The prayers have been working so far, they haven’t sent him home yet, so hopefully everything works out.

Sunday night our devotional was really cool. The director of the Other Side of Heaven came and spoke to us about Elder Groberg and some other things and he showed us a clip from the sequel coming out this summer and a work-in-progress trailer. It’s going to be such a good movie!! Anyways, he spoke a lot about how there are no ordinary people around us, everyone we talk to is a potential god or goddess, and that therefore we should want to reach out to them and love them and help them see who they are. He also talked about how our extremity is god’s opportunity, so as long as we’re uncomfortable we’re giving Heavenly Father a chance to work on us and make us better and Heavenly Father is giving us an opportunity to want to do so. Oh, and in the trailer it has a song by the Killers so we go to listen to the Killers in the MTC and that’s pretty awesome haha.

For our Tuesday night devotional Elder Godoy and his wife came and spoke and it was so awesome! He’s so funny!! He told us about how the missionaries changed his life by inviting his sister to an activity and then his mom made him go to watch out for her and there were only 8 people there who played a weird game that I can’t remember the name of and there were no snacks or anything so he couldn’t understand why they were so happy and having so much fun. So he took the discussions with the sister missionaries, believed everything, and was baptized a month later. And I thought it was so interesting that the imperfection of the game was what caught his attention, because that’s how it’s going to be in a language learning mission. There’s no way we will speak perfectly, in fact we’re going to speak very poorly for a little while. But the fact that we’re so bad and still try so hard is going to catch people’s attention and they’ll want to know more. Heavenly Father really uses our imperfections to help his work progress and I just love that so much.

We got our Finland mission shirts!! So that was very exciting, and also the only picture I have for this week because we always forget to take them. But hey, one is better than nothing right?

This week was our last TRC, which is sad, but next week we get to start skyping members in Finland to teach them!!! We’re so excited!!

I hope everyone’s doing well, Have a great week!! Moi moi!

Terve!

Well this week has been incredibly short because so much has been going on. Also there’s no pictures for that same reason…sorry…but we have a goal this week to take more pictures as a companionship so hopefully we follow through haha

Saturday we found out that my companionship would no longer be a trio. Our Norwegian sisters flew out Monday morning, and one of them was companions with a Czech solo sister. She’s here for 9 weeks to learn a language, the Norwegians were here for 6, so now she’s got 3 weeks where she needs a companions. And the companion that she got was *drum roll please* my previous companion Sisar Anderson. So now they are a companionship and Sisar Debiasi and I are in a companionship. And then on Sunday we are told we (Sisar Debiasi and I) are going to be the new Sister Training Leaders in our zone! So that was a little overwhelming since we’d only been here 3 1/2 weeks, but the previous sisters explained to us that it’s basically just loving the sisters. As long as we are doing that, we’re doing our job. So the last few days we’ve been looking out for the new Danish sisters who got here last Wednesday, and last night we welcomed in 17 new missionaries into our zone who are going to serve in Mongolia, Norway, and Sweden. The welcoming includes a presentation on MTC rules, a tour, and helping them get settled in their rooms. And next week we get to do that for 19 more missionaries!! Our zone is going to be huge!! We’re so excited!

Today when Sisar Debiasi and I were walking to and from the temple, we spoke almost exclusively in Finnish to each other. It was so cool! We’re getting much better at applying the few grammar rules we know, and much better about taking time to SYL (speak your language). And we have more grammar class time this week so we should be able to start saying a lot more than we can right now.

We’ve started teach “progressive” lessons!! Instead of taking 10 minutes to try and teach from a scripture about one or two specific points from a lesson our teachers are pretending to be real people they taught in Finland and we get to try to teach them the lessons. It’s so cool. We did it for the first time yesterday, and Sisar Kappel (our teacher) got jokingly mad at us afterwards because she said it was really good haha. The best part about that is we were making up our own sentences with poor grammar and probably totally butchering Finnish, but we could tell she got a little choked up at one point and felt the spirit. It was so cool to see that the gift of tongues isn’t always perfectly saying a phrase or a sentence, but saying enough of the right words that the person your teaching feels the spirit and can tell that what you’re talking about is true. It’s so awesome.

Alright, now to explain the title of this post. “Minä” means “I” and “kaksi” is the number two. So when we were trying to SYL at the beginning, we thought we should figure out how to say “me too!” since we say that a lot. So one of our Elders said “Minä kaksi!” (I two in English, as close to me too as we could get) and we would jokingly say that to each other. Well one day an Elder says that in class, and our teacher Veli Edwards just stares at him looking so confused and he asks what the Elder was trying to say. So we told him and he just starts laughing and tells us that it just sounds like Finnish gibberish. But we still use it, and at just the mention of those two words we all bust up laughing, it’s pretty great. There are so many Finnish words and jokes like that now, it really doesn’t take too much to make us laugh anymore. It’s great.

And I think that’s everything, have a great week everyone!

 

 

 

 

Alright, so we’re three weeks in now and it’s hard and wonderful and challenging and exciting and so many different things that it’s impossible to capture it in words with the time I’ve got to write this but I will definitely try.

On Saturday one of our wonderful teachers, Veli Allen, had his last day teaching us because he has to study for the MCAT. We were very sad to lose him, but we’re also incredibly happy that he’s working towards being a heart surgeon and he’s now coming on Wednesdays to TRC so we still get to say hi and try to teach him in Finnish which is pretty great. And he took a picture with all of us and gave us some chocolate from Finland, so Saturday was a little bittersweet.

Sisar Kappel is back to teach us! She taught 5 of the 8 of us during our pre-MTC training so we’ve all been waiting for her to come back from vacation and we’re so glad she did because she’s absolutely hilarious and is such a great teacher.

Sunday night we had our devotional, and Brother and Sister Mills who work somewhere in the MTC department spoke to us about how we can still be ourselves and be a missionary because Heavenly Father calls each of us for our own strengths and abilities. They also talked about how missions change missionaries and that by turning outwards and focusing on helping others we are going to change and become so much better. Brother Mills then showed us pictures of missionaries before and after their missions and the difference is astonishing and inspiring and made all of us want to get up right then and get to work. You could see these missionaries looked happier and more energetic and their eyes just sparkled. It was the coolest. And then right after that we went to see the film of Elder Holland’s MTC devotional “Missions Are Forever” and that was somehow even more inspiring. He talked about how there might have been a day when he hasn’t thought of his mission since he came home, he just can’t remember it. Being on a mission in this way is something we only get to do once, but what we learn from it and who become continues on and by continuing that our mission is a part of us our whole life. Also Elder Holland is just such an inspiring, hilarious speaker so that always makes what he says memorable and motivational.

Tuesday night we sang “This is the Christ” in the devotional and it was beautiful. We had “choir” instead of “story-time” this week because Brother Eggett (that might be spelled wrong) wasn’t there. He’s the one that directs the choir, and normally the joke is that choir is actually story time with Brother Eggett featuring a little bit of singing, so we were a little sad he was gone, but the song was so beautiful that it made up for it in the end.

Last night we had TRC again, and it was awesome!! I was able to understand so much and actually respond some of the time, it was crazy. I pretty much always knew what was going on and I felt happy and excited to be there, nowhere near how nervous I felt last week. And when I messed up, I just made it work and kept talking and was able to get across what I was trying to say. I was so happy afterwards, I’m stunned at how much Finnish I can comprehend after being here for only three weeks. There’s no way I could ever do that on my own, it’s all coming from our Father in Heaven and I feel so incredibly blessed.

And sometimes when our vanhimmat (elders) have a hard time memorizing things they will make up songs to remember the sentences. So far we’ve got “we are missionaries of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints” in Finnish set to the tune of “Wake Me Up When September Ends” by Green Day and part of the first vision set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” The second one is because the word “aurinkoa” (which is referring to the sun) was hard tricky to remember and the vanhimmat start chanting “aurinkoa aurinkoa, aurinkoa aurinkoa” for the “a-wee-mo-wat” (probably spelled kinda weird, just sound it out and you’ll know what I’m referring to if you’ve heard the song before) part and it fit so well. The best part about that was the very next day in class the vanhimmat start singing it and our teacher Veli Allen whips around and looks the most excited we’ve ever seen him because apparently when he was in the MTC he did the same thing!! We were laughing so hard for a while it was great.

We got to go to the temple today which was wonderful, and tonight we get to learn more grammar!! I think that’s all for this week, hei hei!

P.S. Quick side-story I almost forgot, but Finnish doesn’t actually have a future tense and we haven’t really talked about what to say so that when we extend invitations in a lesson people know not to do what we’re asking them to do in that exact moment. So for the last few days we’ve just been asking them as if they’d do it right then and then we go “ei nyt! ei nyt!” which means “not now! not now!” and so it’s become a running joke in our district, so now hopefully the title for this post makes more sense

 

Hyvää uutta vuotta!! Happy new year! I kinda can’t believe that it’s already 2019. It’s the year of my life where I spend all 365 days out on a mission for the Lord. So crazy. So awesome.

Well, nothing really special happens here on New Year’s Eve, since we’ve all got to be in bed at 10:30, but our zone leaders and sister training leaders had some noisemakers and 2019 glasses and had their own little party as we all walked back from our classrooms to our residence at 9:15 and that was pretty fun.

On Sunday night we had our devotional, and the best part by far was when it was announced that we would have a special musical number by KENNETH COPE and another guy whose name I can’t remember because all I could focus on when they announced that was the fact that KENNETH COPE would be singing for us. My absolute favorite EFY song “More” from 2005 was sung by him, and possibly written but I’m not 100% sure. Either way he’s awesome. And I believe My Servant Joseph was another album of his that I love, but I might be mixing up the titles because there’s like 3 albums about Joseph Smith that I love to listen to and often confuse them. But either way Sisar Anderson and I got so excited and then the music starts to play and it’s “When You Believe” from Prince of Egypt which we had been talking about only a few hours before wishing we could listen to it. So. Many. Tender. Mercies.

One thing I realized I didn’t mention last week is that we get to have our own personal iPads here at the MTC. We’re the first of the Finns to get them, and even though we won’t have them in the mission field when we get there, it’s likely that we eventually will and it’s been such a blessing so far. It’s a lot easier to do SYL when you’ve got google translate on your side. SYL stands for Speak Your Language. Missionaries learning a foreign language, in my case Finnish, are supposed to speak as much of the language as we can throughout our day and continue to look up words and phrases we use frequently so that we get used to speaking and thinking in another language. It’s pretty cool because you walk around the MTC campus and hear greeting and conversations in so many different languages and you don’t have to walk that far to jump from Mandarin to Spanish to Swedish to Tagalog. It’s so cool.

Monday through Saturday we have an hour of exercise time, and everyone goes and plays volleyball and four square and it’s so much fun. And it turns out I really enjoy playing four square haha.

This Tuesday for our devotional Tad R. Callister and his wife came to speak to us. He’s the Sunday School General President and wrote the book The Infinite Atonement which I had the wonderful opportunity to read this summer. It was all about personal revelation, and it’s funny because since we’ve been in the MTC all of our devotionals have been on receiving personal revelation. So we’re starting to get the hint that it might be a little important haha but in all seriousness it’s been awesome that we’ve gotten so much advice and guidance from these wonderful individuals on how to better let the spirit guide our lives. One point that stuck out to me was when he brought up that when we receive any kind of personal revelation we should right it down. This was illustrated with a hypothetical story of a parent giving advice to their teenager. If the teenager rolls their eyes and walks away, the parent won’t feel inclined to give out more advice. But if the teenager listens, pulls out a notepad, and starts writing it down, the parent will be baffled, then incredibly pleased, and then continue to give more advice. So if we want more advice from our Heavenly Father we should start whipping out our journals when we get some.

The temple was closed the last two weeks so we couldn’t go on our last P-day but today we went and it was wonderful. It’s such a bright and peaceful place, it was wonderful to take a small rest from our busy days and be there.

Learning Finnish is hard. But last night we had TRC (Teaching Real Converts) where we go into a room and speak for 20 minutes with people in Finnish the entire time as if we were visiting a member’s home, getting to know them, and sharing a message. It was tricky because we’ve got such a small vocabulary and essentially no grammar skills, but we were able to understand more than we had thought we’d be able to and use our broken Finnish to respond. We talked with two returned missionaries who had served in Finland, and when we told them we’d only been here for two weeks they were shocked that we were able to understand and say as much as we could, so that was pretty amazing. And this week we start the intermediate core so we’ll start learning grammar!! So that’s pretty exciting.

I think that’s about it for this week. Missions are awesome, the gospel is awesome, and I know that I’m right where I’m supposed to be which is a pretty great feeling. Hei hei!

Merry Christmas!!

So I’ve been here at the Provo Missionary Training Center (MTC) for a week now and it’s awesome! I’m in a trio with Sisar Anderson from Arizona and Sisar Debiasi from Italy. They’re such sweet and supportive people, it’s been wonderful.

I had been planning on packing a small 18″ Christmas Tree for us to have in our room for Christmas, but once I was in the car on the way to the airport Wednesday morning I realized that I’d forgotten it! But I’d brought gold ribbon (originally for the purpose of decorating the tree) and some sparkly silver snowflakes to put on the wall, so I improvised and made it into a Christmas tree on our wall! I was so happy that it worked out!

We had about one day to get settled, and then Friday Sisar Anderson and I had to travel to San Francisco with our Vanhimat (Elders) to report to the Finnish consulate and get our visas started. So we wake up at 2:45, fly out, take a train and then walk to get to the building we were told the consulate was. Well, we walk in and they tell us they moved. And for a split second we thought they had moved back to Los Angeles and that this was all for nothing. But miracles do happen and they were right around the corner! It took around 3 hours and then we had the afternoon to eat and wait in the airport for our plane. We didn’t get back to the MTC until 11:15, so it was a VERY long day.

Sundays in the MTC are really cool because our zone has missionaries learning 13 different languages in it and so we get to hear prayers and talks given in multiple languages and even though we have no idea what’s being said you can still totally feel the spirit. It’s amazing. And since it was the Sunday before Christmas there were a bunch of musical numbers and the missionaries in our branch are so incredibly talented we were crying at every single song. We also have devotionals and watch a church movie on Sundays, so we got to hear about charity from Elder Richard Heaton and then watch the Character of Christ MTC movie. Both were wonderful.

Then Monday was Christmas Eve so we ended class early to watch a live nativity acted out and sung by kids and it was so sweet. At one point they had all the little toddlers dressed like sheep for the shepherds and it was just the cutest thing. Then we had a nice dinner and got to watch A Christmas Carol and that was so much fun.

Christmas morning my companions and I opened our presents, went to breakfast, and then got to watch “My Broken Horse Christmas” and think about how it related to missionary work. After that we stayed in the room to rehearse in the choir to sing a song “Where Shepherds Lately Knelt” and it’s such a beautiful song, if you’re reading this you’ve got to go look it up. Don’t even worry about reading the rest of this, just go listen to it. We sang it in the Christmas morning devotional that’s broadcast to all the MTCs around the world. And in that devotional we got to hear from Elder David A. Bednar and his sweet wife. It was amazing. He said he’d been looking over questions missionaries have sent in previously and found that one of the most common things missionaries ask about is how to receive revelation and have the spirit guide their actions. He told us that it’s often not dramatic, and it’s a lot about being good and by doing so your actions will be guided. You don’t sit around waiting, you go and do and in the Lord’s time he will reveal what you need to know. He said a lot more, but there’s not really time for me to explain it all haha.

Then later we watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” and had dinner and then DAVID ARCHULETA came and sang for us!! He also shared a lot about his mission and sang my favorite song of his, “My Little Prayer.” That’s another one that if you haven’t heard it you should immediately go look up. Afterwards we all got to meet him and shake his hand, it was so cool!!

Since then it’s just been learning to speak Finnish and teach in Finnish and how P-Days work in the MTC. And for me, learning how to relax which wasn’t something I thought I’d be learning on my mission. But more on that some other time.

I love my Savior, and I love getting to wear a nametag with his name on it. I love that I get to study the gospel every day and that I’m truly having to rely on him and the spirit in order to learn and speak this crazy awesome language. I love that I have such a wonderful opportunity to learn to become more like him. It’s definitely not easy, but I have no doubt all of this is worth it.

Alright, so in less than 24 hours I will be in the Provo Missionary Training Center beginning my service as a full-time missionary! I’ll have posts up with pictures every week starting next week, so stay tuned!