Jakes Journey to France

POORLY PREPARED PIANO PLAYING

(note from the editor (mom) he has never had a piano lesson in his life haha, but can pick up playing by ear really well if he wants to learn a song, he probably should have had lessons)

Hello Fam and friends! Ok so for the subject line I decided I don't like counting transfers and weeks. I don't want a focus on the time; instead I will write nice alliterations of an event of the week. :)

LA MISSION FRANÇAISE DE LYON
So this week we had zone training. Our zone has changed a bit! So the whole focus of our meeting was on temples. President Roney had finished out his mission with a large focus on families and family history work (we call it project Elijah). Then President Brown has come into the mission, and he has had strong feelings to add the temple on to what President Roney left. So right now, the mission is working on immigrating Project Elijah and temples. We really want to have temples come up early in the process with our Amis! So this last week we've set some goals to include temples in a lot of the stuff that we do. Whether it's with our contacting, less actives, members, or Amis! So far it's gone okay. We're trying to figure out a good way to go about it. But we've had some good experiences with it. We have another meeting this week, so we are going to talk more about that!

Zone training

FAIRE DU CONTACTING
So.. Because our car has been having issues, we haven't used it at all this week. At first we thought we would have a really hard time without it. Which is partially true because we haven't been able to see Bridgitte or other people that we would really like to. BUT because of this, we've been able to do more contacting. We were able to do a lot of finding this week! The highlight of all this finding was this really nice family of 5 (almost 6). They are a very Christian family! Haha the dads name is Moïse (Moses in English) and then one of the sons names is Messie, and the others was Abraham. But they were very open to let us come over another time! So we're excited to teach them. It's nice because about a week ago we were praying to find a nice family of 5. The Lord answered our prayers by giving us this opportunity to share the message of the restored gospel to an amazing family. We're pumped :)

Also we went to do some porting (door knocking) with a girl in the branch, Julia! She's really cool. She's planning on going on a mission, so we invited her to come do some porting with us. It went over pretty well; we met some really nice people! It's different when we have someone who is actually French. She really helped out in situations when we're trying to get our American minds to make sentences and stuff haha. But it was pretty fun!

Porting with Julia

LES ÉCHANGES
So I went on an exchange this week with Elder Pittsenbarger. I went back to Rodez with him! We had a pretty good exchange. The Rodez elders are in the branch, so we all know each other pretty well. Their apartment is pretty cool; it's right outside the bid cathedral in Rodez. But we had some nice RDVs. We met up with Patrick, the guy who got baptized about two weeks ago, his sister, and then Frère Pascalin (Patrick's really good friend who is the 1st counselor in the Branch Presidency). But Patrick is trying to share the gospel with his sister, so that's super cool of him! He's a super elect guy. He just has so much joy in the gospel and he really loves it!

View from the Rodez Apartment

Later that night, we went to Frère Biargues house. Frère Biargues is an older guy that's probably in his 70s. He was baptized probably about a year ago. He's a super simple and humble man! We went over and he's been reading preach my gospel, so we just read with him and talked about it. Then after at we played some uno with him :)

LE BAPTÊME DE MATTIAS
So here is when I talk about my subject line alliteration. First off, the baptism of Mattias was last Saturday so we attended! Mattias is the son of the branch president. They did the baptism in their little village. It went really smoothly and there were quite a few nonmembers there! Some of the people from the village even came.

Now I'm gonna rewind a little back to 1st transfer Elder Steadman! Back in my first transfer, I wanted to learn how to play one of my favorite hymns, Souviens-toi. It's a hymn that is only in French. So there were random moments where I was able to practice a little bit; I got "good enough" to play the right hand just with memory. So here I was 4 transfers later. The opening song of the Baptismal service was Souviens-toi. The piano player had not arrived yet but we were starting anyway. The branch president, who was conducting, asked if someone could play piano. Jokingly I said to the member right next to me that I can play this song with my right hand. There was a member just in front of us that heard me, so she called out that I could play. The branch president was like "okay come up!" Haha so I went up and squeezed out four verses of this song on the piano. But again, I don't play piano haha. I was praying like the whole time I was up there. But I got through it and Elder Johnson said it was good!

D'AUTRES CHOSES

Our car (Susan) is still having issues. We started it this morning to see if we could take it to the garage, but then it slowly just started shutting down and all the electricity stopped. We think there are problems with the alternator. So we're still working on getting that fixed! We'll see.. For now we'll still be doing contacting and stuff.

Today is Elder Johnson's 21st birthday! We're in Toulouse for the day. We're going to go do a birthday lunch with the Chinese speaking team and the zone leaders. We're probably going to go eat sushi or Chinese food! The tonight I'm going back to Albi with Elder Zhu. He's the first mainland chinese missionary to serve in our mission! He just got here like two weeks ago. So I'll go on exchange with him and that will be fun!