Sentiers et Sangliers

Sunday, May 31

Happy Mother's Day.  Today is Mother's Day in France.  We gave out roses in church today.  But since you can't eat roses or, at least you shouldn't, we also gave out chocolates.  We also had a talk about mothers that was just great.

But let's rewind the week back to Monday.  Something really exciting happened on Monday.  It was a momentous day.  We saw a sanglier for the first time.  In fact, we saw 26 sangliers, including one baby one.  Well, you might say that we cheated.  It was the Elders p-day and they asked us to take them to the Animal Park where we saw the elusive sangliers for the first time but they were amazing nonetheless.  We still haven't seen one in the wild.  We also saw other animals - deer, sheep and birds.

Beautiful Pheasant

We continue to have amazing opportunities while sharing the gospel with others.  We participated in several lessons this week.  Our friends are very receptive and love learning about the Saviour.   They are reading and searching to find the truth.  We were able to help one of our friends who was experiencing anxiety over writing an exam for her drivers license.  Ed gave her a blessing and we drove her to and from her test.  Happily she learned two days later that she passed the exam. 

We finished our Home Teaching for May this week.  We shared a message about families.  Ed had a doctor's appointment with one of our less active members because he had to get some lab tests done. At the same time we shared a HT message with him.  It went very well.

On Friday we had a zone conference.  This was in Villeneuve d'Ascq.  We had training on lesson planning.  We had a great pizza lunch.  Ed shared his conversion story with some of the sisters.  they were touched by the story. We had an interview with our Mission President.  He was pleased with what we are doing and thanked us for everything.  He and his wife are wonderful and we really appreciate them.

A good part of our week was spent getting ready for a Helping Hands Forum that happened in Villeneuve d'Ascq on Saturday.  We were displaying the clean-up project our Branch did as a service project.  We were lucky enough to be able to abscond with a trifold board from one of our missionary apartments.  We put all of our pictures on it, added captions on some of them and added some recyclables - a pop can, a Coke bottle and an old tire tube.  We included a write up on the Arboretum where we cleaned up and six garbage bags filled with balloons to represent the six bags of garbage we had collected.  The project was very well received as were Lynn's cookies.

There were lots of great projects there - a blood drive, other clean up projects a farm support project and a collection project for health products to be distributed to university students.  it was all great.  We headed home when it was over, stopping for supper at a yummy "Friterie" in Belgium and getting home by about 8:00.

Church was great, as usual.  We had 15 people out today, including a new investigator from Rwanda, as well as three continuing investigators.  Ed had a branch Presidency meeting and Lynn did a lesson with the new ami.  It was a great day.

It was also a great week.  We got a lot done and felt the spirit over and over in the teaching and learning we did.

That's all we have for now.
Au revoir de la France

Lyndi-lou and Eddie, too.