Terve!
Hey everyone! The second week has been a blast! I'm loving it here so much. The people I work with here are so amazing, such hard workers, and spiritual giants and I continue to learn from them daily. Our zone all gets along so well, and our teachers are so wonderful!! We have three of them! Our branch president (President Freestone) also served his mission in Finland, so we'll chat with him in Finnish on occasion.
My companion and I received an assignment in our branch as Online Training Coordinators. We pretty much just make sure all the districts are getting their online MTC training done, so that's cool!
We started the week off by going to a showing of David A. Bednar's MTC talk 'Recognizing the Spirit,' on Sunday evening (they show talks or movies like the Testaments or Meet the Mormons every sunday night). It's a great talk, look it up if you can. Throughout the week in class, in the devotionals and personal/companion study, we have been continuing to learn of recognizing and teaching by the Spirit.
Within our first week we got an "investigator" (Saara) and got to teach her...in Finnish. Before yesterday, we would always plan out and write down phrases that we would want to say and pretty much struggle throughout the lesson trying to understand her and figure out what she needed to hear. This week we got a new "investigator" (Petra) and our first lesson with her we did what we normally did except we just planned and studied more, but wrote down less, giving the Spirit more room to guide us. But our latest lesson with her (Wednesday) we went in having planned and studied phrases and the message we felt she needed to hear, yet we didn't write anything down for us to reference except one thing which we were prompted to look up last minute. With the help of the Spirit and the gift of tongues, we were able to conduct the entire discussion without referencing our frasi kirja (phrase book). We had just memorized the invitation to get baptized and also felt the Spirit very strongly, and we were able to invite her to baptism in Finnish. It is truly amazing.
My companion and I have also made the goal to only do our planning and studying together in Finnish, and it's going really quite well. The Spirit helps us remember the words we have learned, and I know for a fact that there is absolutely no way we could learn this language without the gift of tongues and without the help of the Holy Ghost (Pyhan Henki).
Lately in our language hour, we've been learning about grammar... HEADACHE! Finnish grammar is so complicated. It makes sense for the most part, but at the same time, there's so many rules, and it's really hard to remember all the cases and the conjugations and conditions, exceptions and everything. But it's coming along really well!
The other day I got to be an "investigator" where our teacher wanted to give us an example of how a discussion in Finnish might go. It was really an amazing experience and the Spirit helped me see the beauty of the Gospel (evankeliumi) through the eyes of an investigator.
Sunday night we ran into Carmelite and Jeff and their baby! They were there helping translate for an elder that spoke Creole (no idea if that's spelled right). It was really fun to see them!
The attached picture is our weekly cleaning check for our room. We were pretty happy (onni) that they told us we were legendary, and that they drew us a picture. :)
Minä tiedän että Pyhän Hengen voit todistaa sinua että tämä evänkeliumi on totta. Ja että jos sinua rukoilla tietää jos se on totta, minä tiedän että sina voit tuntea ja tietää että Jumala on meidän taivallinen isä, ja Jeesus Kristus on meidän Vapahtaja. Sinä voit tietää.
Minä todistaa tämästä Jeesuksen Kristuksen nimessa.
-Sisar Capps
Myöhempien Aikojen Pyhien Jeesuksen Kristuksen Kirkko
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