Salut
Since this is probably what everyone is wondering - I am staying in Caen for another transfer. Elder Taylor and I will stay together, I am staying right here.
I don't have much time and I am not sure what to write - so bear with me.
Basically this entire week Elder Taylor and I went porting, knocking on doors. I was really trying to focus on serving others and spreading the gospel, so the work was much more enjoyable. Elder Taylor and I had a great time, we found absolutely nobody, but we loved it either way. There was one experience I would like to share.
On Saturday Evening Elder Taylor and I were heading back to our apartment to finish the day and we were just taking random roads around an area we had been porting. Somehow we ended up behind our apartment building. From our apartment we can always see this family playing outside in one of the adjacent apartments and I have always wanted to contact them. We felt prompted to go and knock on the doors of this housing strip. So we went and knocked on the one that we thought was the correct house and nobody answered. The kids were playing in the backyard and we thought the mom was sitting out there with them, but it's France and it is very hard to tell if a woman is, a woman, or if she is a teenager and we were really unsure about her age, so we just knocked on the door. Well nobody answered, so we walked back down the street to our apartment. We got undressed and ready to make dinner, but we both felt very uneasy about not trying harder to get someone to answer the door. So we decided to go try again. We redressed, said a prayer, and went back to the houses. We knocked on a few doors and both times they were answered by men, who said they were not interested in our message. We walked back to our apartment mildly disappointed. But, we came to the conclusion that even though we had been rejected, we still followed the prompting that we had received. We still followed what the Lord wanted us to do and that is what matters. Who knows? Maybe that family will remember the missionaries and accept the message from them later on. Either way it was a powerful lesson, that we should always follow the promptings of the spirit no matter the outcome.
The only lesson we taught this week was to Konstantine. Since we did not know if I was leaving or staying in Caen, he wanted to see me one more time before he also goes on a trip back to Russia. He showed up at the church and was very pleased to see me, he asked if we had anything to share with him and since he had called us just 2 hours earlier, while we were porting, we did not have anything planned for him. So I asked if he had any questions he wanted us to answer and he did have a question about Nephi killing Laban, so we said we would answer that.
Before we started the lesson, he gave me a shirt with NAVY written on it and said, very proudly, that if you look at NAVY in the mirror it says YVAN, which is a Russian name. I was very appreciative of his gift, that meant a lot to me.
We started the lesson with a prayer and as soon as we finished, a scripture popped into my head to answer Konstantine's question. As I read him 1 Nephi 3:7, Elder Taylor found a short passage from an old institute manual concerning the question at hand, which was why was Nephi commanded to kill Laban? Konstantine also asked the questions: Why did Lehi go to the Americas, and how did the brass plates help the Nephites if they were still destroyed in the end? The section that Elder Taylor randomly found answered all of those questions. We only used scriptural references with Konstantine and we made the lesson extremely effective by having him read everything in Russian and then reread it in English so that he had the vocabulary to respond. That lesson was insane. We were completely led by the spirit and we answered all of his questions. He was very pleased.
I'll write a better email next week, I'm sure it will be more interesting! Elder Taylor and I are making some drastic changes in our work ethic. I'll expound on that more next week!
Until Then,
Elder MolinariSince this is probably what everyone is wondering - I am staying in Caen for another transfer. Elder Taylor and I will stay together, I am staying right here.
I don't have much time and I am not sure what to write - so bear with me.
Basically this entire week Elder Taylor and I went porting, knocking on doors. I was really trying to focus on serving others and spreading the gospel, so the work was much more enjoyable. Elder Taylor and I had a great time, we found absolutely nobody, but we loved it either way. There was one experience I would like to share.
On Saturday Evening Elder Taylor and I were heading back to our apartment to finish the day and we were just taking random roads around an area we had been porting. Somehow we ended up behind our apartment building. From our apartment we can always see this family playing outside in one of the adjacent apartments and I have always wanted to contact them. We felt prompted to go and knock on the doors of this housing strip. So we went and knocked on the one that we thought was the correct house and nobody answered. The kids were playing in the backyard and we thought the mom was sitting out there with them, but it's France and it is very hard to tell if a woman is, a woman, or if she is a teenager and we were really unsure about her age, so we just knocked on the door. Well nobody answered, so we walked back down the street to our apartment. We got undressed and ready to make dinner, but we both felt very uneasy about not trying harder to get someone to answer the door. So we decided to go try again. We redressed, said a prayer, and went back to the houses. We knocked on a few doors and both times they were answered by men, who said they were not interested in our message. We walked back to our apartment mildly disappointed. But, we came to the conclusion that even though we had been rejected, we still followed the prompting that we had received. We still followed what the Lord wanted us to do and that is what matters. Who knows? Maybe that family will remember the missionaries and accept the message from them later on. Either way it was a powerful lesson, that we should always follow the promptings of the spirit no matter the outcome.
The only lesson we taught this week was to Konstantine. Since we did not know if I was leaving or staying in Caen, he wanted to see me one more time before he also goes on a trip back to Russia. He showed up at the church and was very pleased to see me, he asked if we had anything to share with him and since he had called us just 2 hours earlier, while we were porting, we did not have anything planned for him. So I asked if he had any questions he wanted us to answer and he did have a question about Nephi killing Laban, so we said we would answer that.
Before we started the lesson, he gave me a shirt with NAVY written on it and said, very proudly, that if you look at NAVY in the mirror it says YVAN, which is a Russian name. I was very appreciative of his gift, that meant a lot to me.
We started the lesson with a prayer and as soon as we finished, a scripture popped into my head to answer Konstantine's question. As I read him 1 Nephi 3:7, Elder Taylor found a short passage from an old institute manual concerning the question at hand, which was why was Nephi commanded to kill Laban? Konstantine also asked the questions: Why did Lehi go to the Americas, and how did the brass plates help the Nephites if they were still destroyed in the end? The section that Elder Taylor randomly found answered all of those questions. We only used scriptural references with Konstantine and we made the lesson extremely effective by having him read everything in Russian and then reread it in English so that he had the vocabulary to respond. That lesson was insane. We were completely led by the spirit and we answered all of his questions. He was very pleased.
I'll write a better email next week, I'm sure it will be more interesting! Elder Taylor and I are making some drastic changes in our work ethic. I'll expound on that more next week!
Until Then,
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