Monday, June 16, 2014

good days and better days

my dear family, friends, loved one's, members of the Rouen Branch who have found this blog, 

it has been one heck of a week. yet again. 

wednesday of this last week was THE WORST. haha. We had 5 RDV's planned out and confirmed for that day and every.single.one.of.them fell through. by the last one soeur berge and I just looked at each other and started cracking up. we had been anticipating such a good day lessons-wise, but in the end...nothing. it's okay though. it was still a great day and we met some interesting people.  

thursday was such a CONTRAST. everything thursday just seemed to go our way. we began our day by teaching Myrielle, a new ami who was found by the other sisters. She is from Benin and so awesome. We talked about how prayer is a conversation with our Heavenly Father and she agreed with everything and committed to start praying to know if the things we teach her are true. I have really high hopes for her. Then we taught Elodie. she is AWESOME. we met her in town a couple of weeks ago and she told us that she met a friend on her study abroad in Canada who is a member of the church and would love to learn more. She is majoring in English and so she speaks perfectly. She preferred that we teach her in it because she is preparing for an oral exam next week and thought it would be great practice. Man, was that hard or what? We are so used to teaching in French that we felt like we had to rely on the Spirit even more for us to get to right words out in English. I guess it worked because Elodie really seemed to grasp the magnitude of the Restoration more than any other person I've ever taught. She was just like "HOLD UP, we have a PROPHET!! I need to know what he has to say!" It was awesome. We are going down to Dieppe to visit her this week before she goes over to England for a few months. She already agreed to meet with the missionaries over there. She told us that she was going to send a FB message to her friend from Canada tonight telling him that she knew who Joseph Smith was now. Haha. He probably wet his pants. Right after Elodie we taught Ludivine with Soeur Barnjak. We talked about to Gospel of Jesus Christ...faith, repentance, baptism, the gift of the holy ghost, enduring to the end...and Ludivine really opened up to us about her worries about baptism. She is concerned that her family is going to reject her. Soeur Barnjak was the BEST person to have there for that because she shared a really touching story about how her husband joined the church and his family wasn't super happy, but how they eventually came around. In the end, Ludivine asked to see the baptismal font, and said..."oh, okay so I will get baptized here"...I think that is a good sign. :) After that we taught Leila, the mom of the Madagascan family and it went awesome and she is really progressing well. And after that we taught our girl Rachel with Soeur Loemba. Hello, powerhouses. We talked about the Gospel of Jesus Christ and committed Rachel to baptism on the 28th of this month :) She said a big YES and then pulled out her work schedule to make sure that it would be okay. It was! We are hoping that her 11 year old daughter and husband can join her on that day! :) 

yeah, so I'm pretty much convinced that wednesday had to happen in order for thursday to be THAT good. i am to the point where i literally get excited when i have a hard day because I KNOW without a doubt that a good one is going to follow. that's just how it seems to work. 

the rest of the week was awesome. to be brief, we...
-gave Leila a tour of the church! which is a huge step for her! now she knows where it is and what it is like. 
-had a FHE chez la famille Barnjak with Ludivine. It was PERFECTION thanks to that wonderful family. We talked about commandments in general and how they are there to bless us and then taught the 10 commandments with our hand signs. haha. we had so much fun and Ludivine really hit it off with the family!  
-had an awesome DMB meeting. why? well, Ludivine had had some questions about why blacks couldn't have the Priesthood, yadda yadda and we really didn't know how to respond. well, our DMB is a huge African man and has one of the strongest testimonies ever so we decided to ask him what to say. Well turns out he has studied this topic enormously and bore one of the most powerful testimonies I have ever heard on how the church is not racist and has never been. It brought me to tears. Basically, I didn't have a testimony of this before. Now I do. We are sending Ludivine straight to him. 
-ERIC. such a miracle!! We were coming home on the bus Saturday night and I noticed that the man in front of us just kept turning around and staring at us, so I asked him if he had ever heard of the church. "In fact, I've been to Salt Lake City" Ah, bon? After that we had a great conversation about the church and the restoration/priesthood and asked him if he had ever been to one of our church meetings. He said no, so we invited him to come. AND HE ACTUALLY DID! And HE loved it!! We are going back to teach him about the Book Of Mormon this week. 

Yeah. It was a great week already and on top of that we PLAYED TENNIS this morning with the Barnjak's and Anderson and then ate a yummy lunch at their house. Basically, I love them to pieces. 

Well family I sure do love you. You are such a blessing. 

je vous embrasse, 
soeur johns