Catch the Vision

Soeur Lethuaire and Soeur LamYam

     Stephanie!

I found the "San France" ;)

Cher Everyone,

This week was great! Soeur Wynn and I were so blessed. This week we were able to see Stephanie twice. Man do we love this little girl!! She is just so ready to be baptized! She loves the church and loves the Spirit she feels so much. There is something so special about working with little kids. They can feel the Spirit so clearly and identify it without problem. I love watching that. We got to play some games to teach her some commandments. It's so fun that me and my comp are so in love with kids and so we always do fun things to teach the kids but the best part is, we end up using it with adults as well! Hahaha it's great. I love working with this girl! It's so great to see how fast she progresses though. Her mom is so incredibly proud and feels so happy knowing the decisions her daughter is making. We pray this will bring her mom back into full activity. Stephanie makes her mom read her scriptures with her every day before going to bed and her mom always teases us that we give too much homework! Haha but September 7th can't come soon enough! We shared her progress for our missionary moment of the week in Relief Society and Stephanie's mom was just beaming the whole time. She is so proud. Also Stephanie is dying to meet Kirstie. I told her I have a sister and I told her she would meet her when you come to pick me up. She is SUCH a sweet girl.

We got to have our interviews with President this Thursday. So here is a funny story, we knew about our interviews like a month in advance but the day of, we went up to Chelles, which took us an hour and a half to get up there. We went up there to find a referral we had received, but after we had just about arrived at the address, I looked at the phone and realized our interviews would be starting in 40 minutes and we were on a bus faaaaaarrrrrrr away from the train station and far away from the church where the interviews were. In a moment of terror, we hopped off the bus and started running to the train station. We were a good 4 miles from the station and we just walked/ran for a good 35 mintues back and then luckily got a couple of trains to line up and arrived only 20 minutes late (no worries, we switched our times with our roommate Sisters) but holy cow it was so stressful. We showed up sweating after going nuts for an hour and a half trying to get there. It was funny though. Interviews were life-changing of course.

I just love President Poznanski and Soeur Poznanski! We had our interviews with both of them. I did them both in French..which was scary, but I did it and I'm so glad Heavenly Father helps with language barriers. If I was learning french on my own I would literally know nothing. It's all the Lord. 

That night we had a huge impression to call the family Lethuaire. We had been asked to find a family like them that we could baptize and bring into the church and so we thought, what better place than to ask them straight up? So we gave them a call. They told us they would pray and think about it and by Friday we will go to their house and there will be someone there. So we went out to do our part as well. We ported their neighborhood of course. It was the only logical thing to do. We did find a family and we will see what happens...so much excitement in missionary work! It's all a big mystery!

The mission, after the interviews, has not been the same. Every day we wake up with a vision of what we want and we go out and fight for it. We have seen nothing but miracles since then. I know we were good missionaries before but now we have caught the vision again. We are on the search and we will not stop until we find a family!!!

Saturday was a pyscho day. It started off by helping a crazy less-active hoarder clear out some of her apartment, who was strangely obsessed with me and wouldn't stop talking to me. She was weird. Next we were picked up by this 80 something year old woman in need of eye surgery this november who nearly hit 40 cars and walls and stuff...so scary! I've never prayed during an entire car ride, but hey there's a first for everything. But she took us out for a 200 euro lunch no big deal!!! Haha she is really rich and doesn't get out much so...but it was a good time!  Right after we met up with Claudia. Wow...such an incredible lesson!!!!! The spirit just knows how to teach, it's nuts watching these people change based on the spirit that witnesses to their hearts that these things are true. Claudia is our amie who came for the first time to our church to Maria's baptism and then to church the next day. We've been teaching her ever since! Saturday the Spirit witnessed to her that she needed to be baptized so me and Soeur Wynn gave her everything we had and poured our hearts and souls out to her. We picked a day and then she was going to pray about that and come to church with that on her mind...to be continued...

The rest of Saturday was awesome, seeing Godwith who is so ready and also Stephanie, our two little girls. We love them! We hope that Godwith can be baptized the same day since they are friends with such similar situations.

Yesterday we fasted to find this family and to help Claudia know she was ready to be baptized. We are on the search. We know the Lord has prepared a family for us so we just have to do our part and ask for His help and then we will cross paths. It was a day of miracles. We had Stephanie, Susan and Claudia all at church with us and it was super awesome. Claudia was just showing all the signs of being ready. Susan, we are unsure still, but we will find out more this week. But Claudia is just so genuine in her search it's amazing! After church we pulled her in a room really quickly and talked about baptism and how she was feeling. She said she wants to be baptized but not yet. We talked and bore witness to her and finally we fixed a date. October 19th!!! We have faith that it will probably be before that, but this was what she felt comfortable with and we are just so thrilled for her!!! The miracles didn't stop there. We felt inspired to make cookies and use those as an excuse to go pass by a family we met this week on the street.

We originally met the mom and her 3 daughters on the way to an appointment. It was interesting because we got on the bus and the doors were broken so everyone in the bus had to switch to a different one (that took like 10 minutes) then when we got off the bus and  a mom got off as well with her 3 beautiful little girls all dressed in cute dresses and carrying groceries, helping their mom (so cute). I just started talking to the little girls a little because Soeur Wynn was on the phone. After Soeur Wynn got off the phone the lady called back out to us and asked us why we were in France (our accents are very american). While we helped her take her groceries to her house we had a great conversation. After a few minutes of walking with them I felt a tiny hand slip into mine and I look down at one of the girls with THE biggest smiles I've ever seen. She was absolutely darling and I absoluetly love this family.

She showed us where she lived but she wasn't answering our calls. We felt good about it anyways and so we went. When we arrived, she let us in and we ended up having an INCREDIBLE lesson with them on the spot! We bore solemn witness of the Book of Mormon and the Dad (who used to be catholic and then was jehovah's witness and now is lost) was so happy to hear about this book. He said it made so much sense that the Lord would help us to better interpret the Bible by having another witness of the same gospel. He absolutely was amazed by this and was so excited to read it. The mom (who is catholic) also seemed very intrigued. The kids just adored us to pieces it was hilarious. We fell in love with this little family and will see them again on Tuesday morning- tomorrow! Soeur Wynn said the closing prayer, just very simply blessed this family and the home and thanked the Lord for bringing us together and ended in the name of Jesus Christ. As i said amen the dad looked up at me and said he hadn't heard a prayer like that in 20 years (since the last time he met with mormon missionaries). He was so touched and they are so excited for us to come back tomorrow! It was an incredible day filled with the Spirit and with miracles. There's just something about that family that just feels familiar to me. I didn't want to leave their apartment. Those kids are my new best friends!

Once again Satan tried to stop us last night on our way home. It's so interesting that on our way back from bringing this family the gospel he tried to stop us and scare us. Satan comes in many forms but right now for us, he's just trying to scare us. But we are representatives of Jesus Christ and satan has no power over us. We will never give in and never stop bringing people this pure joy.

This gospel is just so incredible and I'm so grateful for the opportunity I have to learn more and more each day about our Maker.. As we recognize the touch of the Master's hand in our lives more and more each day, He will bless us more and more. Gratitude is the way we return love to our Heavenly Father. He gives us so many blessings and it can get really hard to recognize them sometimes because He is the ultimate anonymous giver of gifts.

Oh how grateful I am for the Plan of Salvation. What a blessing it is to know our eternal potential and divine design. I just love this gospel so much and I'm so lucky I get to simply offer the gift of peace, joy, and healing powers of the atonement to all the beautiful people here in France.

God doesn't really need missionaries to spread His gospel. He could essentially do it without us, but it is my priviledge to wear the name of His church over my heart and I am filled with joy with the opportunity to love and serve my brothers and sisters as Christ Himself was.

The church is true!

Stay righteous, be true, be you!

Avec amour,

Soeur Berge