May 17th: Calgary Temple

June 26: Last Email from the MTC

My time in spirit prison is almost done. We have an 11-hour direct flight from Salt Lake City to Paris at 5pm on Monday y . Here we go. It's been a good last week, including a real celebrity siting. So every Sunday and Tuesday evening we have a devotional, typically with a general authority of the Church, or some member of the missionary board of whatevers or yadee yadee ya. Normally they're a little dry, but honestly usually quite good, inspiring, and always very spiritual and churchy . Anyhow, this Sunday , the Sabbath day our Sunday devotional speaker was Donny Osmond. I honestly thought the guy who made the slides was playing a prank when I first saw the picture and name Donny Osmand , but then I looked at the stage area and there he was. When I realized it wasn't a joke, I was actually excited because it was a unique and perspective on the gospel that would be very refreshing to hear after ...

July 31 - I'm legal, Zone Conference, La Classe

This week we had our first zone conference with the new mission president, President Sorensen. He said a lot of great things, one of them being "don't count the days, make the days count." He was referring to photos missionaries would take of themselves holding a number corresponding with the number of transfers they've had, but that I took that to heart, so I won't be putting the week number on my emails. I was also counting the days each night in my journal (mostly just for memoirs and hitting big landmarks like 100 or 500 or whatever), but I'm not doing any of that anymore. Make the days count. The first entire hour of the conference was solely focused on repentance. He shared a lot of quotes and yadee ya, but my favourite takeaway was when he had us listen to the song "Oh Divine Redeemer," sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He pointed out that it was originally written by a frenchman, Charles Gounod, and it was originally titled simply, ...

July 3: Je suis arrivé en France

Well a ton has happened. We flew into Paris, had some fun with a Sister's lost passport, and were greeted by President and Sister Babin, who are no longer the president of the mission. So it was good to at least meet them. First thing in Paris, they broke us in with some contacting in Paris--they paired us with a more senior missionary and sent us out. That was weird at first, but was good overall. I was expecting more of a negative response. The French people I'm met so far are quite surprised when a stranger stops them to talk, but once the French people get talking, they get taaaaallllkking. It'd be great if I could understand haha. At the MTC I felt pretty confident with the language, but I got here and couldn't understand a word. The accent, the speed, the phrasing is all different, which I was kind of expecting, but not to the same degree. They can understand when I speek, but I miss a lot when they speek. For example, we knocked on this lady's door and I unde...

Preaching in Paris

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