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!