La Cuisine!

bonjour tout le monde!

alors aujourd'hui, j'ai décidé d’écrire toute cette lettre en français, et si vous voulez, vous pouvez la traduire. ça marche? chouette.

alors cette semaine s'est bien passée. nous avons vu les belle choses et nous étions bien bénis. c'est sûr que notre père céleste est là pour nous pendant chaque instant!

okay well i figure that you will be too lazy to translate, so i'll continue in english from here. this week was great. so as you can see from the title there, this week was a cuisine week. cooking! elder reed and i have been having a lot of fun trying out new recipes and trying to make them work with all the french stuff we have. it's gnarly. we use butter instead of shortening, and sometimes we really have to go searching for the right ingredients, but it's so fun. we made some really good sugar cookies the other day and since i've been here in caen i've made chocolate chip cookies like 200 times, so we're pretty much professional at that. and the ward loves us for it haha. they were asking for recipes and everything. go fight win! so yeah, we're probably going to be famous sometime and going to go work at a famous restaurant when we get home, but we'll see. so if you happen to have any more quick recipes that you want to sent me, that'd be greatly appreciated :)

so the highlight of the week was definitely the baptism this weekend. the sisters had a baptism of a lady named glory. she is from nigeria (by the end of our stay here we are going to have a nigerian branch started haha) but she has been here for a couple of years now and speaks french and everything. but she looooooves the sisters. so she was baptized this weekend, and guess who did the baptism?? this is the coolest thing ever. AUGUSTINE! our recent convert! cool huh?? we were so stoked. when we heard that she was getting baptized, we told the soeurs (sisters) that they should have augustine do it. and he did. he did so well too. it was so cool to see. reminds me of cedric all over again. too good. so that was amazing, and there were a lot of amis there at the baptism from the sisters and us, and it was just great. with the three baptisms that we have had here recently, it feels like the ward is finally getting excited about missionary work again. so that's good. we're just going to keep it up! and we have 2 baptisms schedules here, one of ours and one for the soeurs on december 1, so that'll be great.

speaking of the baptism on december 1st, raphael is doing really well. he came to church this week, and it was way good. he stayed for all three hours, and he had a good time i think. we had a couple of interesting talks in sacrament meeting, but i don't think he took them the wrong way and he seemed to have a good time. what was even better is that we had a young adult meeting after, and someone told raphael to go to it too, so he said okay and he was there for it and we talked about fhe for tomorrow and all that and he exchanged phone numbers with some people and voilà! it was sweet. he can't come to fhe this week though because he has classes until late, but next week should be good. he's a good kid and our ward is doing a good job. that's honestly exactly what they need here too. cause we have a lot of young single sisters in the ward so we're gonna get him hitched with one of them haha. it'll be great.

oh so i don't know if i have told you yet, but guess what's happening this week on friday?? we have a conference in versailles for all of the missionaries, and guess who's coming and speaking??? Elder Andersen! cool huh??? so we're going to get to hear a real live apostle speak to us, maybe even in french, cause he served his mission here, and was a mission president here, so that'll be so cool. we're excited. i'll tell you what he tell us next week. it'll be stellar i'm sure.

another exciting event of the week was our trip to IKEA. that place is ridiculous. it's soooooo big. it was like a maze. we found what we wanted, and then like 3 hours later we had finally bought it because we had to go through the rest of the maze, and then we had to find what we wanted downstairs and it was just la galère. okay maybe i exagerated a tiny bit, but it was still pretty crazy. honestly that place kills me. i have a hard enough time making decisions like that when there are only a couple of choices, but there are like 300 different choices for each piece of furniture there. i would've died if i didn't know what i was getting beforehand. but on the bright side, we now have some nice new desks for our appartment and we threw out the old dead ones that only stood up when we pinned it against the wall with another desk haha. fun stuff.

so here's the question of the week, how do you help an alcoholic?? so i don't know if i told you about quentin last week, but he was a kid that we a couple of weeks ago and had a rdv with him for last saturday, but then he didn't show up and he didn't answer his phone and we thought he blocked our number and all. so anyway, he called us last monday. he called and said hey i'm at the church, can i see you. haha so we said okay and ran there to the church and talked with him. he's a really good guy and he wants to change, he just hasn't yet. he is 27 years old and he has been an alcoholic for 10 years now. he drinks about 10 bottles a day. so our first couple of rdvs, he was still half drunk, but mostly there, and honestly, when you drink that much, i don't think that you are ever not at least a little drunk. poor guy. so anyway, we started off by telling him about the atonement and stuff, but i'm almost sure that that won't be enough. we need to figure out how to help him temporally too. but i don't know what to do about it. we lost contact with him again this weekend, because he told us that whenever he gets too drunk he doesn't leave his appartment and he definitely doesn't want to come to the church and disrespect it and all, that's why he missed our first rdv. so yeah, that's his situation at the moment, but i don't really know what to do to help him. they don't have any church programs here in france for helping with these kinds of things, and i don't know enough about it to be able to tell him what to do. telling him to stop cold turkey will probably send his body through withdrawals and such so i don't know exactly what to do. so that's our dilemna at the moment. we'll see though.

okay so just to close, this week we had a really cool experience going to visit this member that goes to the coutance branch. we have a member that comes to caen that lives out there, so we went to eat at his house and then after we went to visit this person. so his story, he is an older man who just lost his wife about a month ago, and he's still getting used to life alone. he is such a good man though and has such a strong testimony. we got to go over and visit him and he was just so happy and told us about his life and everything. then he started talking about his wife, and you could just feel the love in his words. so we got to talk about the blessings of the gospel and how we know that we will see them again, and i shared a scripture in Alma 28:12, that is such a good scripture about death, the whole chapter is good. and then he gave us some counsel. he said "Find the right one, and love her with all your strength, and she will give you back that love" gotta love getting marriage advice on the mission haha. but it was so sincere and i just realized again why i am on a mission. to tell people about this great news that life isn't meaningly. there is more after death, and we will be able to see our loved ones again. what greater message is there?

well, anyway, that's about all for the week. hope everything is going good chez vous! i love you all and hope you have a great week!
bisous!