October 18, 2010

Dear family!

Another week in Valenciennes, even colder than last week. My boots have been worn 3 days out of the week. Not quite in my heavy coat yet though, there's an upside :)

We hardly got to see any of our amis this week. everyone is getting "busy." We did some finding and had 2 interesting experiences. we were porting and this kid answered, we were talking about the purpose of life. We told him we had a message and he said that he wasn't interested. everyone says they're not interested, (They don't even know what the message is). I took a few minutes said "the message is this; that God is your Heavenly Father and he wants you to be happy. He created this earth for you to come and learn and come back and live with Him. He has provided a way for you to come back and be even happier than before or than you could ever be here on this earth. are you still not interested?" He said that he wasn't. I could at least walk away knowing that I had done my part, that I had given him a taste, along with our testimonies.

The other experience was later on down the street we saw this kid on a scooter and talked with him about faith and how we get faith and keep it. We fixed a rendezvous’ for Sunday and gave him a book of Mormon. I called him on Saturday night to confirm and he said that he read the book and didn't feel anything. I told him to keep reading and praying and that we would talk next Saturday and he agreed. We had contacted him on Friday and I think he had just read the introduction. I hope he keeps his commitment, if he does he will find what he doesn't know he's looking for.

Saturday was a big big day. It was Alexandre’s baptism. We went to go catch our train to find out that it was cancelled due to a strike that has been going on for the past week and a half because the president wants people to retire at 72 instead of 60. We were freaking out a bit because we have no car and all our members live forever away and we had a special musical number to practice. We did get a train about 40 minutes later putting us behind schedule, we still got there a bit before and practiced. A big thing is singing the hymns: Joseph Smith's First Prayer, Oh My Father, or If You Could Hie to Kolob to the tune of Come Thou Fount. After we practiced it was 2:00 and we hadn't taken the pictures. I went in and grabbed Alexandre and Xavier to take the picture. The bishop came up to me and said "we need to respect the hour." I just kind of wished that he would have more understood how much the baptism pictures mean to me. We took the pictures quick, I didn't even notice that Xavier is a dork with a toothpick in his mouth and not smiling and my hair is curled but you can't really tell :( Either way, the baptism went well. It only took Xavier 2 times to baptize him :) Very heart wrenching :) Alexandre bore his testimony and talked about how he wants to go on a mission! The best. Sunday he was confirmed and received the priesthood :). Hopefully Francoise will follow tout suite.

Saturday was also a big day for Kai, Belinda and Xavier, all three of them received their patriarchal blessings! Xavier said it was really really cool, Kai said it was really powerful with tears in his eyes and Belinda was just oh so excited :) Very good day. My day also got more exciting when I heard Xavier speaking English and was like hey, why are you speaking English? h\He said he was practicing because he wants to go through the temple in America so that Soeur Curran and I can go! He wouldn't tell me if he picked a temple to go to, but he said he had looked at the Mesa and Orlando, where we live.
That would be the coolest ever!

Very good weekend, looking forward to a week of birthday eating...I might have let it slip to a couple people it is Soeur Kohler's birthday on Friday. she is rooting for Lyla to be born then.

Love you family!