DESIRE.

Wow, what a jolly good week! Weeks just go by so fast here. every other day is pday it seems. We have zone conference tomorrow so we are going to be prepping for that tonight. we hold the meeting in our ward building. I just got back from the temple too . we went bright and early this morning with our member friend named dinh. he loves being with the missionaries. usually we also eat dinner with him once a week. But the temple was really good today! I love being there. Finland's temple is so pretty. I was very cold this morning...2 degrees celsius...so that is almost freezing. we might be leaving the good summer weather for good now. 

But anyway, the work went so good this week. Our friend Risto came to church again on sunday! on so did our other friend named Hung. Risto has been improving so much! We meet with him twice a week and i have seen his faith grow from nothing to so much in just a couple of weeks. All it takes is a little bit of desire. When we met him he did not believe in God. and then after a couple weeks he hoped that God was real. and now he believes that God is real. We have been talking alot about commandments with him these past few lessons. There is a scripture in deuteronomy that i read this week during my personal study that really stuck out to me. 11:26-28

26 ¶ Behold, I set before you this day a ablessing and a bcurse;

27 A ablessing, if ye obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you this day:

28 And a acurse, if ye will not bobey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside out of the way which I command you this day,

i love that God tells us exactly what he is going to do. If we follow the commandments then we get a blessing...if not, then we get a curse. And the best part is, that we get to pick. We have been helping Risto follow the commandments, and as i have done this my appreciation for them as grown so much! I am so glad that God gives us commandments so that we can know how to get back to him again and to be happy. The same situation with one of our other investigators. She has a problem with the law of tithing. she said that in order for her to pay it, she would need a guarantee that things would work out. I can promise that things will always work out in the end when we choose to be obedient. 

I got to spend a day with my MTC comp elder reed this week. he came down from the north because his companion had to go to a leadership training. It was so fun to see him again and to work with him in the field! We have grown so much but we are still the same. I love elder reed. I also fell down the stairs when we were tracting.

We got taken out to sushi twice this week. Pretty good, but i am not a huge fan of sushi. we are getting ready for the ward temple day too, which is on saturday. We are going to be giving tours of the temple and explaining what goes on there to all of the visitors. We are excited...i need to learn some temple vocab this week though...but hopefully we can get Risto there. 

One last thing that was pretty fun this week was when we taught finnish class. These 3 arabic friends came and they were super cool. they didnt really speak english and no finnish. So we started with the basics...the alphabet and the sounds that each letter makes in the finnish language. it is very hard for them because they have a different alphabet in arabic. in an hour and 30 minutes...we basically accomplished nothing..and i only had them work on the nouns. But is was so fun. they were pretty funny and i was teaching them off to the side of the normal class and they were really embarrassed that they were getting taught the alphabet. But is was so fun and they will come back next week. There are so many things that have changed in my life since i began my mission. people ask me all the time how i have changed the most. I think that definitely the biggest change is just loving everyone as a brother or sister no matter what. there is a big push in the mission right now to focus on God being a loving heavenly father. it is so true...he cares about each one of us!

i love you all! elder christensen

Lift Your Friends Up!

What a crazy week! i have been sick the whole week with a deadly cough, but i guess everything else was way good. Actually it was one of the best ones we have had. I am getting way excited for general conference. i have been rereading all of the conference talks. I have only read the first Saturday session so far, and it is amazing how like 4 of the 6 talks or however many there were, were focused on the need and blessing of a living prophet. i am so grateful that we have a prophet here on earth to guide us and help us to be happier. 

Some way cool things happened this week. on Tuesday, we got to go to the chocolate factory. It was so cool. we took a tour that lasted about an hour, and then after the tour, they took us into a room and gave us free time to walk around and eat as much chocolate as we wanted. I very much enjoyed it. The factory also had these robotic mowers that just moved around by themselves and cut the grass. pretty cool stuff. the world is advanced now.

We had a neat experience this week. we were waiting for our bus to come and we had like 5 minutes, so we decided to start talking to this guy and we was way cool. pretty interested in what we were doing here in Finland. and then we got on the bus with him. after a couple minutes talking with him on the bus, a lady two rows in front of us leaned back and asked "will you talk with me?" so we talked with her too. the guy was very interested and gave us his number. we didn't have enough time before our stop to get the girl's number, so we gave her our card and said please call. That night she called us and wanted to meet...so we met on friday. She is the best. she wants to change her life around. she even came to church with us on sunday! all 3 hours! and she wants to go to the temple grounds with some of the members. it occurred to me that if we hadn't of talked to this guy at the bus stop, then we probably wouldn't have met this girl. she over heard us talking and felt the need to ask us to talk with her. It would have been so easy to just wait 4 minutes for our bus to pull up...but by listening to the spirit we were able to find someone we didn't really even try to find. I know that there are so many people like that here in Finland. It is our job to be in the right places and to follow the spirit, because there really are people that want to talk to us. 

Also this week, we found our old investigator named Edward, from 4 months ago. he went to ivory coast and his phone broke so we could never find him...but every time we were at the train station we checked for him, because he always hung out there with his friends...and this week we found him! we are excited to meet with him again. Our investigator Risto is still chugging along. he couldn't come to church this week because he was in estonia, but hopefully on sunday he will be there. We taught him the law of chastity and the atonement. and talked about how we are friends, and that his Savior Jesus Christ is his friend. because christ died for us, we have the opportunity to change and become better. i read a talk this week called What is a friend? by marvin j ashton. He makes a really good point in the beginning of his talk. He asks around, what makes a friend a friend. and the answer he got was that a friend is someone who accepts us for who we are....i have heard this so many times at school and church and stuff. And this talk completely changed the kind of friend i want to be. He says "we are something less of a friend if we leave a person the same way we find him." that is such a good point. if we do not leave our friends better people, if they havent improved, are we really a friend? we shouldn't just leave our friends the way they are...but lets lift them up. That is what we told Risto...we are your friends. we love you. and that is why we are helping you to change...that is why we want you to improve. i would challenge everyone to be better friends from now on...find something you can do to help your friends. 

One more quote from the talk: "president Lincoln was once criticized for his attitude toward his enemies. "why do you try to make friends of them?" asked an associate. "you should try to destroy them,"...."Am i not destroying my enemies", Lincoln gently replied , "when i make them my friends?" that is some deep stuff. 

We gave a school presentation which went great as well this week. 

Love you all,  i hope that you had a great week!

elder christensen

Are You Willing to Try the Will of the Lord?

It was a glorious week! We are going to a chocolate factory for a tour today and it is going to be a blast. At the end of the tour there is all you can eat chocolate....but you aren't allowed to drink any water... so we will see how that goes....

Sunday was so awesome. Our 70+ year old investigator named Risto came to church with us! he stayed for all 3 hours, and even wore a suit! his tie had beer mugs on it...pretty sweet. I love risto. probably my favorite investigator so far. He is so willing to try everything. That is what we all need. Be willing to try the will of the Lord. we had a lesson with him this week and were talking about the gathering of israel. He really likes it and 2 Nephi was talking a lot about it as he was reading. We told him that this is his opportunity to be apart of the gathering. He wants in. He has been praying about baptism but has not gotten an answer yet. 

Our mission has started doing this 21 day Book of Mormon challenge that i think the whole europe area does. There is a scripture passage each day for us to ponder and read. It has been working really well so far. The very first day answers the question: Is there a God? the passage that we read is Alma 22. I really like verse 15 :

And it came to pass that after Aaron had expounded these things unto him, the king said: what shall I do that I 

may have this eternal life of which thou hast spoken? Yea, what shall I do that I may be born of God, having this wicked spirit rooted out of my breast, and receive his Spirit, that I may be filled with joy, that I may not be cast off at the last day? Behold, said he, I will give up 

all that I possess, yea, I will forsake my kingdom, 

that I may receive this great joy. 

I love this verse. This king, he has everything....gold, soldiers, good food, land, nice house. but he is willing to give it all up for the Greatest Joy...the kingdom of God. it is so interesting. We shared this with one of our other investigators this week and he said "the king, he is a great guy, willing to give up everything to the Lord...i am just not ready yet to give it all up." this investigator is scared, that if he makes the decision to follow God, all the good things in his life will go away. I think that it is interesting that the king, he is willing to give it all up, he wants to, but that is not what the Lord asked of him...he was commanded to repent and ask the Lord for forgiveness and to be filled with his spirit. I think that sometimes we think that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ are asking us to do a lot more than what they are actually saying...they aren't asking us to do impossible things...the king didn't need to give up everything...i am on a mission, i have gained a lot more than i have given. This verse really stood out to me...what am i willing to give so that i can have the greatest joy?

I also got to spend Saturday with elder Jacobsen, my old companion...that was way fun!

I hope that everyone had an awesome week! 

love elder christensen

"Mom tactics" actually WORK!

This was a good week! The work is going forward here in finland for us! 

Last p-day was probably one of the best ones that i have had. We went to the zoo here in helsinki. it was pretty big too. we spent like 4 hours there and we didnt have enough time..we were rushing through it all. but is was so good. the zoo is on a little island, so we had to take a ferry to get there. we met a return missionary that was visiting for the week and he bought us some ice cream which was pretty sweet. My favorite part of the zoo were the tigers. they were way active. one of them attacked the window in front of my. but the zoo was a blast. 

We have been teaching this new investigator named Risto. probably my favorite person i have met on my mission so far. He is just a normal 70-80 year old man. all his family has passed away and it is just him. i met him at the bus stop. i was just talking with him like two weeks ago about something random and asked if we could come over and talk about God. and he said yes! our first lesson was a few days after that..and we have now taught him 4 times!! He doesn't really have a strong religious background. hasn't prayed in over 15 years! I have seen him progress so much. He now hopes that there is a God!  i love teaching him. Awesome too because it is in Finnish. He didn't pray our first two lessons, and said he would practice...but on the third lesson he said he hadn't practiced..so i tried out the "mom tactic". i prayed and had him repeat it after me..it was way awesome..half way through the prayer he just started going on his own. he prayed also for us on his own this last lesson. And he has prayed about president nelson. Also he read all of 1 Nephi! i think he is the only investigator that i have had on my mission so far that has actually read a chapter from the Book of Mormon and remembered what it said. his favorite part was all the prophecies about the present day. He is going to pray about baptism and get back to us on Wednesday :) hopefully it goes well. 

We have been working hard and talking to a lot of people. We knocked this door yesterday and these 4, 7 year old girls opened the door. we asked if their parents were home and if we could talk with them. They said they could not understand us and asked what language we speak...my comp didnt hear what they asked and said that we speak about God. They then said: we speak Finnish. see you. it was so funny. the Finnish people can get way sassy sometimes especially the kids. 

Sorry, i dont have a spiritual thought for this week...maybe next time :)

i love you all!