May 5, 2014

Another exciting week sounds like from the Heggie home. How did the softball games turn out? Has it been warm? LPR threw me for a loop and it has been snowing all day!!! But it is still pretty warm. We went to an appointment with some cute ladies in our ward and my comp didn't have a jacket on the other day. One of the ladies thought she was going to freeze ha then one of our investigators was going through her closet and gave us a coat later in the week. I guess we should have known the snow was coming again! not bertha status though :)

Lots of Russians here. It's funny we don't know how to say "I don't speak Russian" in Russian so we'll ask for language help and then we get way lost ha but it's fun! My comp is a language genius.

We had some cool things happen this week. Well one of them is just funny. We were walking trying to find a less active when we saw an old lady carrying her groceries home so we offered to help. Half way through our walk to her house she started repeating the same stories and asking us the same questions. I was laughing inside as I pretended to be just as surprised by her punch lines even after the 2nd time hearing it. We got to her house and she invited us in, asked if we drank coffee and we told her we don’t, then we helped put her groceries away, and she asked again if we drank coffee, then we asked if we could sing her a song before we left. She went into the kitchen (probably to make us coffee, that we don't drink, but she couldn't remember) when my companion comments "she has no memory!" she had a headache and was apparently out of it for most of the conversation up to that point. we laughed the next 7 times we were asked if we drank coffee, or that she told us she forgot to by fruit, or that she has cousins in Turku, or if we wanted socks for our feet. All of which we heard about 10 times. Cute little lady. You never know what's going to come of talking to everyone!

Then this next one we were walking and said hi to a lady smoking out on the sidewalk, ended up coming back to ask for directions, started to leave then felt like we should go back and talk to them. After a little discussion we learned about a lot of things she was going through and that she can definitely use the gospel in her life. She excited to come to a girl’s night with the relief society this week and hopefully will read from the book of Mormon. It's amazing what happens when we follow the spirit.

How are the sister missionaries doing in our ward? Do they have just one set of sisters in the stake or how is it? I'm excited to be able to come home and work with the missionaries. I have lots of people I want to invite to meet them! There are just some things that members can do that missionaries can't and likewise, blessings we have as missionaries that we are specially set apart to do.

I think we are making cafe rio next week for the second time while I have been in Finland. Hopefully it goes as well as last time!

Congrats to Aaron and Shaleah as well as Brittney and Bret! Life is exciting.

Tras your life seems super exciting to me right now. it's weird to hear the things you are doing. Signing up for housing and classes? You’re not old enough. 6 more days of seminary. Almost done with GBC classes. Working at state farm. Holy weird. What great opportunities you have! Way to take hold of them. I was sad for you to hear that volleyball didn't work out in price but I’m glad you're keeping your chin up. You can still play volleyball although it will be different, you will still enjoy the game. Get hooked up with intramurals and you'll meet some fun people.

I’m excited to Skype this Sunday! It’s still looking like 19.00 my time. What time do you have church? Don’t forget to check your email just in case anything changes.

I love you all! Have a great week!

Sisar Heggie

 my companion with our lovely fish friend:)

 Harbor right by our apartment

Welcome to Lappeenranta!

May 12, 2014

A couple pictures from our exchange day with the sister training leaders

Sisar Heggie!!! 

You are so wonderful! I can honestly say, that was one of my favorite exchanges. We had such a relaxed day just having so much fun. I love being here, even when its hard. I am so grateful to have gone with you and learned with you. Sisar, you are shining! I love being around you and just feeling your enthusiasm for every part of this work! You are a great example to us all. Have the best day ever and always remember to smile!

love ya! Sisar Cribbs

On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 12:54 PM, Chelsie Heggie wrote:

thanks for coming over to Lappeenranta! don't forget to send me the pictures you took! please :) i'm glad we got to spend the day together. you are a wonderful missionary and it is a great blessing to the rest of us sisters to have you in a position where we can learn from you. missionary work isn't always easy. and it isn't supposed to be. but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy it. and i can see in your face that you do love this work! what a blessing it is to be the lord's missionary for this short time. why not talk to the man we pass on the street? why not ask the girl with dreds where she got her cool bird South American looking bag? why not give the lord our all, after all he has given us everything. i am just so grateful, my heart is full and i just wanted to tell you thank you! have a great week

Sisar Heggie

 

 A couple pictures from our exchange day with the sister training leaders.

 

May 19, 2014

Happy Birthday to Kambrie!! Wow 2 years has gone by really fast. congrats to the softball team! I hope to see a picture of Trasie's shiner (Mom I hope you were just as insistent on taking a picture of her eye as you were of my arm;)  ) What position is Trasie playing this year? Did Trasie speak at seminary graduation? Lots of events in the next few weeks!! When is/was young women's in excellence? when is graduation?

Good for Tras making it to the top ten. when is scholarship night? all these exciting things happening :)

Cute cake! It's huge! Kambrie will be able to keep those pictures forever and ever and know how much she is loved because she got a puppy dog birthday cake.

Good to hear you got Al's announcement. maybe she'll send me one? haha really weird that things just keep changing!

Exciting to hear about Madi Frame!! she is going to be such a wonderful missionary.

Today we helped a family in our ward move their things to the moving truck. They have 2 kids and still less than half of what Brian packed up! It was fun to think how the tables have turned, that last year about the same time the sister missionaries were helping us and this year I was that sister missionary. Time messes with my head sometimes.

It has been beautiful weather. I have been studying recently in PMG about Christlike attributes. Moroni gives a great explanation of the relation between living the gospel of Jesus Christ and receiving the power to develop Christlike attributes in Moroni 8:25-26. What an amazing gift we have of the Atonement, and the gift of the Holy Ghost to help us develop a greater understanding of Christ and His atonement.

I hope you have a wonderful week!

Rakkaudella, Sisar Heggie

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. 

 . . . .

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!

April 20, 2014

Hello family! I'm sending an early message this week because we are having transfers tomorrow. I am leaving Oulu and moving to Lappeenranta. (South eastish, close to the Russian border). Cool thing is my companion will be studying Russian! Wow. I was surprised to leave Oulu already, it feels like I just got here. I'm excited for another new adventure! 

I gave a talk in church today talking about the Savior's resurrection and what it means for us today. He overcame physical death for us all. We will all receive a perfect body someday and have the opportunity to stand before God to be judged by our works (Alma 11:44). Christ not only overcame physical but spiritual death, or sin, as well. He asks of us to use this gift of the atonement by exercising faith in him, repenting, going to baptism, and keeping our covenants. Too many feel that everything has already been done and there is nothing required of us. True, Christ paid the price in full. But now He sets the conditions and asks that we follow His example. No matter what stage we are at in life we can benefit by looking to the Savior and following His example. 

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter! I'll add a few pictures from my last few days here in Oulu!

Love you!

Sisar Heggie

I will leave for Helsinki tomorrow (by train) and get there in the evening then stay the night and hop on another train Tuesday morning to Leppeenranta (LPR). Sisters haven't been there so we'll be "white washing" the area. Smaller city, i guess 30ish people every Sunday in church. I’m excited. I've heard it's really pretty.

April 14, 2014

Thank you for the birthday wishes!!! The office called letting me know I got a package from my family so I will get it next week when the Zone Leaders come back from Helsinki :) Thank you!  This morning during work out time there was a knock at the door and the other sisters in our district were outside with a frying pan and banana pancake batter! so they came in and made me breakfast for my birthday :) that was fun.

Congratulations to the softball team, sounds like they are doing well. Trasie you are beautiful! You look old. Not old old, just grown up. Stop it. Sounds like you had a lot of fun! Jackson is a great kid and it sounds like he had a lot of fun too. You're dancing must have got a little crazy but luckily you had a pit crew ready for the job.

Dad our new contacts are doing great. One was in church again yesterday with awesome questions. Hopefully he is at FHE tonight! Another one we set a baptism date with. I'm excited to see the changes that will take place as he applies the atonement; we have a lot of work to do :) We organized a girls’ night for this week. Hopefully we have a good turnout. We have awesome people in our ward! Our branch president and his wife just blessed their baby and had a ton of their non member friends at church for it and we got to meet a few of them. Way powerful meeting.

21 years ago you were waiting for your bundle of "joy". Good thing the joy part finally kicked in! Ha it's fun to tell people my middle name.  Obviously joy is a different work in Finnish but the grandmas especially love it. I like your answer to what I do as a missionary. Love people. That is really all there is to it. That is missionary work. You love people. And as you do that you naturally want to share the best part of your life. You try to understand where they are coming from and what will make them happy. The gospel of Jesus Christ will make them happy. The sure knowledge that they are a child of God, a loving Father in Heaven, and that He gives us the blessing and trials He sees fit for us that will make us grown and progress and then we can come to understand His plan for us.

I'm excited for Easter weekend. I am speaking in church which is super intimidating but also another reason to get people to sacrament meeting on Sunday! Madi sent me a couple pictures of her with Kambrie. She does love her grandma, hopefully you share when I get back!

Thank you for the email, love you!

Sisar Heggie

April 7, 2014

What a great conference!!! What a blessing we have to be lead by men called of God, to teach us what the Lord would have us know TODAY. We had an amazing week. For the past 12 weeks we have been doing a mission fast (don't worry, we took turns;) ) The blessing we saw have strengthened my faith in the power of fasting. The Lord is truly on our right hand and on our left, going before our face.

Friday we were on our way to an appointment and we were a bit early so we decided to call a former and see if we could meet with him. After meeting with him we walked by a man and HE called US over, we started talking. He decided that there has to be some superior power and that science can't explain everything by itself, so he has started reading up on religion. We invited him to conference and he came and enjoyed it. We now have another appointment for next week. HE contacted US! What a blessing that we were early and felt prompted to meet with our former which led us in the end to that man. We played volleyball with one of our investigators and his friends this week.  We invited them all to come to conference but didn't get all of their numbers. We were at conference Saturday night when one of them showed up! We prayed that he would have a desire to come but didn't have any contact information. He came in response to an invitation and is now very curious about the gospel and really enjoyed conference. We have an appointment with him this week.

Another fasting miracle. We dropped by one of our investigators with some cookies because she said she had had a busy weekend. We weren't sure if she would be able to come to conference but we invited her anyway and 4 hours later we went with a member to pick her up and we all went to conference together. She had a great experience and met new friends and felt the Spirit.

Tras congrats on the scholarship! . . . . . Tell Kathy hello! good to hear she is still helping with softball.

Turns out dad that I think I did hear President Uchtdorf's story!...depending on which one you are talking about :) I still haven't seen the Sunday afternoon session. we watched the Saturday morning session live on Saturday night at 19.00 then Saturday afternoon session on Sunday afternoon then Sunday morning session again live at 19.00 Sunday night. Great conference! I thought of you a few times in Elder Bednar's talk about the pickup. and then getting stuck and needing a load to get traction. then again with Elder W Graig Zwick's talk about communication, he had some really good things! good that the sister missionaries were able to have some people at the church for conference! sounds like you had a good...meal :) hopefully you ate some popcorn for me, I wasn't able to find all the ingredients to make it :) tell Ty and Jaymie hello from me! have you been practicing roping together? The language is still coming along. I wouldn't consider myself fluent but I can talk to people and teach. I've learned that the spirit is very important. He makes up for what I can't say. But the language is fun. It's a process.  

Mom sounds like you are loving New Orleans? Maybe get a retirement home there? Luckily I think Finland is a lot more of a peaceful place :) but like you said, a lot of missionary work to be done! the amazing thing about that is it's like a room that is completely black. When a candle is lit, even though it's small, it is very recognizable and illuminates the whole room. we just need people willing to light the candle :) glad you are enjoying the conference but always nice to be home.

Thanks for the letters. I love you and can't wait to hear what you are learning from reading Preach My Gospel :) Have a great week!

Rakkaudella, sisar Heggie