April 11, 2011

Hello!

Yesterday was quite lovely. Ain came to church, and Lempi left her Lutheran church a little early to come make it to sacrament meeting :) Unfortunately, they didn't stay for the last session of conference, but one of the Elders' investigators did! (she was found through the open house 6 months ago. She starting to attend again now that work isn't so crazy :) Ain told us he wanted to give a bunch of brochures to a friend of his, so that's cool! President Dance paid a surprise visit to our sacrament meeting (we only found out on Friday), and he spoke and so did a young man, so we actually didn't have testimony meeting, hehe. The young man actually was serving a mission in Hungary and he was actually in the same MTC group as Leslie Jordan. I don't know really the details for him coming home a few weeks ago, but I know Pres. Dance assigned him to speak yesterday, so it was good to see he's doing all right. After church we think we might try renting bikes sometime when it warms up a little more. We had Zone Conference on Friday and I was surprised to see it looked like it had recently snowed as we rode into town. However, it looked like lots of snow had melted in Pärnu once we were back in our apartment. Zone Conference was excellent!! Elder Neuenschwander, an Emeritus member of the Seventy, and his wife, are now family history-ish missionaries in Moscow. They've been assigned to speak to the members here in the Baltics about keeping records and the importance of them, but they also joined our conference. After the conference, we rode into the old town part of Tallinn and enjoyed some pancakes at Kompressor. It was really good, and nice on the wallet too! I finally had a sneek peek of Old Town, but I wish I could have explored more. Oh well. That day'll come sometime :D

I still have to finish watching the last session of conference in English, but I've been really enjoying it so far. Hearing the prophet speak about temples has made me even more anxious to go. I hear the youth are having a conference in Helsinki, Finland so they can do a temple trip in July. I wish I could go!!!! I believe it was Elder Robbins (?) who talked about marking off children as 'Done' like some checklist. We all had a good chuckle at that! So, what would you say about that, family? I'm not quite there yet, huh? :P Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

We'll probably have to push back Jüri's baptismal date...*sigh* We had the branch president teach him with us once this week, but since Bro. Raid already has something against him, they were just kinda bickering, so it wasn't very effective to teach with a spirit of contention there :/ He's just lacking faith and trust that God will bless him if he just tries to live the commandments. We'll have to work on the basics, because he's going to need some more time to bring for the fruits meet for repentance and baptism. The good news for the mission is that we have 40 baptismal dates though!

You're right, that Boston trip was a long time ago! I could totally imagine Dad have a good laugh at Stacey's blunt response :P HAHAHAHAHA. I would've roared with laughter as too! I've seen a couple of beagles around town lately and so it's made me really miss our little silly Tilly~ Thanks for all the love, hugs, kisses, and support!

Much love,
Courtney

P.S. The contacts are great. Oh, and last week, Bro. Tšekmarjov made us amazing banana milkshakes. Oh boy, they were SOOOOO DELICIOUS. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, eh? :)