Hey everyone!
how is everything going?? so we've had a couple of changes here this last week! i got a new companion, and there were also some changes happening in the zone too. we now have another blue in our district with elder withers at cherbourg training, and we also got a senior couple out here in our district. they live in cherbourg, their names are brother and sister belessa from montana i think. they are nice. we had a lot of changes, but mostly, everything still feels the same. still here in caen and still having a good time. the one thing that really feels like a "big" change is when we change villes. other than that, they are all just little minor changes. anyway, so my new companion, his name is elder reed and he is from calgary canada! it's been pretty hard serving with a canadian so far just because he speaks english funny so it's kinda hard for us to understand each other (haha) but all in all he is a good kid and we're going to have a good transfer. it's really funny because it's really different being with him than with my other companions. i have always been kinda the follower, because the other companions i was with had really strong personalities, so it was easier just to follow them than to try to fight for the word, but now with elder reed, i'm in charge. it's good though and we're having fun and seeing miracles and everything is going great here in caen. turns out i do at least kind of know what i'm doing. but it's weird for me because if i want him to do something, i have to tell him to do it, because he doesn't know it has to be done, so i'm still getting used to that and getting him integrated with the work and the zone and not just trying to do it myself. so we're going to do a little training this week, so that'll be good. also, speaking of which. i have a favor to ask of you. okay so this weekend, we had a zone leader wide fast, along with the assistants and president to decide if we should fix something as a goal for our mission. really just to get the spiritual confirmation that it is possible. so we did this, and we decided that yes. the goal that we fixed is to find a family for christmas. to give them the greatest gift that we can, and to find that family that is ready to be baptized in every city. so we fixed this as a goal, and i was wondering if you could do something for me. could you pray for us here in caen and also in our zone if you want, that we can find that family that is ready to recieve the gospel? that would be stellar. thanks!
anyways, on to the week. so first off, i'll start with the bad experience of the week. well, long story short, elder reed and i both got food poisoning haha. this weekend we ate some bad food i guess (we are not exactly sure what it was but we are about 80 percent sure that it was these canned lentils and sausages that we ate, because other than that, we didn't really eat this weekend because we were fasting). anyway, so at the time it tasted fine, but then on sunday night, the night after, we were both feeling iffy. we went to sleep that night and both of us had to wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and i even had some throw up in there too. fun stuff. so this was last night and we are both still trying to get over it. it's fun i suppose. i'm not really sure what i'm supposed to do to take care of that, so we'll probably just wait it out and hope that it passes quickly haha.
anyway, other more happy experiences this week. we we've done quite a lot of finding this week because we've really been trying to find the people that are ready right away to be baptized, and we had a lot of success this week. we found a lot of people and got a lot of numbers, and i'm not going to lie, i'm happy to be able to contact in my style again. cause with elder johnson, he was a really direct person, and it was kinda just "hey we are missionaries, do you want to hear about our message" and that's it. but now we really are having conversations with them and talking and it's good. i really just hope that i can be as good of an example as elder andrus was for me and that he can learn as much. we'll see.
so one cool experience that we had this week came when we did some porting a couple of nights ago. we were in this area, and we starting knocking doors, and we decided to use the approach that president had given us to do for porting, and that is to ask people if we can come in and pray with them and leave a blessing on their home. so we are doing this, and we knock on this lady's house, and she answers and opens the door, we tell her that we are here to pray with her, and she says come right in. so we come in, talk with them for a little, and it turns out that she is half italian, half spanish, and the husband is german but they all speak french perfectly. so we talk to them for a bit, and as it turns out, they have 7 children, from about 13-2, and they are really believing, and really catholic. so we go into a room with the kids and the mom, cause the dad was busy, and we say a prayer with them. first off, they all say "notre père" our father i think it's called in english, and then they finish, and we ask if we can say a prayer now. so we said a prayer, blessed their family, and are going to be going back tonight to see them again. so that was sweet to see the things that president told us to do work. they are really catholic and i'm not sure how they are going to react when they find out we're mormons, but we'll see. we're really praying and trying to figure out what to teach them tonight, so we'll see.
so yeah, this week has been really crazy. we've been running everywhere, we had exchanges with the assistants, we had zone council, and then we had to prepare our trainings for next week, welcome the zone in, and do all these things, and we really have just been running on all cylinders. we haven't had any down time, and our appartment shows it haha, it was so messy this morning, but at least we mostly got it clean. also, it's starting to get cold, and we don't really have heating in our apartment and it's terrrrrribly insolated. so the past couple of nights have been a bit chilly, but we found a couple of space heaters in the apartment, so we've turned those on and closed all the doors in our living quarters, so that the one side of our apartment is nice and warm, but the other side is freezing. it's a nice experience.
as to other things, all of our amis are doing pretty well, stanley and augustine got the priesthood this weekend, so that was sweet. ely, a guy we've been teaching for a little bit now, but who hasn't really been keeping rdvs that we fix here at the church, finally came to church yesterday, so that was great. i'm not sure how his experience was, elder reed said meh, but we'll see this tuesday when we see him. our ward isn't the best fellowshippers, and i was too busy running around trying to make everything else work out by myself since my companion didn't know what was going on yet which is completely normal, so i didn't get a chance to tell members to go up and meet him and integrate him and such, so we'll see. he's kinda shy until you break his shell, so we'll see what happens. also, raphael, an ami that we had been teaching about 3-4 months ago, who was super ready for the gospel, we got to see him again finally on sunday, and we had a great rdv with him. we talked again about the restoration and what that means and how if Jesus Christ's church, the one that he established himself, was on the earth, we would all want to belong to that one, and then we told about how it is and how he can know. so it was a really great rdv and we're gonna see him again this tuesday, so i think he's gonna be baptized this transfer. we're praying. our other amis, they are all doing fine too. everything is going just peachy here in caen.
well i'm all out of things to say and i feel nausious (spelling..........) so i'm gonna say bye! hope you have a stellar week and everything goes as planned! love you all! bisous!
Okay so first off, there are so many changes happening at home! that's crazy! it's so weird to see all these young people getting ready to put their papers in! that announcement in conference just blew my world haha and i can't imagine for the people that it actually affects directly. crazy crazy. that's gnarly though for everyone! tell them good luck for me. or something less cliché if you want haha.
anyway, as you probably know, this weekend was transfers! so are you ready to hear the big news?? well, elder johnson is going! he is going to cergy in paris and he will be training a new little baby! so he's really excited about that, and then i will be staying here in caen! and i'm pretty excited about that too. i don't know why, but caen isn't even getting old for me at all. i'm so ready to stay a fourth here. my new companion is going to be a brand new zone leader. his name is elder reed, and he is canadian. ew i know right? but you can't always chose where they are from right? haha no i'm joking it's going to be great. i'm going to have fun teasing him though. so anyway, what i know of him as of now is that he is one transfer younger than me, we knew each other in the mtc, but since then i haven't seen him. he's a really good innocent happy kid who will really be ready to learn i think. i'm really excited because i think he will really just be a sponge so i will have the chance to really help him. hopefully i don't mess up haha. so that'll be fun to train a new zone leader. on other exciting new for transfers, little baby boy elder andrus got called as a zone leader! so that's sweet. he is such a good kid and i knew it was coming. and guess where he is going??? VILLENEUVE D'ASCQ! i'm so so so excited for him. i talked to him last night when he called in to report stats, and he is so excited. i told him to say hi to everyone there from me, especially cedric and gregory, and i'm just so excited for him. we're ending up serving in the exact same areas haha it's sweet. but i'm not going to lie, i'm sad to see him go from my zone, but at least i'll see him every month for ZL council. as to other happenings, guess who is dying on wednesday????? papa! elder coleman is dying this transfer! so weird! it's honestly just so crazy to think that he is going to be gone. what ever will we do... but on the bright side, i'm going into paris on wednesday to pick up my new comp, so we've planned lunch together before he gets shipped out. it's so weird though cause a lot of my comps are getting realllllllly close to going home. elder andrus has one left, elder dick and elder johnson both have two... i'm next. ew. mais bon, on fait avec. it's weird though because i am now one of the senior zone leaders... super weird. time passes way too fast. but i'm eating a delicious panini right now so it's fine.
anyway, as to the rest of the week, everything is going well here in caen. as of now and looking a little at our past couple of transfers, i've decided i'm going to put a lot more focus on finding. because we find people and it's great, but i really don't want to miss that person that is ready right then to be baptized. so that's what we're going to do this transfer. we're going to find teach and baptize at least one person in 6 weeks. bam. hooray. so it's going to be great. i'm really excited. as to our amis right now, everyone is going pretty well. stanley came to church yesterday and we gave him a white shirt and tie with a suit coat, and he looked so fly. it was so sweet. so augustine came in a fresh grey suit, and stanley had the sports coat look going (since we didn't have matching pants, we do the best we can) and they just both looked so nice. it was sweet. such good people. and we also have an interview set up for them on tuesday so they can recieve the aaronic priesthood, and it's so great. the sisters have another nigerian friend that is getting baptized soon, and we're going to have one of them baptize her. it's going to be so great. as to jude, the other person that had a baptismal date, we kinda lost contact with him this week. he still have the desire to be baptized, he just has a lot of problems with his life and papers and he is just really occupied by those things, so we haven't seen him in awhile. so we'll probably see him again this week sometime, but we're really going to have to help him understand the importance of everything and church assistance and such. we'll see how everything goes with him. ça va aller. so this week, what did we do... i don't even remember, it's kinda just come and gone.. weird. too many crazy things happening this weekend that i forgot the week. oh one thing we had a nice little trip to rouen this week. we went to their district meeting again because president was going to be there and he invited us too, so we moved some rdvs around and bought some tickets out to rouen. it was a good little meeting, and elder andrus is the district leader out there, and his district meetings are so good, so it was great. other things... honestly i cannot remember at all... "no news is good news" right? ha but it really was a good week and it was a good week to end our reign here in caen. now i have to train a replacement.
it's going to be really weird to be the senior comp again. cause it's just been 50/50 for the past long while, and it's going to be weird to have to lead. it'll be sweet though. we'll have a lot of fun. i'm excited to train a new zone leader. it'll be great.
oh one last thing, we're going to the beaches today! going out to omaha beach and the american cimetary and everything, so that's going to be way cool. i'll show you pictures next time.
well anyway, hope everything is going great out there chez vous. love you all and have a great week! bisous!
Hey everyone! well this week was actually really good. it was just a complete opposite from last week. it's funny cause i think last week was just the smack in the face that i needed to get going again. not that i wasn't going before, but to kinda kick it into overdrive. cause last week was really just oof, but this week i was determined to change that around. so this week really any down time that i had whenever, i was either making calls, thinking about who i could call, sending out texts all to fix rdvs for this week. and did it ever pay off. this week, we taught a bunch of lessons and even better, found a lot of new people that we are going to teach next week. as of now, just at the beginning of the week, we have like 17 rdvs fixed and about 10 of those are new people. and what's funny is that most of the time we don't really have a ton for the beginning of the week, but we fix them throughout the week. so this week is going to be just stellar.
So as to the highlights of the week, we've been doing a lot of something we call enlarging the vision. which means that if something falls through, we find the reason that we are there and we go out and look for those people that do want to hear the gospel. so anyway, tuesday night we had planned to take the bus 5 to do some porting. so we get to the bus stop, and it doesn't come for like 10 minutes, so we decide to do a little contacting around the bus stop while we wait. so we go out and contact some people, and have a couple of good contacts, but then as we are contacting someone, we thought we saw the bus 5 go past, so we finish the contact and go back to the bus stop and are looking at the schedule to see when the next one comes past, and while we have our back turned, the real bus 5 drives past haha. it was super frustrating cause we hadn't missed it after all, but we ended up missing it anyway cause there was no one there to stop it. so anyway, instead of getting annoyed or mad or anything, we sat down and said a prayer to ask what Heavenly Father wants us to do, and we decided to go contacting in centreville, cause the next bus didn't come for a long time. so we went out and starting contacting, and we had a couple of good contacts, but definitely the highlight was when we ran into an old ami. his name is arnaud le roi, and he is super cool, he's a guy in his 30s, who is christian but doesn't really have a church. We taught him once a long time ago, but ever since he has been super busy. so as we were walking along, i saw him walking along just on the other side of the tram tracks. so i run across the tram tracks quickly, cause there's a tram coming, and i say hi. so we talk to him for a bit and we had a really good conversation with him and we're gonna call him this week to see if we can see him. but it was just really cool to see that even though we missed the bus that WE thought we should take, HE had better plans for us, and as we gave ourselves up to his will, we saw that miracle.
another miracle that we saw this week happened last night. so we had been out porting down a little south of caen. so we had to start coming home a little early, cause we had to check train times for district meeting at the train station before we went home. so we left a little early, but as it turns out it took a lot less time than we thought, so we find ourselves at the gare (station) with about 30 minutes left and trying to decide what to do. cause it's pretty late, so usually the only crowd you see out at this time are the partyers and drunkards. so anyway we were going to get on the tram and take it to centreville to do a little contacting. but the tram comes, and it is just completely packed full. there is no room at all for us to get on. and the next tram doesn't come for 15 minutes, cause it's late on a sunday night. so instead, we decide just to walk home and contact on the way. so we set off, and our whole walk, we saw about 3 people. one was extra drunk, but the other two were sweet. so the first one was named olivier. he was a cool kid, in his late 20s, who played rugby, and we got to talk to him for a bit and we exchanged numbers to talk another day. so that was cool, but the second guy was even better. so we are walking home, and we finally get there, but we still have about 8 minutes to go before it's time to go home. so instead of going inside, we just start looking for people on our road. and honestly there is no one. it kinda felt at first like we were just wasting time. just staying out because we had to. but we kept looking, and we saw a guy in the distance who we thought might be drunk, but we say what the heck why not. so we go up to him, and as it turns out, he is not at all drunk and he's a guy that we were supposed to teach this week, but that didn't come. so we talked to him, and he asked us what happened for saturday? how come we didn't call him for our rdv? and we told him we did and as it turns out he hadn't saved our number, but we gave it to him, he saved it, and we fixed a rdv for this week. and he was really cool about it and he seemed like he was excited for our rdv. so it was super cool just to see those perseverance points. we kept working until 9 o clock exactly, and the lord blessed us for it by making us run into this old ami. it was gnarly.
as to all of our amis, everyone is doing well. except one. remember how i told you last week that steve could choose either of two paths now? one he can want to change his life, or two he can decide it's impossible and he doesn't want to, and we're pretty sure he chose the second... we saw him once this week, and it was crazy how much he had changed. his countenance had just completely changed and instead of being the happy person that he was before, he had something dark about him this time... so we talked to him about what we can do to help him change, and he kinda just got defensive and i'm pretty sure he doesn't have the desire that he needs to stop. so anyway, we had a rdv with him later on in the week, and he didn't show up or answer his phone or anything. then he didn't come to church on sunday, so idk what he's up to. we've been trying with him, but we don't really know what to do anymore. we'll see. anyway, as to good news, jude, another nigerian guy who is here trying to get his papers, we fixed a baptismal date with him this week! he's going to get baptized the 28th of october. so he's excited for that. it was funny cause the day of stanley's baptism he came up to us and asked us if he could get baptized with stanley, but we explained to him he had to come to church and get the lessons and stuff so he said okay i want to so we saw him a couple of times this week, and he's preparing to get baptized.
on a sadder note, this week, we saw a less active guy from sierra leone, and he really opened up to us why he doesn't come to church anymore. he said that he feels that the ward doesn't care about him. he was sick for 2 months after his baptism, and no one came to see him. and he's been a member for about 2 years now and he has had one person come to visit him. it was a really frustrating towards the ward rdv. we've kinda decided that they are not going to see a baptism of anyone but nigerians and sierra leonians until they learn how to fellowship these people and love them. so we talked to our first councelor in the bishopric about it and he gave a sweet testimony this sunday about how we need to love these people and they were a lot better after that. but's it's hard. they are great people and i love them a ton, it's just that they haven't understood exactly. i think that they are going to do better though. hopefully.
anyway, that's a little our week here in caen! saturday is transfers, so we'll be finding out what's happening for the coming months this weekend. i'll keep you posted. i think that i should be staying. elder johnson has only 2 left, and i think that he will be training for these last two. so i should have a new companion, but i think i'll be staying in caen. we'll see. anyway, hope that everything is going great at home. i love you all and pray for you everyday! have a great week!
