Skip to main content

July 10: Week 2 (1.5 really) avec le Tour de France. Ooooooooo

This week was good, we had several appointments with members and amis and stuff like that, which meant more opporunities to teach and share experiences, and also more opportunites to speak and hear legitimate French. I get lost frequently, but I can already feel myself improving, being able to understand more of what people say. Each of our visits have been quite spiritually uplifting, the people have responded with hope and gratitude, and several have shared unique and personal experiences from their lives. It'd be great if I could understand those experiences haha, but they were sincere and crying sooooo hopefully that's good. I understand bits and pieces and words and feelings. 

We we leaving a members home, and she asked if we wanted any onions to take home. I meant to say "no thank you, we have some onions" (non merci, on a des oignons), but instead I said "no thank you, we are some onions" (non merci, on est des oignons). They thought that was pretty funny.

The members here are great and are really nice to the missionaries and are pretty enthusiastic about the gospel and missionary work. On Wednesday, Elder Thomas and I went to Paris for exchanges with the Zone Leaders. In Paris we had a lesson with a member present, and the member who was with us was named after the missionary who converted his parents, Ryan (which is pronouced way weird in France haha). It was a good reminder of the change and good that we can do here. 

We also had the opportunity to go to Remilly, a small town just north of Troyes for a lunch appointment. There was this huge memorial monument for several different wars there, and overall the town was just really beautiful, I got a couple pictures.

The Tour de France came through Troyes this week. It made one of our days very difficult because they completely bar off a main road through centreville, and we needed to be on the other side of that road for an appointment, so we ended up walking aaallll the way around to get to the church, it was probably an extra 50 minutes of walking (and it's been crazy hot here for the past few days, mid-high 30s--Frere Euphrosine said his car thermometer read 42!! I asked if that's normal and everyone says no, so it's just a heat wave) so we sweat like crazy walking to the church for that appointment, and the dude never showed up, but we tried haha. We did get to see the cyclists go by in Troyes, I don't know if that's against the rules, but it was right in centreville 5 minutes from our appartement at noon, so we took half and hour to see the Tour de France, got a picture, and talked to a couple Americans who pronounced Troyes horribly wrong, it was great.

I had a great study of the scriptures the other day, in the bible dictionary actually, I was feeling like I needed to do more here, and I turned to the section on grace that really touched me: 

"The main idea of the word is divine means of help or strength, given through the bounteous mercy and love of Jesus Christ...It is through the grace of the Lord that individuals, through faith in the Atonement of Jesus Christ and repentance of their sins, receive strength and assistance to do good works that they otherwise would not be able to maintain if left to their own means."

Through Christ we can do and be more that we can alone. I'm really trying to learn how to apply and live that principle here, to mettre à l'épreuve (put it to the test).

C'est tout pour cette semaine. A la prochaine!

 - Elder Johnson







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more