There Must Needs Be STRUGGLE....

Wow, time flies. Sorry for another two week gap. We have been pretty busy lately, but this week things have quieted down. We are ready to get some more missionary work done! We had lots of traveling these past two weeks! The Zone Conference tour! We started by driving to Tampere, and then Helsinki, and then finished flying to Oulu. The pic that says "Apulaiset" means Assistants. The zone leaders in one in Tampere make fun of us all the time. That is ok though, we are like best friends! We only got 4 hours of sleep when we flew to Oulu, and I was so tired. It is so amazing to me though that the moment you see another missionary from a different area and the meeting begins, all the tiredness goes away. The Lord really does sustain us and support us! I have seen that in normal missionary work as well. On those days when you just dont want to go outside or just dont feel super good, when you do it anyway, and give it your all, I feel as if immediately I can feel the joy coming back right during that very first contact! 

One scripture that has really hit home that I found a couple days ago was Mosiah 7: 18 And it came to pass that when they had gathered themselves together that he ^aspake unto them in this wise, saying: O ye, my people, lift up your heads and be comforted; for behold, the time is at hand, or is not far distant, when we shall no longer be in subjection to our enemies, notwithstanding our many strugglings, which have been in vain; yet I trust there ^bremaineth an effectual struggle to be made.

King Limhi has just been told that Heavenly Father loves them and is going to bless them and help them get freedom from the Lamanites. I love that he rejoices over this news, even though he does not know what or when or how it will happen. But he is confident that it will. And then the very last sentence sticks out so much! "Yet I trust there remaineth an effectual struggle to be made." Even though he knows that God is a God of Miracles, he also knows that that doesnt take away the need of our own efforts or even the effort being a struggle! Sometimes the miracle can be that we were able to do something hard, with the help of Jesus Christ! I have always had this sort of dream that on my mission, I would find the most golden investigator that is so ready for baptism and he would just walk right up to us and know it was true. It would not even matter what I say. But I have kind of learned that at least for me and the people in Finland, that is not the way Heavenly Father works. There needs to be a struggle, or great effort. As we do all that we can, we need to dig up the gold with maybe even many wagons full of dirt to find it. I am so grateful for those times when I have pushed pass the no, or dug a little deeper! 

After Zone conference we took a train to a city called Kajaani. Way cool place. We worked with two really cool elders, one of them is an Australian, one of like 5 non americans in the mission. way cool guy, He gave me lots of tips to work out when i get back. After kajaani we came home and helped with a move. There were some heavy things there, as well as many strugglings :) 

We had a really cool experience while preparing for zone conference, we had like 90 minutes of presentation material to plan and we had no idea what to do. It was supposed to be on Area Book Planner App, something that we just got on our phones. And we were giving info on it to the whole mission. But we had never used it or done anything with it, and there wasn't a whole ton of guidance. This last day of preparation, we were in the office planning our parts and in total it was around 9 hours or so, and our heads just hurt so bad, we had no idea what to present and after 4 hours all our ideas dried up and we were completely stumped. So we decided that we needed to pray and counsel with Heavenly Father. "Me emme tiedä mitä meidän pitäisi tehdä..." Nothing really huge or miraculous happened, but after the prayer we did some air punches and got back to work, little by little, the most tiny of thoughts would come to our minds, and then after we would talk about it, they would grow, and after about an hour we had a great basis for it all! We were also asked to teach the missionaries how to recognize the Holy Ghost, and I was able to share this experience : I know that the Holy Ghost gives ideas to the mind!

One last cool thing that happened this week was I got to give my first Baptismal Interview! I dont know if I told you all last week, but me and elder Krause are also district leaders, we are team teaching, because we dont have enough missionaries. And so I got to interview this sweet young sister who is going to be baptized on sunday! It was one of the most spiritual minutes I have had on my mission. She is from the phillipines and didnt speak a whole ton of english or Finnish, so she brought her member friend along to translate. It was so cool to hear her conversion story, and how she found the Gospel. She moved to Finland and then after two weeks or so her friend invited her to church. 3 months later she is getting baptized. The spirit was so strong as I told her that she was led to Finland because that is where her friend had been prepared to invite her to learn about the gospel. And then we talked about the Temple and that she needs to set goals for attending the temple, That is the place you want to be. After that she asked me "why are you crying?" and i couldn't really say much. The friend then said "tears of joy, they are tears of joy." Amen! What a joy it is to be able to see a change in people's lives!

I love it here.

Talk to you next week ;)