Rockin Baptism!

YO!

    This was an incredibly, wonderfully, difficult week! All of our amies, pretty much all of them, were sick so the average of 10 or so planned rendezvous turned into two or three.....which means LOADS of porting and contacting.  This has become slightly harder recently because I am the only one speaking most of the time. However, I must say I am very proud of my companion because he is getting better and better every day! I can get him to start conversations at the door and he is starting to get used to it, but I still haven't gotten him to contact someone yet. He'll get it soon though! Another thing he has done that I was SUPER proud of, was  during a lesson with Damien we were teaching about the priesthood to kinda prepare him to be ordained a priest soon, and I asked Elder Costner to explain the organization of the Aaronic priesthood.  Not an easy question to answer in English.  He struggled with a few words and paused here and there, but it was great! I love seeing him progress its cool! One cool/not cool at first experience we had contacting this week happened after we had been contacting for an hour already and nobody would even talk to us, but we had to go to a rendezvous so we headed out to take the bus.....when we got there he must have forgotten and suddenly are day became pretty open .....again. We went to go take the next bus back to the downtown area, but I felt like we should keep walking instead.....so we did. We stopped everyone that we passed and the second lady, Annie, let us talk to her!!! I taught her about the ministry of Christ, the great apostasy, and the wonderful restoration of His church by the prophet Joseph Smith. I told her about the blessings that came from the restoration, notably the Book of Mormon. She took a copy and we exchanged numbers and bam! new potential amie! Yeah spirit! We also have found two people porting and we have a full list of potentials that we need to contact!! I have found that finding potentials isn't the hard part.  It's turning potentials into investigators!! But we're weeding through the list and hopefully we can pick some new people up as well!

     OK,  now the baptism!!! Damien was just beaming!! You could tell that he was feeling the spirit big time! His brother and sister's were there and we had three other amies there as well. Armelle in particular was super touched by the baptism!! Today we are going running again with Damien and we are going to teach his family as well!! Right now he is playing the role of brother and father because their father decided to walk out on them when Damien was only three.  He is left to take care of everyone when mom is not home. I hope his mom will be there today but we shall see!

    Ummmm, things are going well, I am a bit tired but that is normal as a missionary and I love my mission and hope I can keep the fire going!!

Love all of you and I pray for y'all all the time!

Elder Lyons

Wow!

    This week was surreal and unfortunately I have been running back and forth from Paris and doing my best to keep up with everything.  Unfortunately I do not have much time to write today!

    FIRST OFF!!! Big news!  Damien has gotten his answer and he is ready for the baptism!!!! He is super excited and everyone is pumped here!! He will be baptized this coming Saturday and I will be either confirming him or baptising him.... I can't remember which.   What a great experience for my new comp!!! BTW His name is Elder Costner and he is from New Mexico and he is super cool! We are doing great and I am trying to figure out how to teach him a language that I don't even know too well, he he he! No it's great and OOH other great news, Damien has already started sharing the gospel with his family and now his sister wants to be baptized too!!!! I am too excited to really explain with an e-mail!
     Well our amies our progressing very well and Armelle is getting SO close to baptism. She's just struggling a little with trying to forgive herself and to not take things out on herself....sounds familiar. God is funny. I was able to relate with her very well and share some really touching experiences I had in Dunkirk. I was able to tell her how true charity for others starts with loving ourselves and having a testimony that we are truly Gods children and that he loves us SOO much!!   She is doing much better!!
We even found a new guy porting for the first time on Elder Costner's part, and are starting to pick up a few I already found with Elder Fisher!! Things are great and I loves you tons and I am sorry this is so stinking short.
LOVES and KISSES
Love Elder Lyons

Training and Staying in Limoges

 So... yes it is a new transfer, and of course I will be staying and getting a brand new comp......really new actually! I will be training and I will also still be trying to manage the whole district leader thing. Yep, crazy! President must be really lost right now he he! Well, in any case I will be dropping off my dead comp in Paris and we will be getting up at 5 in the morning to catch the train on time so that we can both get to the mission home to pick up mon bleu.

    I got mommas package and I loved the heart scriptures, legit!!!!    I can't believe that Chris is gonna be freezing his booty off at the big red leaf in two days!!EXCITING

    Well this week was pretty exciting we found lots of new people from contacting and  porting.   Unfortunately, one of them just wants to be our friend, and another one just wants to bible bash with us.  Even though all we did was testify (without using scriptures to "prove" she was wrong).  Even though she felt the spirit she painted incredibly flawed arguments to try and tell us that we were lost and being lead away from Christ because we supposedly like the BOM more than the Bible.......bad rendezvous. HOWEVER, it was interesting because we brought Damien with us, and it was actually a good experience for him. He saw what it was like to see someone who tried to contend with the scriptures and teach by their own knowledge rather than teaching by the spirit and recognizing that missionary work is Gods work. He even told us afterward that she had gone way beyond the mark with the bible, and whether it's the Bible, Book of Mormon,  missionaries, priests, or whatever, none of them matter if we don't have a personal relationship with our Heavenly Father and pray to know what is true! GO DAMIEN!! That was a good day!  He was our mini missionary for the day and followed us to almost all the rendezvous.

  Another super cool thing happened as we organized a church activity for all of the amies. We made crepes and watched a church film on Wilford Woodruff's conversion.  We talked and shared comments afterwards. We had three amies there, and the coolest thing happened as we just kinda went around and presented ourselves to each other. The amies started by explaining how they met us and basically testified about how we had helped them.  One of of them in particular expressed how she hoped that she could be a member someday. Her name is Armelle. At the beginning of our rendezvous she was a little sad and really searching for God in her life. Now she even looks different! She's super happy, she loves going to church and loves talking with the members between and after the meetings!! SUPER awesome!! She is getting close to baptism, as well as a few others that we taught with the bishop last week! I am absolutely loving it out here and I am absolutely freezing my butt of as well!!  I have to go now, but I love all of you and I hope those of you that are sick get better. I am praying for y'alls!! GROS BISOUS!!!

 

Love Elder Lyons

Another Great Week!

Bonjour ma chere famille!!

 

     First off, yep! I got the wonderful package from grandma, it was delicious! Thanks much for the sweet note and goodies!! Second off, I don't think its the orange juice that made you consto Chris .....(it just wasn't powerful enough to blow through the junk you eat at the MTC he he. )!! 

    I just sent out a letter to ya mom and one should be coming to g-ma soon as well. I must say one thing, I really do try to keep up with the letters but Elder Fisher doesn't give me much of a chance to breathe on P-day and I never have time to write.  I am not supposed to write on other days, but I figure I want Elder Fisher to be able to see as much of the ville as possible before he leaves next week because I would wanna do the same ...so hopefully I will be able to balance things a little better next transfer.

     This week was super great and I traveled everywhere again, like Paris!! We had a big conference with all of the district and zone leaders there! Almost everyone in my MTC district was there.  It was SOOo cool to see them and how they've progressed!! We talked a lot about the goals for this new year.  Something super cool the Pres. did was to ask all the missionaries to help their wards and branches fix a goal for the amount of baptisms they felt like they could get this year, and then plan how to achieve that goal. Then, we gathered all of these goals and the combined total of baptisms became the new mission goal. This makes it so that the goal that we have fixed is really France's goal and everyone is involved and responsible for it. Rather than fixing a goal with simply the missionaries faith and their leaders, we have taken the faith of all the members and thus we are united in one purpose! This is what the president explained to us and let's just say the goal ain't small. It has doubled, maybe even more than that, and we as a mission are striving to bring 675 new converts to the church!! Already we are seeing big changes in the mission as members are getting more excited about the missionary work. The amount of new amies we are finding has nearly doubled since last year as well as lessons taught each week!! "We have a great work to do and we cannot come down." This is our theme from Nehemiah, when he built the walls anew around Jerusalem, and many things tried to distract him and prevent him from diligently working.  But he was persistent and never gave up. So too must we place our faith in the Lord and never give up because we too have a great work and we cannot afford to go down! We also talked a lot about the importance of prayer, obedience and many other things I hope to share with you in my next letters.

     This week we taught Damien , (well me and Elder Pieper, due to exchanges), more in depth about Joseph Smith. We related his story to Damien, to help him see how he can find and strengthen his testimony of the gospel of Christ, and the restoration. We explained how Joseph was an ordinary boy looking for truth and how he had enough faith to ask God, in mighty prayer, where to find the truth. His church wasn't immediately restored to the earth and Joseph wasn't even immediately called as a prophet. He had to endure many trials and persecution, due to his vision, and he had to overcome temptations and even repent, I imagine. BUT HE DID PERSEVERE! And, he did prepare himself and become closer and closer to God through prayer and studying the scriptures.  This is why Moroni came to him one night to reveal to him the location of the Book of Mormon. He even had to prepare himself more and diligently keep the commandments to be ready to translate the record. Over time and during the translation process of the Book of Mormon, Joseph and his colleague pondered over several chapters in the Book of Mormon about baptism and how it was to be done. So they asked God! John the baptist was sent to them and conferred upon them the priesthood power to baptize and later they received the higher priesthood necessary for other saving ordinances. They were baptised and prepared to organize the Church of Christ once again on earth and it will never again be taken away! What a blessing to have this knowledge!  And boy did Damien love it! He is going to be more than ready for his baptism the 28th of this month!! He was really touched by our testimonies of how we came to know of the truthfulness of this history and we are so proud of him.

     Armelle is also progressing very well and she even came to church during the craziest snow storm yesterday!! We have been really trying to help her understand how to receive answers to her questions and we taught her a lot about prayer and scriptures last week. She told us that she has been making a big effort to pray and is starting to feel peace. Even during rough times she's been able to better cope with stress and difficulties!! She's starting to recognize the spirit and after explaining the first four principles of the gospel to her and showing her how she's been in the process of doing the first two, faith and repentance, we challenged her to be baptized. She's not ready yet, but she says she really wants to get to that point, and she is continuing to progress.

Lyons