Hello!

Elder Chapman's first door.

The holiday at the graveyard.  Candles are by the head stones.

This week was pretty good. It was an improvment from last week for sure.

Our apartment is about 60 square meters. Its small for American standards but quite normal for here.

Our ward here is an actual ward and there are two wards that meet in the building here. Pretty interesting, the old church building here in Tampere burned down about 4 years ago. The building we have now is brand new and it is nuts! It is soo nice. It blows away our church buildings in Arizona! It has 3 stories! Look it up online its beautiful!

Tampere is a pretty big city. tons of people in the center of the city always. The bus system is pretty complex and really easy to mess up but we are getting the hang of it!

The nearest missionaries live on the other side of the city. So, pretty far but we played basketball this morning with all of them.

Pretty good week.

On monday, I slipped into a pretty deep depression. I was so sad and had very little hope for the future. Kinda scary but after some intense scripture studies and doubling up on Vitamin D, I am back on top of things! It was cool what I figured out though. There is a Christ like attributes test thing in Preach My Gospel that I did. Afterwards I averaged all my scores and then found the one I scored the lowest on and that helped me find where I could start and it helped a lot!

There was a pretty cool holiday this week called something like Pyhääpäivää or something. I dodnt really understand because coincidentally that is the same word for just holiday but eh oh well!

Anyway, Everyone goes to the graveyard and lights a candle and lays it next to a tomb stone of a loved one! We had the idea to go and light our own candle next to one of the head stones that didnt have a candle on it! So, at 5 o'clock (it was pitch dark at that time) we went and lit our candles. It was pretty intense being there with all those candles lit. It was seriously a sea of fire! I took pictures but the dont really capture it.

This week President dropped in for one of our district meetings. That was fun!

We had a ward party for Halloween. We dressed up as missionaries. haha

Yesterday, a member invited us to this special worship service at the Lutheran Cathedral in Tampere. It was super cool, the whole thing was in German but pretty amazing. Afterwards he showed us around the church. The People of Tampere are super proud of the church there.

We were getting pretty down about how we have been here for a week and havent found any investigators. We worked on this together and came up with this phrase

"Incremental Improvements, coupled with consistency, develop discipleship"

We realized that we can change what we do but unless we do it consistently it wont make that big of a difference. So, we need to not just talk to everyone sometimes, we need to talk with everyone always!

So, we were on our way to a recent converts house when we saw a guy taking out his trash. He was obviously not Finnish so in English we asked him how he was doing. We had a great conversation when a drunk man came up to us in Finnish and started asking what we were doing. So, we broke out into Finnish to tell this man where we were going and maybe cool the situation down a little. All the while our new friend was standing in amazement  because he didnt know we could speak Finnish. He said he had lived here for8 years and cant speak nearly as well! It is pretty good proof of the Gift of Tongues because academically I am not that smart and for anyone to even attempt learning Finnish is crazy but the fact that we do it in such a sort amount of time is even cooler. Pretty big blessing. Anyway, our new friend was super impressed so he said come upstairs with me and we can trade phone numbers. We went up and it turned out he was our recent converts neighbor! Crazy! So, we got an investigator next to our appointment that night and he was the last person we talked to. Our new friend told us about how he only wants to do what the Lord wants him too but he just doesnt know what that is!

It shows that we need to be ready to help people before God will give them too us! Which makes me wonder why I ever get blessings! haha

Well, thats about everything for this week. Hope everybody keeps doing good!

Näkemiin!

Rakaudella,

Vanhin Tippetts