Preaching in Paris

This week was great. We're starting to see some solid results of our work here in Troyes. The biggest miracle was JP. We met with him and his friend Cecilia (a member) a few times and we felt like it was time to invite him to be baptised during the next lesson. Right after we said the prayer, Cecilia's daughter (she's 6) straight up asked JP if he was going to be baptised soon. There was a bit of a pause...Elder Thomas and I being silent not wanting to jynx anything, then JP said "oui, j'aimerais bien." The rest of the lesson was great and we set a date for September 9. I have a lot of faith that we'll be able to make it. It's really cool to see the difference in JP's countenance between our first rendez-vous and our last. He's much brighter, lighter, and confident in just a couple weeks. We also met with another family in Romilly from Nigeria. Vivian, David, and their two sons. We mostly spoke with David, who prefers to speak in English, ...

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, ...

This week we had a "finding day" (all the missionaries in the district go to one city and contact it to death) in Compiegne. The problem is, is that our trains were late, so we ended up having a solid 1 hour and 45 minutes of actual work in Compiegne. We also had exchanges in Auxerre with the district leader, and that was cool.  I'm going to be straight up, this week was hard and frustrating. We were rarely in Troyes, and I felt that a lot of time was wasted. I also feel like there is such an extreme emphasis on contacting and knocking on doors, but no one talks about other ways to serve people and help the ward (I asked the DL if anyone had started a class to study the scriptures during the week to bring members and people learning about the church together, and he had never heard of anyone doing that------it's in Preach my Gospel!!....!!!!!! We're starting a class like that this week in Troyes, I hope it goes well. I'm not saying we shouldn't talk to...

We had some interesting experiences this week. On Tuesday I had a big boost of energy and spirit that definitely did not come from me, so whoever was praying for me on the morning of Tuesday, July 11 France time, thank you.  We had a couple language studies with a member in the ward. He's a native French speaker who's fluent in English and a really great teacher, so he's been a big help with specific questions we have, and also about correcting our accents. Those have been awesome. We had a small miracle with our phone. First off, our phone is oldest, tiniest, most inefficient thing I think I've ever seen. Getting used to that is just about my biggest challange here haha. Anyhow, It has a very small amount of space to store messages and other information. One afternoon, the memory was full, but it was also trying to receive a new message. When we deleted other messages to make space, the incoming message was lost. We had sent a number of messages to many peo...