Room With a View

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Picture this - a nice little freshly painted one bedroom apartment in a building that is 180 years old along the banks of a meandering French river in a town that is 800 years old.  To top this all off you look out your bedroom window onto an enclosed courtyard.  There you have it!  This describes the new missionary apartment that will be inhabited by young missionaries this Wednesday.  I say young missionaries not because we are not young but because they are considerably younger than us.  

I would think anyone would want to live in such a place.  However, when you think of the schedule of young missionaries you realize the sacrifice they are making.  They are up by 6:00, pray, exercise, study, plan, hit the pavement, contact, teach, serve, eat, meet and support the members.  It is kind of nice that they have a great little apartment.  We hope that it will make their load a little better and that they will enjoy coming home to the place described in the previous paragraph.

In any case, we have spent a good deal of this week putting the finishing touches on the apartment.  We had the stove delivered and Ed wired it.  We put on a new toilet seat.  We put up the shower curtains and rods.  We did a fair bit of cleaning.  Our Branch members have been great.  They provided a bunch of food and other supplies to stock the apartment. We gave a guided tour of the apartment after church today.  The sisters decided to move some things around and it looks great.

Laundry hanging to dry outside of a the same apartment complex as the Missionaries.  So quaint!

To put things in perspective you need to look at the history of our little Branch.  There were about 35 active members here at one time.  As jobs dried up members moved until there are now only 7 active members other than us but what strength and faith there is in this little Branch.  There is a big load on the members here, though, because those 7 members have to do everything.  There have not been missionaries in Charleville-Mézières for 8 years.  You can imagine how excited they all are to have these new missionaries.  They are overjoyed.  They will be here on Wednesday.  Our two missionaries are cracker jacks.  They both have great track records. 

Of course, we did other things this week besides setting up apartments.  We had our last District Meeting with all of our district before transfers.  After this transfer we will be the longest serving missionaries in the St. Quentin district.  We lose a team from Compiegne but gain a team from Charleville.  It will seem a little different.  We will now be part of the Lille Zone instead of Paris Nord.  Good in one way because we haven't been able to check out Lille much.  Also it's our Stake so that is a good thing.  We're a little sad at not being able to travel into Paris as much as in the past.  It's a good thing we've made great use of our previous visits there.

The lovely weather this week brought out these beautiful Swans in St. Quentin.  The watching dog wants them to go over for a visit with him.

The warm weather this week didn't only bring out the swans in St. Quentin but the first outdoor market of the year appeared in our square on Friday.  It will be there every third Friday of the month until October.  We had a great time visiting the stalls and tasting the goodies.  They had all sorts of things for sale; quails and quail eggs, chickens (with their heads still on), huge Ardennes meatballs.  All the restaurants have tables and chairs set up outdoors.  And, they were all full.  It wasn't warm enough for us to do that but we enjoyed seeing everyone else do it.

We were able to contact some of our less active members this week and have set up a meeting for next week with one of them.  We also had a visit from the Redds, senior missionaries from Liege.  They had to get their car looked at here.  We had a great visit for the day with them.  We also were contacted by two different couples, the Woodrows and the Wildes, friends of ours who will be in Europe and want to see us.  As senior missionaries we are lucky to have some flexibility in our schedule to be able to do that. 

Sedan's fortified Castle

Elders Redd and Wilson

Love the way this turned out looking through the old fortress wall window at a Church.

For some time now we have been visiting an older couple.  He is 96 and his wife is in her late 80's.  Sadly they were both hospitalized this week.  He has bronchitis and she has an infection.  This, of course, is really hard on people that age.  We have gone to see them twice now in the hospital and pray for them and their family.  We have really gotten close to them. 

We are blessed every day in our missionary callings.  We love what we are doing and feel that it is making a difference in our own lives.  We hope we are making a difference to those here as well.  We are thankful for all that we have been given.  We are very grateful for our family and for their support.  March is a month full of birthdays and we have been phoning and sending packages home.  Happy Birthday to Mom Wilson (Colleen) on the 17th, Amy and Darrell on the 19th, and Dad Wilson (Don) on the 20th.  We'll help you celebrate by eating a brownie made with some of those black beans Lynn made last week.

So yummy!

Anyways, that is all we have for this week.

Au revoir de la France,

Lyndi-lou and Eddie, too.