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