Finding Lost Luggage and Getting to Know President Brown

French Driver's License

I hope these last weeks of July are treating everybody well, we had some good cooler weather here in Lyon the last couple of days, so that was really nice, we didn't wake up in pools of sweat like before! This week was transfer week, and so therefore, was completely nuts for the office elders. The sending off process for the departing missionaries went smoothly, given that we were sending about 25 missionaries home, all things considered, so that was a blessing, we got more sleep than normal, no all nighters this time. However, the incoming missionaries were a little bit more difficult. Due to some random flight miscommunications, half of the baggage for the incoming missionaries was lost in transit. This led to a hectic 48 hours, a lot of calls to a delivery company, a lot of missed deliveries, and finally a crazy road trip with me driving a very large van rather quicker than normal so as not to miss the deadline to a warehouse to get them all ourselves. But all turned out well, and we had a blast doing it, crazy situations are fun to laugh at, so it was a fun two days! 

The best part was still seeing all the new bleus get their trainers, so much excitement in one room, and so many hugs going on at one time. Tons of fun! we had a second transfer bleus conference on Thursday, and Friday was free, so we really enjoyed having a normal quiet day to frantically try and catch up on all the spreadsheets that changed with all the changes for the transfer. Overall a fun week. It was really neat to see President Brown go through his first experience with all the new missionaries, how he was just so happy, and how strong the spirit was when he was presenting to them for the first time. He was so powerful in explaining what our purpose is here in declaring the good news, it was almost like coming back and being a bleu again, even for us and the older missionaries there. It was wonderful, I'm really glad we have him as our mission president, the mission is going to grow a lot under his leadership, I'm sure of it.

Hot Weather and a New Mission President

Me and Elder Taylor took a trip down to Beziers to pick up a car from a senior couple who left. It was fun to visit, that's the ville where my first branch I served in is based, so it was neat to get to see everything again. On Tuesday we were able to teach our ami Cristelle again, and invited her to baptism after teaching her the gospel, she said she doesn't know yet, but she's willing to keep learning and think about it! The office received completely new computers on Wednesday, because of the new Mission President, so it's really nice, it's fun to kind of start over and work with a whole new computer. The funnest part about the week though is probably this temporary new companion we received! Our equip is now a four man equip, momentarily, so our apartment has six missionaries living in it. The laundry, shower, and food situation has now become very large. However, it's a ton of fun! He's one of the elders from Switzerland who left for a bit, and because he has a hurt ankle, he's staying with us. He's Tahitian, from the islands of Tahiti near Tonga and Samoa, and doesn't speak English hardly at all. However, when he speaks French with an American accent, it's super super funny, and he loves doing it! We all laugh a ton at it, so it's fun. Other than that, we had our District Meeting this week, which was a lot of fun, and was really really good for us I think. They talked a lot about kind of accepting ourselves, an

d others, and trying really hard not to compare ourselves. It's very easy I think to do so, want to be better, want to be seen better, and so it was good to remind ourselves that we're on the same team, and that we all have a part to play in this game. It was good. I hope everyone stay cool, it's burning here, so hopefully stateside it's better!

Welcome President and Sister Brown

I think this week was hopefully the last week of the severely hot weather we've been having here in Lyon, and the start of at least a brief respite, we had some good cool breezes and cloud cover, so that helped out a lot. We had a fantastic start to the week on Monday, President Brown had his first interview tour this transfer and our zone had our conference on Monday, so we got to hear from him for the first time. He was truly happy to be there, and loved talking to us, getting to know us, and during the actually conference got us all very excited. He really wants to make a push in the mission in regards to how much we talk about family history with others, specifically in regards to the first temple being built on French soil up in Paris. He says we are some of the first missionaries ever who get to announce the coming of a temple to the French people, and we should take full advantage of that. It was really inspiring. The interview I had with him went very well, he's going to be a phenomenal mission president for us I think.

It is hot in France

The rest of the week went well right up until transfers. Turns out our tripanionship is getting broken, me and Elder Taylor are going to stay here in the office, and Elder Pedersen is going to do his last four weeks in a beautiful ville he served in early on, called Annecy! We're excited for him, though we're sad to see him go. The tickets were the same, up very late into the night two nights in a row, but what was cool was that without any blatant indication, the whole process seemed to go by much much more smoothly than last time, which was kind of a cool blessing. In any case, the transfer ended on a good note, we got to go to the very well known cathedral here in Lyon, and it was really really neat inside, we got to go around and look over all Lyon at the edge. All in all, a good week. Hope everyone stays cool, au revoir!

Finishing up with President Roney and Planning Transfers

We started by going to the last Pday of the transfer, where President Roney gets all the missionaries in Lyon to come up to his house and we all eat lunch together, play sports, and just have a great Pday. It was a ton of fun, though it was sad, because it was the last time President Roney would be there to do it himself. Tuesday and Wednesday were fairly normal office work, though Tuesday we did have a really neat ward activity, one of the members put on an exposition over marriage. It was all about marriages in the past, how they've evolved over time, what they're like now, how the church does marriages, and so forth. We had a couple of good amis from other equips come, and a lot of members, so it was really good. Some of the missionaries sang, and there was a good spirit there.
Wednesday was great, we had our district meeting in the morning, helping us understand more about how we can use the iPads to their fulles

Adieu to the Roneys

t extent, and how we can be better prepared for the struggles and the temptations that will come with these new tools. It was a good meeting. Then the fun began. This week was the end of the transfer, so Thursday morning we had a big planning meeting at the President's house, planning how the first week was going to work, who would be going where, when they needed to be there, who was going to take them, and figuring out all the logistics of next week, with all the missionaries going home, coming in, and getting transferred. Then afterwards, we all played a celebratory game of pétanque, a French game kind of like bocci balls that is super common here, and tons of fun.

Then we, the office elders, went back to the office, to do the single most time consuming part of being an office elder here in Lyon, planning the transfer tickets. Because of the very very important rule that a missionary never be alone, even on a train, we try our very hardest to plan our the hundreds of different train tickets going from all sorts of villes in the mission so that nobody is ever left alone. Because of this, when we got back to the office, we put in all the old assignments, all the new assignments, and all the travel requirements into a couple of Excel spreadsheets already formatted in an incredible way, to start the process of just the planning them out, not yet the actual buying of the train tickets. We then spent the next 30ish hours, planning, checking, double checking, triple checking, entering, and buying all the train tickets involved. We went home during this time, and did a couple of other things, but the entire process took about that long. The first night we got home at 4 in the morning, and the next night somewhere around 12:30, so we've been having some late nights. However, it was a ton of fun, and I actually was able to see some very real help from God. We said a lot of prayers those nights, when it seemed like a train time wouldn't work or someone wasn't going to be able to get somewhere, and somehow each time we were able to find a solution. It was a really neat thing for me.

It takes a long time to plan the transfers.

It was transfer week, so we had the luck to take all the leaving missionaries to the airport, or at least their bags, to see them all off. It's always a little weird doing this, but at the same time, it's fun to see so many super happy people talking about and thinking about their missions, about the best times they had, the weirdest experiences, etc. A lot of them were really good friends I've made here, so it was hard to see them all off from the airport, but fun to see them all again. Then we got to welcome in the brand new bleus (new missionaries), who are seeing everything from the opposite end, so excited about France, and what they're about to get to do. It's always a lot of fun. We spent most of the working part of the week however planning out the three big zone conferences this next week, we spent some later nights at the office getting all the train tickets bought and such. It's President Roney's last conference here, so it's going to be very special, we're all kind of looking forward to it and dreading it at the same time. President has done so much for the mission, and is so well loved here, he will be sorely missed. I love my mission president. One of the best parts of the week however, was the Stake Conference we had this weekend. The overwhelming theme of the conference was the family, and how important it is in our life. It made me reflect on how much I love my family, and how important that is in my life, how much I am grateful to be in a good family, and to have that in my life. I love my family a lot, and am so grateful they're supporting me from my home while I'm out here in France. I hope everyone has a good week, and doesn't take life TOO easy just because it's summer!

Breaking the Ukulele and Getting iPads

This week was fantastic, though very very stressful for the first couple of days, however everything is all good now, because the iPads finally came in! The beginning of this week was fun, last Sunday was hilarious, we didn't have time to sing Happy Birthday to our mission nurse last Saturday, which was her actual birthday, and so we decided to do it unexpectedly last Sunday. We showed up to her house with an almost broken/destroyed ukelele, then threw rocks at her window until we got her attention, and proceeded to sing a Tahitian birthday song in French while playing the ukelele, then at the very end, my companion smashed the ukelele on the sidewalk without further ado. Her face was smiling and laughing through the song, but was absolutely priceless when he busted the uke on the sidewalk. We were all laughing hysterically, and so she came down and we laughed and talked for a while so she could take a picture of us with the busted uke. It was a blast. After that we had a dinner appointment with one of the members, so all in all it was a fantastic day. The week was stressful for the first little bit though, we had received from church headquarters an estimated date of the iPad's arrival on Monday, and so we had made plans for all the Zone Trainings, surrounding that date, where we would hand out the iPads. Unfortunately, they didn't come Monday. Or Tuesday. Or Wednesday. 

Good bye to the ukelele. 

Long story short, we had to cancel a few events, and then if the iPads hadn't come this week, lots and lots of events would have been wasted, and many things would have been put on hold. Yesterday, Friday, was the last day the iPads could come in, and they didn't come in the morning, nor all the way up until 4 oclock. The whole week before this my companion Elder Taylor had been digging, making hundreds of calls, and doing everything and anything possible in our power to find out where they were and how quickly we could get them here. Finally, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon yesterday, we get a call from a random shipping company asking us when the best day would be to make the delivery next week. Almost breathless, my companion asked if we could come get them ourselves that day. They said yes, if we could get out there in the next 3 hours. After two and a half frantic hours of running home, grabbing the car, unloading different things to make space, and driving in super thick Friday afternoon traffic, we made it there half an hour before closing time. We now have the iPads, and will now spend the first part of next week in the car traveling around the south of France delivering them to different Zone Trainings. It was a fun week. On a more spiritual note, on Thursday, we had a cool experience. At the end of the day, after we had gotten all our office work done and had waited until we felt comfortable leaving, in case the iPads showed up, we only had one hour left where we could work. We were all exhausted, worn out, stressed, and cranky for different reasons. The last thing we wanted to do was go out contacting, and try to find people, however that was the only thing we had any time to do in our circumstances. Reluctantly, we left the office, and started contacting. However, almost miraculously, as we stepped outside, started walking, breathing fresh air, and talking to people, all of our spirits lifted immensely. It felt like everyone wanted to talk to us, we had a ton of great conversations, and gave out lots of cards and numbers. When we finally had to go home, none of us really wanted to we were having so much fun. It was great for me to remember that when we go that little extra bit when we feel like doing anything else but that, the Lord will bless us in great ways. I hope everyone has a great week, and starts their summer off with some fun!

I love technology. 

This week was a lot of fun for me, even though I didn't get to go out all over the country like I thought I would. Because it's really hard to catch up on all the office work the longer we stay out of the office, we decided last minute that I would stay behind and stay with the Zone Leaders of Ecully, who live in my secteur, and work with them, or be in the office on "exchange" with the husband of the senior couple who works there. It worked out fine, I was able to get a lot of work done while they were gone, stuff that I really needed to do, and I got to go on kind of an exchange with the Ecully ZLs, which was a lot of fun, I learned a lot from them. One of the coolest parts about getting to stay behind though was that I got to hear the testimony of my Zone Leader during the Zone Training where we handed out the iPads, his last testimony before going home. It was powerful, and one of my favorite things that I really remarked on was at the end, he said he hadn't seen a vision, he didn't know with solid indisputable evidence that God lived, but he knew that this gospel is good. He knew that, because he felt so good while teaching it. It made me really reflect on what a blessing I have in my life. It was a very great experience, something I think I'll remember for a while. Sorry this email is pretty short, the rest of the week was fairly unexciting, we caught up with all our office work. I hope everybody gets to think on the many blessing that we have in our lives, they surprise us I think, when we think about them. Have a great everybody, au revoir!