Training Replacements and Being Babies

It seems from all the emails that I keep getting from everybody that life is going well back home for everyone. Here in the office life was a little bit hectic this week, but really good as well.

This transfer the office received a new senior couple, named the Mahaffeys, who will be taking over some of the responsibilities that were previously with the younger elders, so that we can have more time to go out proselyting and become more mobile to help out in other parts of the mission. Before that can fully happen however, me and my companion Elder Taylor, have to train them in all the responsibilities they will be taking over, so that they can fully understand their jobs. This week was the first week we got some really good sit down time with them, and were able to start training them in the various aspects of what we do. It's going well, they learn fast, and we've already been able to teach them some good portions of our responsibilities, so this will be very very helpful to office elders in the future.

The fun part of the week, though, was Wednesday evening, when us and the other Elders in our ward got together to go visit two different single, less-active women in the ward. The message that we shared was something that my companion had come up with, and really liked. He recently read in a book, an example of our relationship with our Heavenly Father. When two parents have a newborn child, it's a very exacting, draining, and involved experience. The baby can do nothing for itself, and when it's not being incredibly cute, it's crying, demanding attention, waking you up in the night, and draining your funds on all it's physical needs. Yet despite this, the love a mother and father have for their child is almost incomprehensible, and they make all the sacrifices necessary and more so that this child of theirs has the best life it possibly could have. It's the exact same with our Heavenly Father. We are all babies, we make mistakes, we cause problems, we mess up, and we can barely take care of ourselves sometimes. Despite this and more, our Heavenly Father still loves us with a love we cannot comprehend. It was a really cool message to share and talk about with these two less actives, and a good reminder for all of us.

Full Apartment and Book of Mormon Stories

This week we just finished was the last week of the transfer, so we had a good time preparing and trying to work hard before next transfer. We went through the whole transfer ticket process like normal, buying all the trains for everyone, and also planned out transfer week with the assistants, which will be a lot of fun, we're going to have Mission Leadership Council a little earlier than planned, so next week we'll have upwards of 70 to 80 missionaries sleeping at our apartment throughout the week, it'll be good fun.

The highlight of last week though was the district meeting we had on the Thursday, it was about the Book of Mormon, about coming back to and studying what is the most important parts of our missionary work. We didn't get to stay for the whole meeting unfortunately, but we were able to be there for a round the table recounting of everyone's favorite story from the Book of Mormon, and why it was so important to them. After some thought, I decided upon the story of Abinadi, the prophet who taught with such power to King Noah and his advisers. I love this story, the part that gets me the most, is that although Abinadi taught the King, and everyone in the city, as powerfully as he could, he never saw the fruits of his labors, he never saw in his lifetime any success. Alma the Elder was converted through the teachings of Abinadi, but Abinadi never had the opportunity to see this conversion. However, because Alma was converted, he went on the convert hundreds more, to start the Church in the land, and played a key role in the conversion of Alma the Younger and the sons of Mosiah, who all went on to convert hundreds and even thousands of more people. Abinadi had one of the largest missionary influences in history, and never got to see that while he still lived.


It's always been a strong reminder to me of how important it is that we press on no matter how futile it seems, that we are touching the lives of other people in more ways than we think. It was a great district meeting that helped remind me of that and help me re-remember it.
Transfer week was exhausting, but lots of fun, which is normal for a transfer week. All the new missionaries that came in were really great, this was a particularly good group that I have seen come in during my transfers here in Lyon, a lot of missionaries I think that are going to do real well. It was tons of fun to watch them get their trainers, and all the fun stuff that goes along with that. We didn't get a break from people at our apartment this week, because the Mission Leadership Council got moved to Thursday, but it was fun, we always had a ton of people to talk to in the evening.

The coolest part of this week though, was I think the story one of the newer French missionaries told me yesterday evening as we were all walking back to the apartment. He told me about something his district teacher had showed them in the MTC in Spain. The teacher had had them all take a balloon, and blow it up as much as possible. Then, he had them all pop their balloons, almost as soon as they had blown them up. The teacher told them that on their missions and during their lives, there will always be people who kind of want to take away your hope, and tear down your expectations. Missionaries who perhaps served in an area where they had had very little success, or where the reputation was maybe not so good, will often say it's not a good area, that you'll never find success there. If you come into a new area with expectations like that, you'll never succeed or surpass these expectations that you have already set yourself. You should always try to keep your balloon full, and not to let other people with little pins pop it before it can really grow to it's full potential. It was kind of a silly image at first, and I kind of laughed at it, but I really liked what the teacher was trying to say.

What is a Transportation Secretary?

My desk in the office is called the Transportation Secretary, though I have other things than just transportation. My responsibilities include:

The Transportation Secretary Sword

Transportation Secretary, which means I'm in charge of all train tickets, boat tickets, airplane tickets (we do have people fly places sometimes), and everything in regards to travel within mission boundaries. This can get a bit tedious at times, with gigantic conferences and lots of exchanges, but for the most part I like it!

Vehicle Coordinator, which means I am in charge of all the cars in the mission. Thankfully, we only have 24 cars in our mission, but I'm in charge of taking care of the maintenance for them all, all the accidents and wrecks we get, working with the insurance, and probably biggest, making sure all the drivers we have are legal in France to drive and are church certified. That is ongoing, I work with a lot of spreadsheets keeping up with the state of the cars and drivers, who is legal to drive, who will become illegal soon (after one year non-European

Office Meetings

drivers' licenses are invalid), and who is certified. This is probably my biggest and most stressful job.

First Year legality. This is me getting together a bunch of paperwork, like passport scans, proof of insurance, proof of residency, and stuff like that together for all the incoming missionaries to the mission, to get them all legal in the country, and to make sure they have all that they need to stay legal for the first year here.

Cell Phones. I'm in charge of replacing broken cell phones, ordering new ones every once in a while, re attributing numbers to different SIM cards when they get lost, and that sort of thing. It's alright, the mission cell phones seem to break often, so it's a fairly involved process. 

Teaching Long-Term Investigators and Playing Charades

Salut les gars!

I hope everyone is doing alright back stateside and across the globe, here in France life has been very fun! Last Sunday I had a really cool experience, one I don't think I expected on the mission. My companion, Elder Taylor, had an aunt and uncle coming through France on vacation, and so they really wanted to come see him at church while they were here. Elder Taylor asked President Brown, and he said yes! He even suggested us having dinner with them and having like a missionary rendez-vous, so it was really neat. They came to church, and loved it, thought it was really neat to have church in an other language other than English. Then that night we had dinner with them in the apartment of the office senior couple, the Sweeneys, who were kind enough to invite us over. It was a really really good dinner, and when we gave the spiritual thought at the end, Elder Taylor bore his testimony and almost started crying, the spirit was really strong. Overall, it was a really neat experience.

This week we were also able to see Cristelle, our ami, who's been sick for the last little while, again. We found out a little while back that her husband is American, and so she speaks fluent English, because he doesn't speak a word of French, despite living here. We normally still teach in French, because the gospel vocab is a little bit different than normal vocab, and it works better. In any case, she told us she had been looking up more about our church on the internet with her husband, who actually remembered that he had seen a film all about our church. He found it again on the internet, and turns out it was the Joseph Smith: Prophet of the Restoration film that the church produced! She loved it, and so we were thrilled that she had found that on her own, they watched in English because it's hard to find in French, so it worked out really well!

The rest of the week was spent in a lot of office work, we had to buy a huge amount of train tickets for the conferences next week, which took some time, and also took a missionary to the airport on Wednesday morning, he went home a little early for school.

Then Monday was the multi-zone conference we had up here in Lyon, we had four zones come in from the eastern half of the mission, and had a fantastic conference. President Brown is really emphasizing how important the temple is in our work, the whole conference was focused on how we can better apply the principles of the family, family history, and temple, into all our finding and teaching techniques. The spirit was there very powerfully, and we all felt how inspired our new mission president is with the new temple coming to Paris. Then in the afternoon we had a second testimony on his wife, who had us all come outside and play a role play charades-like game, which was a blast! All in all, it was a fun day.

Then throughout the week we got to so see two member families and share with them this new temple message, and both of the rendez-vous were excellent. We got to welcome in a new missionary who came in the middle of the transfer, because he was Chinese speaking. It was cool to see him speak what little Chinese he could with his trainer on the first day. The best part of the week was when I got to go on a mini-exchange with our district leader, we had some things we had to take care of and we couldn't do both at the same time, so we went on exchange, and I had the opportunity to teach one of their amis with him. She's been learning from the missionaries and taking the lessons for over fifty years, so each rendez-vous is a little bit different they told me, but this rendez-vous we were really able to touch her heart, and it was a great feeling.

She told us how she's been asking for such a long time about the truthfulness of the church. We felt prompted to talk to her about Moroni chapter 10, verse 4, and the importance of real intent when we pray, how that means we have a commitment in our hearts to act on the response we get even before we start praying. It was incredible to see kind of a comprehension come into her face, and she promised us she would keep trying. We'll see, but I hope I was able to help her path in a small way. We weren't able to write yesterday due to some extra work we had to do, but today is fine, and I hope everyone is having a good Sunday at home! Go to church!;)

Using the iPads to Teach

Bonjour à tous!

This week was fairly normal as regards to life here in Lyon. We had a very inspiring Mission Leadership Council on Tuesday, President is really really pushing for all kinds of new ways to use the temple in our day to day work. A large part of the council was spent in brainstorming sessions with all the leaders together figuring out some of the best ways we can integrate temples and the new temple in Paris into an already existing project focused on family history in our mission, called Project Elijah. It was so cool to see how, with so many people contributing, and so many great missionaries there, the spirit was truly able to guide us, and so many phenomenal ideas came forth out of the framework. So many different ways the mission is going to use this, and it's really exciting.

One of the new tools was actually created by my companion, Elder Taylor, who's really good with visual design and presentations on the computer, and he and I had a really cool experience with it. The assistants asked Elder Taylor a few days before the council to put together a presentation all about the temple, that all the missionaries could have on our new iPads, to show in rendez-vous' with our amis and the members, so last Sunday we took some time to go to the office, so that Elder Taylor could create and I could work on other things for a little bit.

We did that for a while, then went out and tried to pass a member, which didn't work out, so we decided to go contacting for a little while. As soon as we got out of the car, I started a conversation with the first man we saw, and after talking to us for a little bit, he told to come on in, turns out he lived right next to where we were parked. We went in, and after talking to him for a little bit about who we were, we mentioned temples, and he seemed really curious. We were able to use the presentation on Elder Taylor's iPad that he had made not even an hour beforehand. It went super well, he really liked it, especially where it talked about the guided tours during the open house before the temple is dedicated. He told us he thinks that would be a really neat thing to go see, and sounded legitimately interested. He told us he would love to have us back over another time, and talk more about what we had to say. It was a really cool miracle, and we were stoked that Elder Taylor's presentation worked so well. Other than that, the week went by very well, with Zone Training happening on Thursday, where I got to translate for a native French sister, it was fun. I love you all, and truly appreciate all the support you send me in your emails, have a great week!