November 7, 2011

Salut!
Another week in Bergerac over! I can't believe I've been here since the beginning of June. That flew by! We're already getting close to Christmas. Crazy. Well we had a great week! We ended up doing alot of finding with a lot of appointments falling through and such. It was great though. We're really concentrating on finding a family to teach. We've fixed the goal to find one this week and we're praying and working hard for that. A little update on people that people have been asking me about. Madame T just kind fell off the face of the earth. We've passed by a few times but she never answers anymore. It's ok, it'll happen one day, in the Lord's timing.
Last week I forgot to write about a funny experience. Last Sunday we were sitting in Sunday school when the fire alarm went off. I thought for sure that G had set if off haha but he was in hte primary room so that wasn't possible. We all walked outside immediately to get away from the noise, and the first thign we saw were two Jehovah's witnesses walking around the back parking lot and then there were like 4 or 6 more out near the front of the church. Hmm.... I'm not going to assume anything, but I guess we could say it was a little fishy.
Anyways, this week we saw a miracle. Her name is Mme F and we've been teaching her for a month or so now and she lives in La Force which is about 10 km from Bergerac. She's always been against coming to church, but on Monday we went there with the Branch pres and his wife and taught the Sabbath Day. As soon as we brought up the subject seh went "geeze, you really want me to come to church dont you!" and we said yes, of course haha. But we had a great lesson and the Spirit changed her and she just all of a sudden became open to the idea and at the end we invited her and she said she she wouldn't say yes or no. I asked her what could keep her from coming and she thought for a few seconds and said "well... I guess nothing really!" Then she accepted to come adn said she couldn't not come at least once and see what it's like. Sure enough (even though she had slept in) she got to sacrament meeting sunday morning! It was such a miracle for us because we have some great investigators right now, but it seems like all of them have the hardest time coming to church and all have something blocking them whether that be their schedule or a desire. I've never had such a problem in my mission getting investigators to come to church. That was a great tender mercy we were blessed with this week though.
This week we developed a new technique that we call "musiking". As much as we love contacting and talking with people, when you do it a lot, it can get old and hard to keep the excitement. So we decided to put my portable speaker and my ipod in my backpack and put the Motabs on. It was just loud enough that anyone within 5 to 10 feet or so could hear the hum of motabs. It was so awesome! . People we talked to could hear it but the looked super confused like they were wondering where the music was coming from haha. It was great. The best part was that as soon as we did it we had more success in contacting! We were having a good time and enjoying being missionaries. You've gotta do stuff like that every once in awhile to boost your morale and keep things interesting. And doing that helped us find people that were interested because we were having more fun and enjoying the work more. Plus we were inviting the Spirit into our contacts with God's choir playing in the background :). Good times!
I went on exchange this week with Elder Dorton which was a blast as usual. We went out and visited that Irish family again in Beynac. We ate hot dogs with them. I thought it was ironic that I went all the way to Beynac France to eat a hot dog. Anyways, it was pooring rain all day that day, and poor Elder Willett and Elder Caldwell in Bergerac biked to an outer city 4km away in the pouring rain and got soaked! The guy was there though and became a new investigator. He believes in some prophet that lives in Bordeaux and gave us his book of revelation. We'll see what we can do there. Only in Bergerac!
We've been seeing B, Sister B's dad who is an ex catholic bishop who sits in his house all day smoking and drinking with his boyfriend. He's one of my favorite people ever. We're really trying to help him because he has such a good heart, he's just so taken over by addiction though, it's terrible. When we pray, we always have to stand up, because that's how the catholics do it apparently, but this time at the end of the lesson I told him we were going to pray on our knees. He flipped out saying "Oh la la! ça ne va pas la tete!" and said he would never do it! But Elder Willett and I got on our knees and waited for him for 5 minutes and finally he got on his knees too (after a few expletives) and said the prayer. The Spirit was so strong and he was so humbled, and so was I. There's power in a kneeling prayer, and we're starting to invite all our investigators to do it during our lessons. It was a miracle!
We were in the newspaper last Thursday under an article about evangelist churches. They had a pic of us in front of our chapel and it was pretty legit. The article wasn't that great and she mixed things up a bit about what we said in the interview, but that's ok. Some people we've contacted said they saw us in the paper, so that was cool haha. In the article, they said that we believe the prophets are living, instead of we believe in a living prophet. So everyone probably thinks we believe that Moses and Abraham are still walking around somewhere.
Last night L, our investigator who is half catholic half muslim, accepted a baptismal date for Christmas eve! Woo hoo! We were so excited! He's the man. The work is going great here. Things are a little slower than they've been in the past, but it'll come. I know this is the Lord's work and not mine, so I can't complain about the results if I'm doing my best to be an effective instrument in His hands to bring forth His work. I can always do better, of course, but I'll be working on that my whole life. I know the church is true and that Heavenly Father has truly called prophet in our days and that He inspires all his servants. The Priesthood is on the earth, and by its power and the power of the Spirit this work will keep rolling forward all around the world. Have a great week! I love you!
Elder Tudor