April 28, 2014

It has been an exciting week! I can’t believe my companion (Sisar Hansen) and I have almost been here for a week! I love this place. It is a small branch and they have only had elders here for a long time. They are way excited to have us and we have lots of people we are excited to work with. Lappeenranta is east of Helsinki...you have better access to internet so I am not sure exactly how far it is. 3 hours maybe? It is so pretty! We live really close to the harbor, which makes for really pretty runs in the morning. People are super friendly here. I don’t know if it’s because it is warming up and summer is almost here or because it’s more of a small town I don’t know but I love it! 

We moved into the apartment where the elders used to live and as you can imagine that has been entertaining. They were excited to have us come. They even prepared an Easter egg scavenger hunt to help us get acquainted with the new apartment. Over the next couple days we found a lot of interesting things to clean out.  . . . . . Just some interesting things haha but it’s all cleaned up now and I can think:)  

The members are great. My companion is great. Lappeenranta is great. Being a missionary is great. Writing my stories isn’t my favorite thing to do so I’m excited to be able to Skype in a couple of weeks! Where is the time going!? Hopefully we will be able to coordinate times to Skype on mother’s day. Most likely Sunday evening here, 19.00ish so I’m not sure your time. 

Wow congrats to Scy sounds like they did a Brian and Annie style engagement! Yes I do know sister Lund, we were in the same zone a few months ago, and she is a great missionary. 

Sorry just catching more questions ha it is a branch, about 50 people in church on Sunday. Really great people. It has been a smooth transfer and way fun getting to know the area. We can pretty much bike everywhere so that is convenient. We are the only missionaries serving here right now, which is a lot different that my last 8 months seeing other missionaries on a regular basis. I always wanted to serve in a smaller branch and now I am I love it! 

Last week we met a lady on the street. We invited her to church and got her number and confirmed what time we would meet her and where. We tried calling her number and it didn’t work. Saturday night my comp and I talked about faith and the role our faith plays in making things happen. We prayed she would remember that we were meeting. Sunday we went to the place where we were supposed to meet and waited 15 minutes and she wasn’t there yet. We decided to start making our way to church and while we were talking to a different lady we saw our lady on the other side of the street. Turns out her bus never came so she had to call a taxi and we had the right number just didn’t put the area code (which now we know). She enjoyed church and the members were great to her. It’s exciting to see miracles in the Lords work. 

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I got my birthday package!!! It was so great!!! Thank you thank you thank you thank you :)

I got it on my way to LPR while I was staying the night in Helsinki. The other sisters were almost as excited as I was for me to open the package. I pulled out the candles and she noticed they were 2 ten packs and said oh not quite enough for how old you are and then we noticed the extra one taped on :) I even got dads secret note written on one of the balloons. Love it. I will send some pics.

Love you all I hope you have a wonderful week!