Jakes Journey to France

I don't know about you but I'm feelin 22

Bonjour tout le monde!

Today is my 22 month mark.. so that's why I put that hahah

Ok so last Monday we went to a place called Arcachon. We took a ton of pictures and videos but I don't have the patience to send all of them by email. It was super cool though! Because it's after October 1st, we're allowed to go to the beaches and stuff. And not too far from Arcachon is this huge sand dune up against the Atlantic Ocean. I don't think very many missionaries in our mission get to see both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean! But here's a few...

Arcachon

Tuesday we had zone conference with president brown, our zone, and the Toulouse zone. It was a super cool conference and something really cool happened. Zone conference as pretty different for me... because I am now somehow the oldest of the six ZLs that were there, I was asked to conduct the meeting. So that was weird sitting on the stand during the presentations. But it was cool because I could watch the facial expressions of people.

Zone Conference

President said that he was having a hard time on deciding what to talk about at the conference. So he was just like "what do you want to talk about? What questions do you have?" He actually talked a lot about what going on in the mission right now. Not very many missionaries know what's going on. I don't want to go into too deep of details to make anyone worry (Bordeaux is really safe.. not much to worry about). But currently we have the zone leaders from Aix-en-Provence (like 4 or 5 hours away by train) serving here in Bordeaux because there was terrorist threats and suspicions. There was suspicions on terrorist activity that would be targeted to the church. So president played it safe and took both the zone leaders and STLs out of Aix En Provence. Church was also cancelled, which is once in a million for church being cancelled due to terrorist suspicion.

So basically president was getting our inputs on whether or not these missionaries should go back to this ville. After talking about it, we all thought that it would be fine to put them back in.

We then were taught by the APs, had lunch, and then us, the Toulouse zone leaders, and the Aix zone leaders presented. During the Aix zone leaders presentation, they were talking about samuel the lamanite. They were sharing the story of how he was forced out of his city and he almost didn't return to it because of the danger there. But he decided to return anyway because he felt like there were people that needed him. And so he turned back and went and prophesied unto the people.

Right when president Brown heard this, he immediately stood up and interrupted them. He said "Samuel the lamanite was forced out of his city... but he returned." He then looked to these zone leaders that were forced out of there city and said "Are you ready to return?"

It was super cool! He pretty much received the revelation right there. He said he was going to confirm his feelings later, but it was really cool how president received that right there during the conference. Everyone in the room was mind-blown. It was so cool!

I'm super grateful for President and sister Brown. They are the perfect people to lead this mission right now!

Arcachon

That evening, we went to a members home named Oihab so we could go home teach someone. On our way, we met a Chinese guy named Junjie. We became his friend really fast and got his number! We'll hopefully see him this week. The members czar actually broke down so we didn't end up going. But we stayed and visited him for a little bit. Oihab is a professor at a private business school here in Bordeaux, so it was cool talking to him about business stuff. Afterward, we got on the bus and we started talking to another Chinese guy. His name is Ling and we also connected with him really fast! We're going to see him as well this week. It turns out that the sisters found two Chinese friends as well, so we're going to do some sort of Chinese game night this week or next week. It's super fun working with international people!

Wednesday we had a long rdv with Emmanuel, a recent convert of about a year because he's have some struggles. We hope we were able to help him!

Thursday we had an exchange where we went with all four of us and painted inside a members home. It took quite a while but it was good. We had English class that evening and there were 9 people that showed up! There were four nonmembers and 5 members, so that was pretty cool. Especially for it being the second time, it was a really good turnout. We even got a phone call to the church this week with some random guy asking if he can come.

Friday we helped some members clean the chapel in the morning.. and then we did a bunch of random tasks. That evening we went porting (door knocking) for about two hours. We met this German professor (who speaks English). He kept asking questions to try to stump us or find a fault with our doctrine (it wasn't aggressive, he was very nice), but all the questions were fairly easy to answer just by testifying about the doctrine we know.. for example, he asked "are children born with sin?" And so that was pretty easy to explain. He like our response a lot especially because he was a father. He has two young kids. He wasn't interested to take another rdv because he's a pretty busy guy, but we gave him a restoration brochure and our card. He seemed open and humble enough to read it and pray about it.

Saturday we had ward council in the morning and it was one of the most effective ward councils in my mission! We talked a lot about the talk from President Uchtdorf called "Learn from Alma and Amulek." We are going to start focusing on finding our Amuleks in the ward. It was perfect because there is a recent convert that is kind of struggling because he doesn't have many friends in the ward or a calling, but the ward council talked about helping him and giving him a calling. It was exactly what we wanted!

Arcachon

After we went to samedi sport and had some fun playing soccer. I've really started to enjoy soccer again. I say again because I played when I was like five years old... Hahah in the evening, we had a family home evening about the temple. Our ward mission leader did a presentation on the temple and it was really nice.

Sunday we had church and our homie Jordan came. We were able to fix a lot of rdvs with members for the week so that will be really cool! After we had lunch with Frere Defranchi, and we had dinner with the Moutalamaya family.

Voilà!

I love the mission. The church is true, and I don't have any more time.

Love you all. Have a great week :)