BONJOUR!
First off, wow so much baby news my brain is exploding! Congrats
to all especially my brother and ma sister in law! Babies are just beautiful!
Ok, so last monday night we had a cool miracle..we were trying
to find an address to pass by someone we found in the area book. While we were
crossing the street we saw this mom and her two daughters and I just felt
it..so we stopped them in the middle of a highway on a tiny cross walk thing
(hard to explain) and as we told them who we were the mom says, "We were
literally just in the middle of a conversation about God..where's your
church?" So cool! We ended up getting her number and address and prayed
with them in the middle of a highway..coolest experience ever. She didn't end
of coming to church or to our rdv but we are going to make it happen.
Tuesday we had exchanges. I was with Soeur Thibault and Soeur
Castillo was with Soeur Wynn (name ring a bell? :) It was such a fun exchange.
Soeur Thibault is just an incredible missionary and I'm so grateful for the
older missionaries in our mission who are just spiritual powerhouses and still
have so much enthusiasm about missionary work and the gospel.
We ended up going to see Gregory, the man we ported into my
first Sunday here in Rouen. He had so many questions about the Book of Mormon
and he was really intrigued by how we pray. I really hope we can set something
up and pass him to the elders, he really is a cool guy and the gospel will only
change his life for the better. We also stopped by my favorite people, Soeur
Panou and Barbara!! Love them!
Wednesday we met with Nina. She is so awesome. She has 2
daughters and a son. Her oldest daughter, Enricka is 16 and a member and comes
every Sunday. Nina wants to get baptized, but it's complicated with her
husband. We talked about families and how the gospel brings so much joy to our
families.
Thursday we saw LAURA. She is so solid. She is 20 and a student.
She is raelly interested in learning about religions. One of the members who is
on a mission now invited her and a bunch of his friends over to his house
before he left and they had the missionaries go and then they started teaching
Laura. So before I got here Laura had been reading the Book of Mormon and
saying how she agrees with the doctrine, but she just gets bad feelings and she
doesn't understand why. She wants it to be true and she likes it, but she is
just really confused. We shared some Mormon Messages with her and she was
really touched. We encouraged her to watch the Elder Bednar's message about
discerning light and receiving revelation and she said she would. We have been
praying so hard she will be touched by the Spirit and get her answers. She is
really cool and has such real desire.
Friday we went to a ville that it kinda far away to see an ami
named Lionilde. She is really cool and has the cutest little baby. We read 3
Nephi 11 together and the Spirit was really strong. She was supposed to be
baptized this weekend, but she hasn't been answering the elders in a while. The
elders passed her over to us now, so we are just going to figure it out with
her. It's so hard when people live so far from the church.
Later we had our meeting with our ward mission leader and he is
so awesome! This branch has so much fire to get the missionary work going it's
incredible! I love the energy and vision that our leader and our branch
president has.
Saturday we had a lot of lessons set up that pretty much all fell
through :( But it's ok because at the end we had an awesome Family Home Evening
with Nina and her family. We spent so long trying to figure out a fun thing to
do with the family and finally I remembered that one family home evening we did
when we had to cut out the shape of our feet and draw our faces on it..I just
remember it was so funny so we decided to do that and put a picture of Christ
out and talk about the attributes of Christ and how we can 'follow in his
footsteps' It was really fun and the feet people turned out really good. The
dad who isn't a member and a little hesitant about the church even
participated. We ended up having a huge discussion about forgiveness and there
was a little tension, but we only pray they were able to get something more out
of the lesson.
Sunday was so awesome. Sometimes it's a little hard to be
'spiritually fed' in a way you can when it's your first language, but Sunday
was the first time on my mission that I just felt so nourished by the word of
God and I felt like I personally grew and learned from the incredible people in
this branch. Frere Bitanga, our ward mission leader just gave the coolest
lesson about desire, hope, and faith and he is so incredible at breaking down
complicated concepts into a simple way that everyone understands and everyone
learns so much. A really cool comment by the elder's recent convert during the
class, "When the scriptures say we need to become as little children, we
need to think about how a little child learning to walk and taking it's first
steps. When a child learns to walk, there is always a parent with their arms
stretched forth for a baby to walk towards them. It's the same with our
celestial parents. We have to walk with faith, baby step by baby step and we
have to remember that Heavenly Father's arms are always stretched forth to us
beckoning us to walk by faith towards Him." I loved that and the more I
thought about it, the more I felt it is just so true. Heavenly Father loves us
and He is always calling for us to come to Him, but it depends on our steps of
faith to be close to Him.
Life is great in Rouen. Beautiful ville. Beautiful Branch.
Beautiful Gospel. Beautiful people waiting to hear the Jesus Christ is their
Savior and He LOVES THEM! Soeur Castillo and I are super excited for this week
to really weed through the amis and start focusing on finding new people to
bring coser to Christ. It's going to be a great week full of adventures!
Praying for you all so much! Love you all and thanks for the support! :)
GROS BISOUS
Soeur
Berge
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