Ryker's Helsinki Finland Mission: "avoid it!"

Hello Hello!

we had a jolly good week here in Finland! We are staying busy for elder jones' last couple of days here. This transfer is already ending...crazy. but we get our new assignements on friday. They might be combining our area with another one because our mission is losing about 7 missionaries this transfer...so we will be shrinking a little.

Elder Jones

We had some great activites this week. one of them was the ward soccer and frisbee activity that we have every saturday! it is so fun and investigators love it. I had a really cool experience also this saturday. we were walking up the path to go play, and this guy was walking towards us and i got the thought to ask him to come play with us and that he would say yes for sure. So I said :terve terve and i ask him what he is doing and he says he is exercising, and then i say we are about to go play soccer...and he says: can i come? we have become great friends now. He really loves the ward and all the people that came. he also said he wants to come to church someday. His name is AK. I feel like i get promptings like this all the time...usually they aren't : "ask him..he will say yes" but like "you should talk to him...that might be a good thing to do." the trick is to always follow the promptings. Nothing has ever gone wrong when i did.

Another good thing this week has been teaching our friend MIKI about life goals and planning. It has been going really good and i have already seen a ton of improvement in him. he always comes to church now, and goes to sports day and he even helps us teach finnish to people. We have been talking alot with him about temptation and how he can resist it. His goal is to get to the temple by sep.29 and so in order to do that he needs to be worthy. There is this awesome talk called "avoid it!" by lynn g robbins. maybe one of the best talks i have ever heard. it says that temptation is so much easier to avoid, than it is to resist. I can walk down the meat aisle every week or the candy aisle and tell myself that i am not going to buy anything but just chekcing to see if they have enything that is 30% off...but once i get in that aisle you start getting hungry or your mouth starts to water and maybe every-time I have gotten some ribs here, some pork there, a chocolate bar here and two bags of gummies over there. I know from experience that i cannot go down those aisles without buying something. The only way to not buy it is to avoid it...to skip that aisle completely. I have done that a couple times, and it does work. When we put our selves in the position to be around temptation, then we are going to have a tough time holding strong...avoid it...run away and get out of there. Or you might have a sick stomach after you ate a whole bag of salty licorice in 15 minutes.

Something weird that happened this week was that the train station started on fire or something. we were in the middle of teaching at the park and we look up and see that for about 15 minutes. hopefully nothing too bad happened.