hey everyone!! quoi de neuf??

 

hi! so how is everyone? you know what the weird thing is? i honestly have no idea who everyone is. i have no idea who actually gets this email, but whoever it is, i love you. haha well, to start out, this week was good! we started off solid. monday we got to teach a lesson with a member, and then we taught another one on tuesday and wednesday! then we got to thurday, and we had a rendez vous with our best, most potentially ami, Isaac. AND we got a member to come with us! we were just on fire. and thennnn.... thurday afternoon, and we were eating lunch, he sent us a text... he said that he has made a decision and he has decided to stick with his beliefs.... so.. we got dropped. second time in one week ha. go fight win. I guess we're back to the drawing board and by drawing board, i mean contacting all day. but it's not all bad. everything happens for a reason right? we're not sure quite yet what the reason is, but maybe one day we'll figure out what we were being taught, besides patience. so yeah, that was kind of a low point of the month, but it's fine, life goes on!

 

oh so funny story. so this weekend, we got to eat with three members! it was super great. we started on saturday by doing service for frère apasamy, and then he fed us after, and we got to eat raclette! raclette is this super good dish which you have this raclette melting machine (raclette is cheese) in the middle of the table, and you all get potatoes and some meats, usually like lunch meats and such, and then you melt your own cheese, and pour it over the potatoes and meat. look it up on the internet if that made no sense at all eh? but it's suppperrr good, but you feel like you're going to explode after eating it, because it's like eating straight fat haha. it's terrific. So that's what we ate on saturday, and then we had lunch and dinner with members on sunday. so we show up to the Wassmer family, and guess what we're having?? you betcha, raclette! but it had been a day already, so it still tasted pretty good. oh also, side note about this family. he is the father of the bishops wife, so the bishop and his wife came to eat with us too. and i love these two. they are so fun! but the funnest part about them, is there little son. his name is lorenzo, and i have honestly never seen a kid with more energy than this one. he is sooooooooooo crazy. but so cute. one of his favorite things to do is just run around saying "cours cours cours cours" which means run run run run hahah. he's so funny. we decided that we want one for our apartment. a lorenzo that is. we'd be entertained for the rest of our lives. ohkay so anyway, back to the story. so after we had stuffed ourselves full of that, because they don't let you leave until you've eaten so much that you can't move, and then we went to our next dinner right after. and guess what we got??? RACLETTE! hahhaah oh boy, it was terrible. it doesn't even taste good the third time. but we still ate it. oh boy though. raclette......

 

So guess what happened this week in church??? we may or may not have sung a christmas song in sacrament meeting hahahah. it was sooooo legit. me and elder coleman just looked at each other and smiled. they're for reals about christmas here though. alsace is world famous for their christmases i guess. and we definitely saw them starting to set up the christmas decorations when we went to church too. it's going to be so pretty! hopefully i get to stay here for christmas... on verra. but yeah, we were pretty excited that here in mulhouse we were already busting out the christmas music.

 

so i don't know if i've told you or not yet, but we now have sisters in our district. they elders that we in colmar, another city in our district, got whitewashed, as in they both got transfered away instead of one staying and the other leaving, and they replaced them with sisters!!! crazy huh? no one was expecting that one. but yeah, so that's cool i guess. we met them on thurday at district meeting, and they are both okay, except for the fact that they're kinda serious. not the biggest laughers or anything. but ça va. they're both good missionaries, so that's all that really matters.

 

okay well i'm mostly out of things to say... being a missionary is still just stellar and i love it here in france. the language is coming along, and i've finally just decided to go big or go home, aka stop being afraid of making a fool out of myself and just spit it out, even if i sound like a dumb american. most people already think i'm an idiot anyway so i figure talking to them can't make my chances any worse haha. but yeah, life is going well. tout va bien. i hope you are all just having the time of your life wherever you happen to be. je vous aime tous!

 

--

Elder Matthew Meyers

2 rue Guillaume Tell

68100 Mulhouse

La France

Pictures!!!

hiya everyone!! so just a couple of pictures.

explication of what they are: on saturday this week, we did service for a member, and we definitely make home made apple juice. and it was the best thing that i've ever tasted. nom nom nom. he has these super old machines that tear up the apples, and then we put them in the press thing and it was just stellar. love me some fresh apple juice. he even gave us a bottle to take home. num. oh and the other picture is me and elder coleman crying because we were porting and we found ourselves in the creepiest alley in the world. the adventures of the mission! haha. but yeah, i have a couple of minutes here just waiting for the pictures to load so i can send them so i suppose i'll write you a little more explanation of my life or whatever. so this coming week, i'm so excited! it's going to be a truly stellar week. hopefully. but already, we have about 4 rendez-vous set, so it should be at least marginally good if that's all we get. oh and we started off the week with a lesson that we gave today! so that's good. we actually have a couple of amis now and it's so nice!  they are all progressing nicely (well at least they keep letting us fix rendez-vous haha) and i know that if they get that witness that the book of mormon is true, then they will act on it. now we just have to keep teaching and hope and pray for that witness. it's good though. and me and elder coleman have so much fun. it's funny how similar we are. we were talking about it the other day and it's just silly. but yeah! life is good here in mulhouse, and the work is starting to take off. it's not quite in the air yet, but the engines are started at least.

love you all and i'll talk to you soon! i expect a monster package for christmas too. just saying. haha jokes. love you!

--

Elder Matthew Meyers

2 Rue Guillaume Tell

68100 Mulhouse

La France

 

I hate thinking of new subjects for posts

HEYYY ERYONE!

so this week was so good. sooo good. guess what we got to do? we had an exchange with the assistants!!! it was soo cool. we learned so much too. especially me. i went with elder plétain, he's from nice in southern france, and it was so cool being with a native french speaker! i want to be like that so bad! just being with him renewed my desire to be completely fluent. gah i love those two so much. i wish we could do that like every week. because after the exchange, i just wanted to be like them so bad and be the best missionary i can.

so also this week, i definitely blew a fuse.... and along with that fuse, i may or may not have exploded my hair cutter ha.................................... i've used it a total of one time, and it's definitely completely busted now. cause i grabbed just a random converter, and i went to cut my hair, and as i turned it on, it just exploded. turns out it wasn't the right voltage of converter... it was smoking and everything. go fight win.

oh so anyway, do you want to hear the miracle of the week? man i love being a missionary so much. but so here goes. so this week on wednesday, we had 3 rendez-vous! 3! that's like a record for us! so we were super excited and couldn't wait to teach these people. so then wednesday rolls around, and all of them fall through. we have 0 lessons on wednesday. so that was super sad, and we didn't have any other things to do, so we just put our shoulder to the wheel and went out contacting. for like the whole day.. so it wasn't the best experience, but while we were contacting, this guy calls us out of nowhere. his name is Jean, and he said that he had been taught by the missionaries 2 years ago and he wants to fix a rdv! 2 years!!!! that's a longgg time!! but anyway, the day that we fix the rdv for, was the day that we had our exchanges with the assistants, so i got to go teach this guy with my assistant companion, and we (mostly he haha) gave such a good lesson and then gave him a soft invite to baptism. as in when you know that the book of mormon is true, will you be baptized. and he said yup! and that also happened with the other rendez-vous that we had that day that elder coleman and the other assistant. it was so cool. prayers really do get answered, and God really does care about each individual missionary. if you are working hard, even if you don't see the results in your immediate surrounding, there is always someone being prepared. I love being a missionary.

okay well this is going to be a short letter, but i love you all and i hope you are doing just stellar!

bisous!

--

Elder Matthew Meyers

2 Rue Guillaume Tell

68100 Mulhouse

La France

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Beginning of the transfer 2

Sunset in Mulhouse!

quoi de neuf tout le monde??

life is good over here in Mulhouse. we just got our transfer email last saturday, and the results are that i am staying here in Mulhouse for another transfer at least! and i'm actually way happy about it. i like my companion a lot, and we get along better and better and we just have a lot of fun, while getting a lot of work done. it's super good. and this week was really cool. okay so remember how i told you that i bought that coat? well it turns out, that i'm going to return it. i just can't really wear a 100 dollars worth of coat with a good conscience. and my Elder Coleman's trainer has a coat and he is going home after this next transfer, so he said he'd sell it to me for like 25, and that's a lot better ya know. so i'm just going to survive on sweaters that i'm going to buy today for a little while. and there is a suuuuuuuper tacky coat that some missionary just left in the apartment so i've been wearing that every so often too. it's hideous, but it's warmer than nothing! i might freeze to death, but it's not overly cold yet. i'm super glad that i grew up in utah, because it's pretty cold here, but not as cold as utah in the middle of winter, so it's not bad yet. i think it helped all those times that i went to school in the freezing weather with short sleeves and shorts. SO THERE parents, it turns out that freezing yourself really is a good idea, and it helps haha. all those years i was just preparing for my mission.   anyway, speaking of coats, me and elder coleman think we are pretty funny. whenever we refer to our coats, we always call them our disguises. because when we wear our white shirts and ties, we stick out sooooo much.  honestly no one in france wears a white shirt and a tie. if you wear that, you ALWAYS have a suit jacket over it, or it's a different color of shirt. so everyone knows that we are weird before we even talk to them. but now that it's getting cold, when we wear our disguises, we just look like super well dressed businessmen! it's just terrific. we're kinda cool i guess. at the same time it's bad though because we look more like Jehovahs Witnesses, and that's not a good thing.   this week was good! except for the fact that we didn't get to teach very many lessons because a bunch of them fell through, and then a bunch of them we couldn't get ahold of the person to fix the rendez-vous.. so it was pretty disappointing in that sense, but it was good other than that.

so monday, our preparation day, was fun.  we went to the car museum here! it's actually the biggggggest car museum in the WORLD!! cool huh? i took tons of pictures, and it was pretty cool. they had the most expensive car in the world there, at i think 40,000,000 euros. it was a Bugatti royal. oh and also the fastest and most powerful car in the world too. that was a Bugatti also. pretty cool though. but that was pretty much it for preparation day. nothing too exciting.

tuesday we had a RDV( rendez-vous), and it was literally in the middle of muslim community, so on the way there, we had some people spit at us and yell some....colorful things at us, and by the time we got there, he ended up boefing us. in other words, he didn't show up. so that was fun. oh on a side note, i discovered today that Mulhouse has one of the largest muslim populations out of all the areas in france. so that's good i guess. i would honestly guess like 2/3s of the people here are muslim. it's incredible.

wednesday was our golden day. it was so great. so that day for studies, i read this suuuuper good talk, about desire and drive. it said something along the lines of that the most successful people in the world don't get there because they have just raw talent, but they get there because they have a desire to be there. and if you really have a desire to do something, then you are going to do everything that you can to reach this desire. so i applied this to missionary work, and i was already super pumped up for the day. oh so then before contacting that afternoon, we talked about it, and we decided that we really need that desire, and we really need to want to do contacting and want to find people and not just see it as a chore and a way to use up time. so we prayed to have this desire and love for the people, because sometimes it's just hard. so we went out with this prayer in our hearts, and the contacting was just great. we were smiling the whole time and it was really just fun. also, we found 4 new potentials in just 2ish hours, so we got their numbers, and we fixed RDVs with two of them for the coming week. it was so great. and so now, our morning contacting that we do is like the highlight of our day. missionary work is really fun.

thursday. so i just want to tell you a funny story about today. so the weather here. it's been HOT. hottest it's been in 25 years or something. so everyday, we'd go out with short sleeves and such. so today, it started like any other day. we walk out with our short sleeves, and everything is just peachy.  we go through the whole day, and the weather is nice, and everything is just splendid. but then, it's night. and we are allll the way out of the city, doing some porting (door to doors if i haven't already told you). so we are just happily porting along, when all of the sudden, out of nowhere it starts raining. at first it's just kind of nice and it's no big deal. but then it picks up, and it's just pouring. we continue our porting like good little missionaries, and it just gets cold. so there is a bus at 815 that goes back to centre-ville where we live, so we get on that, but we get into centre-ville, and we still have 30 more minutes to do stuff until we can go in. so we are out there in the pouuuurrrring rain.  it was so cold, because we just had our short sleeves on, and we were just completely drenched through, but we had so much fun. there was literally no one out on the streets, because first off, people go in at around 7 in france, and second, it was pouring. so we tried to talk to everyone we passed, which was about 3, with no luck. i think this one girl that we tried to talk to thought we were going to mug her.  finally, we went inside, and drank hot chocolate while we planned for the next day.

today we got soaked. soaked through.

friday. we had a good rdv with an African today, and he loved everything we said. africans love talking about jesus and they are very open, but they don't really do anything about it. this guy was so super nice though and he was interested in everything we said and promised that he would come to church on sunday, but then he didn't. and i don't know. we are going to try to set a baptismal date with him next time, so hopefully he kept his commitment to read and pray and stuff. we'll see i suppose.

saturday we started off by doing some service in the pouring rain. this time we were smart enough to wear jackets though, so don't fret.  we had 2 RDVs set  for today! we were way excited and it was going to be a terrific day. but then we got boefed twice. both of them didn't show up for their rendez-vous.... so that was pretty disappointing... but that's missionary life i guess. hopefully next time. then we did some weekly planning and called it a night.

sunday was super good too. we ate with a member after church, and her non member husband, and that was good. this guy is sooo nice and just a terrific guy, but he just has different beliefs. i guess he has been taught the lessons 3 or 4 times, he hasn't felt that witness from the spirit yet.. so i think we are going to see if we can teach him again. he has a son that served a mission, and was married in the temple, and his wife is such a strong member and she really wants to get sealed forever, but i guess it's not his time yet.. so pray for that one.  we went over to the Dietschs after that. the dad here is french, but he went to school at BYU, so he speaks english fluently, along with german and spanish. his wife is from peru, and she speaks french and spanish and a little english. so they have 2 little twin girls, and they are honestly sooooo cute. they are my favorite, and they love the missionaries. we usually go over to eat every sunday and we always play with these two. it was even their birthday today! we made them origami things for their birthday, but then we forgot to give them to them. while we were there, we had a tea party and everything. it was just precious. i got a picture, but one of the girls was too shy, so she wouldn't be in it. i'll get a picture of them both soon though so don't worry.

tea party with the famille dietsch

but yeah!! that was my week. also, about the other investigators that i told you about before. this week we couldn't get ahold of them to fix a rdv, so we're going to keep trying. so no progress yet, but we're still praying.  but yeah, that's about it. i love you all.

this is our 60 eggs we bought for one week. two thumbs up. we're fat, so what.

POSTERITY! me, grandpa crump and papa coleman

-- 

Elder Matthew Meyers

2 Rue Guillaume Tell

68100 Mulhouse

La France

SALUT!

so time flies. that's just how it goes. i cannot believe that i am almost done with a transfer already!! it's so weird.    So this week, at the beginning of october i remind you, it has been sooooo hot! especially for this area! they said that it has been the hottest here in 25 years in this part of the season. weird huh? it's consistently around 31 C each day, which is around 90 F i think? it's no bueno. especially since we wake up and it's freezing. it changes sooo much from morning to afternoon in temperature. it's mighty fine. oh so also, our professional cook-ness was going pretty strong this week. we definitely made a quiche. completely all by ourselves. we made the pate (crust) and everything. it was soooooo good. we found this swiss cookbook in the church that was gathering dust, so we asked some people and then just borrowed it, so we're making all sorts of exciting dishes now. although most of them take wine, so it's a little challenging,but we make due. oh also, a couple of weeks ago, i bought a coat! it is freaking chic. me and elder coleman look like models when we walk down the streets with them. although we've only had that chance for like a half of a day and then it got blazing hot, it was sorta expensive, although pretty cheap for here. it was 70 euro. so like 100 dollars, it was super sad using that much money, but i kind of needed it to survive and be warm, so i did. sad day for sure.... okay so everyone at BYU, another temple in provo?? what?? was that as big of a shock for everyone else as it was for me? that was crazy. speaking of which, conference was so amazing. i've definitely never gotten as much out of conference as i did this year. it's amazing what happens when you don't sleep through half of it haha.... but i was alert and taking notes the whole time. it was stellar. sad part about it though, is that we only got to watch 4 of the 5 sessions. the last one, sunday afternoon, was playing live, and it was at 10 o clock in the evening that it started, so we kind of had to go home and get to bed instead of watching it until midnight. we're probably going to watch it for study time tomorrow. 

so story time for the week.....we had the coolest experience everrrrrr. sort of. so we were doing door to doors, which was just magical. i love doing that so much, ha ha. we were just having everyone tell us that they didn't like us and wanted us to go now, comme d'habitude, oh side note, at least here in france, they don't slam doors in your face! because they have a fence around their house, and instead of having the doorbell on the house, they have it on the gate, so then they just walk out of their doors, see who it is, and yell they aren't interested. it's just great haha. anyway, back to the story, so we were having no success, so we decided to go back to do some contacting. so we go and get back on the tram, because we were pretty far away, and we took it a couple of stops, and then we decided to stop at a random stop and continue porting, and after more disappointments, we found this guy! he said he was busy, but to come back the next day, so we did, and we taught him a great lesson on the restoration. he was super curious, and he had tons of great questions and he was actually pretty open. so we taught him, and challenged him to read the book of mormon and pray to know if it was true, and that it could answer all of his questions, and so he said that he would, and then we set a lesson for this next friday! i can't wait to teach him again. we have been praying like everyday that he will get that witness that it is true. so cross your fingers! or better yet, pray.  that was so cool. so i hope he keeps progressing, but i'll keep you updated. that other young family, we didn't get to teach this week, but they seemed genuinely sorry, so hopefully we will get to them  this week.   time's up for this week, but i love you all! hope everyone is doing just peachy! à plus!

 

Elder Meyers