Week 88 in Mikkeli (Well, President Nelson said he's proud of me, so that's all I really care about)

Jeff Bolingbroke
Apr 9, 2019
3 min read

Quote, President Russell M. Nelson, modern-day prophet: "Blake, we're thrilled with you."

In all reality, I definitely need to keep feeding my spirit. And we've done so this week! Lots of busyness, work, and inspiration with general conference, MLC, and many more things:

-District Council was pretty awesome on wednesday. Sister Aura was in attendance, and she encouraged us to do a kneeling prayer do confirm our district goal of bringing people to general conference! After going a bit over on time, we drove the Kouvola Elders to the train station as fast as the yaris would allow... and missed their train by about .05 seconds. Ah darn. Subsequently, we had a bit of a party in our apartment while we fed half of our district lunch:

And crammed six elders into an elevator.

-We had yet another miracle! As transcripted from my letter to President Aura:Tender Mercy: A lot happened this week that would otherwise be noteworthy, but I just want to highlight one thing - we went on a road trip to one of our satellite cities for a lesson we had with a man, but as soon as we got off the highway into the city limits, he shot us a text, saying that he wouldn't make it that day, and that he was already in the hospital. We didn't want to just turn around and waste the time spent driving out here, so we decided to follow up with a 'potential' - a man who had, a few weeks ago, given us nothing but a street name that didn't even appear on the city roster when we checked at the kaupungintalo. When J wasn't able to make his lesson, we decided to go over to the street and try some tracting. Our idea was that we would just knock every door until, eventually, we would find our friend. Well, guess what - the THIRD door we knocked turned out to be a man who was not only interested, but he's a former member! He had a coming surgery, and wasn't able to meet, nor come to conference, but we've kept in contact via phone, and he's told us excitedly about his trip to the Switzerland temple at age 12, and is very excited to meet once he's healed. I guess this miracle was a few weeks in the making - maybe even longer than I imagine!

This work is definitely going forward, and we receive so many blessings. One of my personal desires recently has been to do better at noticing those blessings and miracles.

-MLC happened. This time we're talking about the culture of becoming a technology mission. Lots was discussed, but we watched a training video about implementing technology. Elder Bednar in the video was really excited about the opportunities that this affords, and I'm catching his enthusiasm!

We also got to attend the temple that evening, and I received much personal inspiration from my questions and searchings there.

-We stayed in Espoo the next day after MLC for exchanges with the Assistants! They lined a ton of awesome work for us, and a ton of miracles also happened that day!

With Elder Weeks,

Elder Christensen, as well as our friend we taught(who has a man-cave with a huge stereo system and a flat-screen TV on which he watched gospel concerts),

And making dinner for four.

-General Conference! Probably the most exciting talk for me was Elder Utchdorf's about missionary work. That's a principle that I need to apply as a missionary, and that we can all apply as servants of God.