May 9, 2017 ~ Week 81

 Hello my great family and friends!What a crazy week we found ourselves in! We had exchanges with the elders from Rovaniemi and had a great day! We found a new investigator while on exchanges which was great. it was fun to be with those elders, one was a newer missionary and is doing great in the language and being a missionary in general and the other is a missionary who is just younger than me and he has really sky rocketed on his mission! We also had a pineapple on exchanges and that was fun, I have forgotten how to cut a pineapple, but it still tasted pretty good.

Also on Friday during personal study President Watson called us and said that we would be going to Kemi for the next few days to be with one missionary while his companion was in the hospital due to pneumonia. That was a shock! So we spent the Saturday Sunday and half of Monday in the hospital with the two missionaries, went to church there and did work at nights when we were not allowed to be at the hospital anymore. It was pretty crazy! The missionary was released today a few hours after we left to go home. President and Sister Watson even drove up to pay him a visit (keep in mind that Kemi is in the clear north while they live in the south). We got interviews from him while he was here and it was good. The two elders are doing fine now though, the one is happy to be out of the hospital since he was there for 4 days. 

That was our crazy week! My companion and I are doing great, enjoying every aspect of missions, even when we sit in a hospital all day reading the scriptures and Preach My Gospel! 

I hope you all have a great week! 

Love,

Vanhin Robison

May 2, 2017 ~ Week 80

Hey Family! This week was one hectic week, we traveled a ton, saw all 4 seasons in one day basically and found new people to teach while teaching older investigators too! This week we traveled to Seinöjoki, Helsinki and Espoo and then back to Oulu. All of these train rides and plane rides have put us through the wringer and made us super sleepy. unfortunately from what I see from parents, older siblings and friends, it appears that life doesn't slow down after the mission. I have even heard my mission president say "just get used to being tired, you'll be tired the rest of your life", I hope he is lying about that. But amongst all of this travel and whatnot we have been with great missionaries and met awesome people so that was a blessing in itself let alone seeing the beautiful country side.

We saw all four seasons of weather I believe on Sunday when we woke up to a good amount of snow on the ground, came out of church and it was raining a cold fall like rain, then the sun came out and warmed us up feeling like summer was here and then later the flood gates of spring rain hit, it was quite the day.

Today in Finland, the 1st of May is actually a holiday called Vappu. I asked a Finn today what the holiday was for, and he said "ahh, it's just a day for us to have work and school off and for everyone to party haha". That is a very true statement. Due to unusual high amounts of alcohol consumption during this holiday we as missionaries are not allowed to proselyte, just teach investigators and members and then make our time productive around the apartment if we have nothing else to do. We were safe today and even had a great productive day in teaching people. Super sad though because we taught a less active member who hasn't been to church in years and realized that he basically knew nothing about the church or God for that matter. It was pretty sad.

But it was a good productive week, so we are happy about that! Have a great week, I love you!

-Vanhin Robison

Oulu River

From the plane window

Poor attempt at a selfie

April 25, 2017 ~ Week 79

Train Rides get boring

Hey family and friends! This week we did a lot of fun things like going up to North of Finland into Lapland (the really far north) and spending a few hours there at their district meeting, teaching a lesson in Swahili and also getting let in while tracking!

While we were in Rovaniemi we spent time with some of the elders up there and attended their district meeting which was great, we talked about what a successful missionary is. Since the key indicator numbers have been reduced to 4 it is seeming like a lot of missionaries are having a difficult time feeling successful especially since weeks were we get all 0äs are being more and more frequent, we thought that this was a great district meeting topic! While there in Rovaniemi we stuffed our faces! A senior couple from the mission office was up there for the day and they took us out to lunch at a buffet type deal and it was really good! However we had already planned on eating the legendary hamburger of Rovaniemi called the Tosi Miehen Burgeri or in English the real man's burger! The thing was huge (probably self explanatory by it's name) but we had it for the experience! It was painful but we got it all down, basically eating two lunch that day in a row!

We got let in tracking to these 2 college kids, but it was pretty awkward because they weren't interested and whatnot but let us in anyways. We tried our best to teach them to their needs and in a way the spirit would touch their hearts, but they were pretty non receptive. It is interesting how you can see more and more when someone is prepared and when they are not. It was still cool that we got let in, it doesn't happen often.

We had our lesson in Swahili today, that was exciting! About a month ago I met a lady on the street who knew almost no Finnish and no English but she showed me her door and made it very clear at what time she wanted us to come back. We showed up at the prescribed time but no answer. Since then we have tried back a few times and set up an appointment for today. We brought a recent convert in our ward of a few months who is from Kenya, who speaks Swahili, heäs the best! When we got in the lesson we realized that her Finnish was not at the place where we could hold a coherent

lesson, so basically our recent convert of a month taught her. He would translate to us what she said and then we would tell him what to say back and teach through him. It was cool because at one point he turns back to us and said "let me testify to her" and he did. It was so fun! I don't however thing that we will be going back there too often seeing the language barrier is thick and even with the Swahili translation it would leave her dependent on the only member who speaks Swahili in our ward. It was a great lesson though, really fun!

In a nut shell that was my week! I hope your week was great! It is so nice to hear from you all each week! Have a great week!

Love,

Vanhin Robison

Contacting

Tosi Miehen Burger

April 18, 2017 ~ Week 78

Hey family and friends! Happy Easter! We are blessed with this great opportunity to ponder and reflect the world altering events that happened not too long ago. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ and the completion of the Atonement of Jesus Christ is the single most important event to have ever happen on the face of the earth and for that I am tremendously grateful!Leading up to this day for the previous few months I have been studying Jesus Christ more intently and the thing that stands out to me more and more is His Character, His ability to turn outward when the natural man would turn inward. It is truly incredible and something I love to ponder about.

This week in and of itself leading up to Easter was great! I learned a few more things about Easter this year her in Finland in terms of traditions. The major thing I learned is that they don't believe in the Easter bunny, rather in an Easter chicken. I mean it makes a little more sense when it comes to laying eggs everywhere, but bunnies are much cool. I learned this while we were at some members houses spending time with them and building their faith in Jesus Christ and in his Gospel.

This week we also went on exchanges in a small town called Kajaani. It's two hours away by train and actually Elder Henry's first city. He was so excited to go back there and see the city again and happen to bump into to people that he had met there. The Elders currently serving there are great missionaries, working very hard. One goes home this transfer while the other one just came to the country this transfer, interesting to see the differences.

A cool experience that happened this week actually happened yesterday. Usually at 8 o'clock we go inside to make phone calls because we can't tract after 8 and walking on the street isn't very effective because no one is out there. But today we felt that we should stop doing that and go on the streets anyways and the Lord will bless us with people, so that's what we did. We walked the whole hour and then in the last 10 minutes we met a super prepared person. It was awesome, she was excited about the answers that the Book of Mormon can give to her along with prayer. We were very excited to teach her and then found out that she was just visiting here but lives in Denmark. That was a little disappointing, but shows that the Lord blesses us for putting in the extra effort and doing all that we can do.

Have a great week! 

Love,

Vanhin Robison

April 11, 2017 ~ Week 77

Hello hello this week was a good one. Now that all the messages from conference have statrted to settle in and I have been able to review my notes and listen to some again I am so impressed by the love that Heavenly Father has for us. I left conference with the desire of wanting to know the Father better by coming to know Jesus Christ even more. This past week we decided the mission scripture for the transfer and it echoed my desires coming out of General Conference. As a mission we chose John 17Ö3 "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent."

Over the past week we found a new investigator who is so awesome. She is a young mother who has recently divorced and has such a sincere desire to strengthen her faith in Jesus Christ. It has been an absolute privilege to teach her as she is one of the nicest people I have ever met. She accepted everything we have taught thus far, except a solid baptismal date, but that won't take long until she accepts.

This week we also have been able to visit a lot of members homes )some for the first time sharing the #Prince of Peace video or in Finnish #RauhanRuhtinas. It was great as we shared just a brief thought about one of the principles of peace after watching the video with them. One of the members loved it so much that during priesthood meeting he stood up and testified about the spirit that came to his home when we came. It was great, super awesome to see that we actually do have the spirit and that people notice it! If members notice it when we come over I can only imagine how investigators feel.

The work is moving on here and it is going great! Spring is here, it has started to rain a lot here today but all the drains in the street are frozen so things are pretty flooded haha, luckily we have a car!

Have a great week!

Love,

Vanhin Robison

 A bear carving in a tree stump on the path

Elder Henry and I in Espoo

The ice on the ground is super thick

Our Avacado tree that we are growing

April 3, 2017 ~ Week 76

 Hey there family and friends! This week I got my new companion, Elder Henry, from Highland, Utah. He is a funny man with great work ethics. We have already seen a lot of success and are excited for this transfer.

On the transfer day I spent time with a lot of other different missionaries as they were waiting for their new companions and I was a waiting for mine. We bounced around a lot between my area doing work and the train station. Amidst all of that we were able to get some good work done.

We have one investigator in particular who we are working with who is super awesome, we actually have 3 that are progressing really well at the moment. One of them is going through the Book of Mormon really fast and praying about it everyday. I imagine that within a few days they will have a baptismal date. Our other really awesome investigator has already received an answer that the Book of Mormon is true but now we are just kind of waiting for that to sink into to his heart. He keeps keeping commitments so one day he will make the connection between the Book of Mormon and the rest of our message and when he does he will be baptized in the future soon there after!And finally our other investigator is doing well. We intended on just teaching a very simple overview of the Plan of Salvation but it kind of got more intense than we were planning on. He was just very curious as to why this life is so important and what we become after this life, haha we got some questions where we just didn't have the answers haha. But we said we'd study it out and get back to him.It was an interesting lesson haha.

We also this week had a cool experience, similar to one that I had back in September when I was in Kokkola. We had stopped by this family's home to see if we could share the new Easter video with them #PrinceofPeace. Unfortunately the husband was at work so we were not able to come inside that time, so we resumed to our finding efforts. Not even an hour later we get a text from one of the family members explaining how they had become in active and are experiencing a crisis of faith and would like to take the missionary lessons. My companion and I were filled with joy that he had humbled himself enough to seek for help and that he entrusted in us to do so. We met with him immediately and found that his crisis of faith was not something that I had the capacity on my own to fix, but the spirit filled the room as we testified of the Book of Mormon. I just hope that I said the right things but from what i heard from General Conference I think that we told them the right things. I guess you can never go wrong when you invite someone to read the Book of Mormon. But yeah that was our cool experience of the week.

General conference was awesome, it is honestly one of my favorite times of the year. As President Monson spoke to us this year I could really feel that he is Godäs chosen man to lead His church. I love any time that we get to hear the voices of reassurance and upliftement from the prophets and apostles of God, and we also got to hear voices of warning, telling us what we need to do to keep ourself safe. i love the counsel from Elder Clayton in doing the small and simple acts of obedience everyday.

Have a great week!:)

Love,

Vanhin Robison

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