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!;)
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