FINLAND SUOMI
MEMORIES & MIRACLES
MUISTOJA JA IHMEITÄ
The Memories & Miracles Projects
Memories and Miracles began in October 2025, when former Finnish missionaries who served under President and Sister Wade from 1972 to 1975 set out to create a memory book for Sister Wade. Six months later, the finished book was presented to her at the April 2026 Finnish Reunion.
Since then, missionaries from other mission groups and eras have reached out asking for help creating books of their own. The same team is still leading this effort — and they consider compiling each book a mission in itself, one they're glad to keep serving in.
Every Memories and Miracles book can also be shared with the Church History Library in Salt Lake City and the Northern Europe Department, helping preserve these stories for the future.
The Kristus Garden
Just north of Helsinki, where the Finnish forest opens into something unexpected, stands one of Europe's most quietly extraordinary places.
The Kristus Garden is home to the largest collection of Christ statues on the continent — dozens of depictions of the Savior, sculpted by Angela Johnson - each one an invitation to stop, to look, and to feel something you may not have words for yet. Some visitors walk through in thoughtful silence. Others find themselves moved in ways they didn't anticipate. Many leave changed.
We want to hear what happened when you were there.
Perhaps you noticed something in a statue's expression that you'd never seen before. Perhaps a friend grew quiet at a particular path, or a child asked a question that stopped you cold. Perhaps you came in a difficult season of life, and found more than you came looking for. These are the stories that belong here.
Write about your own experience at the Kristus Garden. Write about what your friend noticed, what your family member felt, what was said on the drive home. No experience is too small. No words are too ordinary.
And then — take someone new. A neighbor. A companion. Someone who has never heard of this place. Walk the paths together, and then come back and write that story too.
This page exists because the Kristus Garden does something to people. We'd like to know what it did to you.
Kristus-puutarha
Aivan Helsingin pohjoispuolella, siellä missä suomalainen metsä avautuu johonkin odottamattomaan, seisoo yksi Euroopan hiljaisimmista ja merkillisimmistä paikoista.
Kristus-puutarha on kotina mantereen suurimmalle Kristus-patsaskokoelmalle — kymmenille Vapahtajan kuvauksille, jotka on koottu Angela Johnson. Jokainen patsas on kutsu pysähtyä, katsoa ja tuntea jotain sellaista, jolle sinulla ei ehkä vielä ole sanoja. Jotkut vierailijat kävelevät polkuja pitkin hiljaisessa mietiskelyssä. Toiset huomaavat olevansa liikuttuneita tavalla, jota eivät osanneet odottaa. Monet lähtevät muuttuneina.
Haluamme kuulla, mitä sinulle tapahtui siellä. Ehkä huomasit jotain patsaan ilmeessä, jota et ollut koskaan ennen nähnyt. Ehkä ystäväsi hiljeni tietyllä polulla, tai lapsi esitti kysymyksen, joka pysäytti sinut täysin. Ehkä tulit vaikeana elämänvaiheena, ja löysit enemmän kuin etsit. Nämä ovat tarinoita, jotka kuuluvat tänne.
Kirjoita omasta kokemuksestasi Kristus-puutarhassa. Kirjoita siitä, mitä ystäväsi huomasi, mitä perheenjäsenesi tunsi, mitä sanottiin kotimatkalla autossa. Mikään kokemus ei ole liian pieni. Mitkään sanat eivät ole liian tavallisia.
Ja sitten — ota mukaan joku uusi. Naapuri. Toveri. Joku, joka ei ole koskaan kuullut tästä paikasta. Kävele polkuja yhdessä, ja tule sitten takaisin kirjoittamaan sekin tarina.
Tämä sivu on olemassa, koska Kristus-puutarha tekee jotain ihmisille. Haluaisimme tietää, mitä se teki sinulle.
Share Your Story
If you served in Finland under President Hoyt, this page is yours. We want your stories — the real ones. The ones you've told at dinner tables and family reunions for twenty years. The ones you've never told anyone. The ones you'd almost forgotten until just now.
Write about the cold that settled into your bones on a dark January morning, and the warmth that somehow found you anyway. Write about snow so deep and silent it felt like the whole country was holding its breath. Write about ice underfoot, and the faith it took just to keep walking.
Or write about the other side of Finland — the summer light that never quite left, the forests that seemed to breathe, the lakes that lay so still they looked like mirrors. Write about the beauty that caught you off guard.
Write about the door that finally opened. The person who was ready. The lesson that didn't go the way you planned — and what you learned because of it. Write about the moment you realized you were being taught just as much as you were teaching.
Your article can be a single paragraph or several pages. You can submit one story or many. There is no wrong way to do this. There is only your experience, and it matters.
These stories belong together. Let's gather them.
It's Your Turn to Tell It
You served in Finland under President Thompson. You know what that means. You were there. Somewhere in you lives a story that belongs in this book — maybe more than one. A moment that has stayed with you longer than you expected. A face you still remember. A prayer that was answered in a way you didn't see coming. A day that was so hard you weren't sure you'd make it through — and then you did. We want that story.
Tell us what Finland felt like from the inside. The particular silence of a Finnish winter, when the darkness came early and stayed late and the snow swallowed every sound. The way a sauna at the end of an impossible week felt like mercy. The sisu you didn't know you had until Finland pulled it out of you.
Tell us about the people. The ones who invited you in and fed you. The ones who shut the door. The ones who listened, slowly, carefully, and then one day said yes. Tell us about your companions — what they taught you, what drove you crazy about them, and why you'd serve alongside them again without a second thought.
Tell us what you carried home. Because every missionary who served under President Thompson came back carrying something Finland gave them — a deepened faith, a changed perspective, a quiet certainty that those years were not ordinary years.
Write as much or as little as you'd like. Submit one memory or a dozen. The only requirement is that it's yours.
Finland shaped you. Now help us remember how.
You Were Just There — and That's Exactly the Point
President Lehtinen's missionaries are different from the others in this series in one important way.
You just got home. The memory of Finland isn't something you have to reach for. It's still with you — in the way you instinctively check the weather before you leave the house, in the Finnish words that still surface before the English ones, in the way a cold morning or a quiet snowfall can take you straight back to a street, a door, a moment that mattered.
You served in Finland from 2023 to 2026. The world you served in was shaped by things no missionary from an earlier era experienced — a digital Finland, a fast-moving world, a generation of people searching for meaning in ways that looked different than they once did. And yet the cold was still cold. The dark was still dark. The snow still fell the same way it always has — quietly, completely, without asking permission. And the gospel still changed lives. Yours included.
Write about what it was actually like. Not the highlight reel — the real thing. The days when the work was hard and the hours were long and Finland felt vast and you felt small. The moments when something shifted and you knew — you absolutely knew — that you were exactly where you were supposed to be.
Tell us about President Lehtinen. What he taught you. How he led. The counsel he gave you that you still think about. He is Finnish — he knows this land and its people from the inside, and that shaped the mission he ran and the missionary you became.
Write about the Finland you saw with your own eyes. The Helsinki streets at midnight in June, still lit like afternoon. The way winter arrived not as a visitor but as a resident, settling in for months with complete authority. The lakes. The forests. The saunas that saved you after the weeks that nearly broke you. Write about the people who let you into their lives. And the ones who didn't — and what you learned from those doors too.
Your mission ended recently. But the stories are already worth telling. In fact, there is an urgency to telling them now, while the details are still sharp and the feelings are still close. Twenty years from now you will be glad you wrote it down. So will everyone who reads it.
You served under a Finnish mission president, on Finnish soil, in one of the most recent chapters of this mission's history. That chapter deserves to be recorded. So write it.
The Years You've Had Time to Think About
You've been home long enough to know what Finland did to you. Not right away — it took a while. In those first months after returning, you were busy re-entering a world that had kept moving without you. School. Work. Family. The slow, sometimes disorienting process of becoming a civilian again after years of living with a purpose so clear it had its own schedule, its own language, its own name tag.
But then something would happen. A quiet morning. A certain quality of winter light. A stranger's kindness that reminded you of a door that once opened on a Finnish street. And Finland would come back — not as a distant memory, but as something that felt remarkably close. Because it is close. Those years under President Aura are far enough behind you now to see them whole, and close enough that they still feel like yours. That is exactly the right distance to write from.
You served from 2017 to 2020. You may not have realized it then, but you served in a Finland that was quietly on the edge of change. The world that waited for you when you came home in 2020 was not the same world you left — and some of you experienced that shift firsthand, finishing your missions as the ground began to move beneath everyone's feet. You adapted. You kept going. That is what Finnish missionaries do. That is what President Aura asked of you, and you delivered.
Write about what those years were made of. The ordinary days that turned out not to be ordinary at all. The companion you were convinced you couldn't work with — and what changed. The investigator whose story you've thought about a hundred times since coming home and still don't fully understand. The testimony meeting, the service project, the silent train ride, the moment of unexpected grace that came on a day when you had almost stopped expecting it.
Write about President Aura and what his leadership meant to you. What the mission felt like under his direction. The things he said that took years to fully understand — because some counsel lands immediately, and some lands later, quietly, when you're ready for it.
Write about Finland itself. The particular beauty of those years — the Helsinki evenings, the countryside in every season, the saunas that were less a luxury than a way of life, the sisu that the Finnish people wear so naturally they don't even notice it. You noticed it. It got into you. It's still there.
You've had a few years now to live with what happened to you in Finland. You've seen enough of regular life to know that those years were not regular. The perspective you have right now — not brand new, not decades old — is a rare and valuable thing. Use it.
Write the story only you can write. This book is waiting for it.
It Is Finished — and It Is Beautiful
One hundred voices. Three hundred and fifty pages. Fifty years of living with what Finland gave you. The book is done.
Memories and Miracles: President and Sister Wade's Missionaries in Finland began as an idea among a small group of former missionaries who felt that the stories of the 1972 to 1975 Finland mission deserved to be gathered, preserved, and honored before time made that harder to do. What followed was something none of them fully anticipated. One by one, former missionaries who hadn't thought about certain moments in decades found themselves sitting down to write — and discovered that Finland had never really left them. The stories poured in. Hundreds of them. From people scattered across a lifetime of living, all of them reaching back to the same cold, luminous, life-altering years on Finnish soil. The result is a 350-page hardcover volume that is, in every sense of the word, a monument.
You were young when you served under President and Sister Wade. Finland in the early 1970s was its own world — a country still shaped by the echoes of a difficult century, a people who carried their history quietly and their faith even more so. The winters were long and dark and unapologetic. The summers were brief and golden and almost unbearably beautiful. The work was hard. The moments of grace were real. And President and Sister Wade led with the kind of steadiness that missionaries remember for the rest of their lives.
Fifty years is a long time. And yet something remarkable happened when former missionaries were asked to write — the memories were there. Sharp, specific, alive. The street. The family. The lesson. The answer to a prayer that still brings tears. Finland does that to people. Those years do that to people. Some experiences simply refuse to fade.
In April 2026, the book was presented to the Church History Department in Salt Lake City — where it now stands as a permanent record of the Finland mission during those years, preserved for historians, descendants, and future missionaries who will want to know what it looked like to serve in Finland half a century ago. A copy was also presented personally to Elder Dale G. Renlund of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, who received it as part of his cherished collection of Memories and Miracles books about Finland — a country and a people he knows and loves deeply.
It was a fitting moment. Elder Renlund holding in his hands the collected memories of a hundred missionaries who gave their young years to a land he has never stopped caring about.
To the former missionaries of President and Sister Wade's group — thank you. You wrote the book that started all of this. Because of your willingness to sit down and remember, other mission groups are now doing the same. The series that began with your stories is growing, and it began because you were willing to tell yours.
Finland shaped you in 1972, 1973, 1974, and 1975. And in 2025 and 2026, you shaped something that will outlast all of us.
That is a miracle worth recording. And you did.