B4

Sunday, April 10

We bet the title caught your attention.  Not that we needed to catch your attention.  If you're on our blog we already have your attention.  Anyway we wanted to talk about 4 "B" word - birthdays, Baptisms, bags and blessings.

Let's start with bags.  Now, we're not talking about a little old French lady walking home with a baguette in one hand and a dog on a leash in the other.  No we are actually talking about bags for carrying things.  Why would we talk about bags you might ask.  French people have a thing for bags.  There are bags for everything.

In France when you go to a grocery store they do not, ever, give you a plastic bag.  You have to bring your own bags.  As a result we often end up at the store without a bag because we are just not used to bringing bags with us.  And so we have to buy one. This results in us having an overabundance of bags in our apartment and our car.  Yes, Ed keeps a stack of bags in the car for when he takes the Elders shopping and Lynn gives him a shopping list.  Each grocery store has it's own bags that they sell.  They often have a selection of bags to purchase starting at 5 centimes and going up to 1 Euro.  The paper bag is also an option.  The quality and size of the bag go up with the price.  In the fruit department the bags are much too flimsy.  Ed bought some apples last week and yes he probably overfilled it but it split and the apples fell all over the tiled floor outside of our elevator.

Non grocery stores have a more stylish bag.  For example a local clothing store named Jeanteur has a picture of the Place Ducale on their bag.  It is quite nice. We also have a cool bag of a family on a picnic that shows them with baguettes in a park - very French.

This one we picked up in London.  It reminded us of our grandson Peter and his love for Elephants.

Other side

Ever French family has a special bag that they use often - the grocery pull cart on wheels bag, a little cart with a bag attached on wheels.  We have an upscale model, one with three wheels on each side.  Why, you ask?  The three wheeler adaptation makes it much easier to go up and down stairs.

We love this baby!

There are 2 bags that are freely provided by the city.  One is widely used and one is rarely used.  The widely used one is for recycling.  All you have to do is go to city hall and ask and they will give you a roll of recycling bags.  The second bag is for collecting dog waste.  These are placed in containers and are available to anyone but hardly anyone uses them.  We have only seen a handful of people cleaning up after their dogs in our year and a half here.  The result is obvious.  Watch your step as you walk.  There are "dog mines" everywhere.

Regular garbage bags here are different, too.  They are sold in a roll and look much like Canadian garbage bags but when you tear off a bag there is a long plastic string that is attached to the bottom of the bag.  You pull off the string and these are for tying up the bag when it is full.  We haven't seen these in Canada.

Bakeries are everywhere in France.  Bakeries have bags for everything.  They have long paper bags for baguettes.  Smaller bags for pastries, croissants and pain au chocolat.  They have larger bags if you are buying lots.  Each bakery has their own logo on their bag, too.

The last bag we will talk about will bring us back to missionary work.  All of the missionaries carry a shoulder bag.  This allows them to hold scriptures, I-pads, pamphlets, teaching aids and writing materials to make teaching easier.  Ed has a bigger one which is more like a brief case to haul stuff around.  When our new missionary, Elder Asato, arrived he realised he needed such a bag and was lucky enough to find one in the Zone Leaders' apartment where someone had left it behind.

Time to move on to the second "B", birthdays.  Today is Ady's birthday and in the last week we also had Sam's birthday.  Ady is 3 today and Sam turned 8.  We sent both of them a nice birthday card via the computer.  Lynn does a great job of making internet cards with pictures of each grandkid and spruced up with designs and colours.  We talked to them on FaceTime.  They were both very excited about their birthdays and their gifts.  We sent shirts and chocolate which every kid likes.

In our Branch we have some birthday traditions, as well.  We list the birthdays in our Branch bulletin at the beginning of each month.    We also send around a birthday card that everyone signs.  Today was the first Sunday of April because last week was General Conference.  We had 3 people's birthdays listed for April in the bulletin this morning.

B is also for Baptism and we are so excited about Sam's baptism today in the Sheep River in Okotoks.  We'll have to wait for pictures to be sent to us and hope to include them next week.  We'll also have to wait and see if there is enough internet service in the area.  We hope that we'll be able to be FaceTime'd into the event.  It happens at 9:00 p.m. for us.  Congratulations Sam.

Our last "B" word is blessings.  Laurent and I gave 2 blessings after church today, both for Health reasons.  One of them was Lynn.  She has been sick all week and was finding it difficult today.  It was a pleasure to give her a blessing.  I love giving blessings.  It is a time when I really feel of the Spirit and when I feel very close to our Heavenly father.

Of course, we receive many blessings in the mission field.  We are constantly feeling the presence of our Heavenly Father.  Some of the special blessings we received this week were very uplifting.  For example, Stephen blessed the sacrament for the first time today in French.  Stephen is from Nigeria and does not speak French.  He has been working on the Sacrament prayers in French with Ed and the Elders for some time with anticipation of him being ordained a Priest, which happened 2 weeks ago.  It was wonderful to hear him this morning.  His practise payed off.  He didn't make one mistake and his accent was pretty good too.  It brought tears to one of the Sister's eyes.  Another blessing.  Elder Asato has been in France for a total of 12 days.  Shortly after his arrival Ed asked him to introduce himself and to bear his testimony in Sacrament Meeting today.  He did an amazing job.   What a special moment.  We are very proud of him.  He is saying prayers in French and is sharing scriptures.  His French is improving and he will be a great missionary.  We are blessed to have him with us here in Charleville.  

A third blessing.  We had a wonderful Family Home Evening for the Branch this week organised by Florine.  We had a great scriptural message from both the Elders.  We played a great game where you had to think of words with specific syllables in them before a toy bomb went off.  We made the treat.  When we say "we" the focus is definitely on Lynn.  We bought baked chips.  Ed did that and Lynn made a banana-apple cake.  Stephen brought some bananas.  We also had flans, a french pudding type thing, which the Elders brought.  

We had a flee market this weekend here in Charleville.  Ed's Dad would have been in 7th heaven.  It was really busy in the streets and really fun to be among the crowd.  Here are a couple of photos for you to enjoy.  The sun made it nice to just sit and enjoy the carousel and flowers in the square as well as the many people enjoying a meal at the sidewalk cafés.

Of course, as we teach and learn our blessings are immeasurable.  The more we teach the more we learn.  The more we learn, the closer we come to Heavenly Father. 

Au revoir de la France,
Lyndi-lou and Eddie, too 

Thanks and Pranks

Sunday, April 3, 2015

Let's start with the prank.  Here we are in April already and it started with a bang.  Ed did a nasty April Fool's joke on the Elders.  In French April Fools is Poisson d'Avril, which literally means April Fish.  Poisson is also a French family name but not very common.  On Friday we had our weekly DMB meeting (Branch Mission Leader meeting).  Ed is the Branch Mission Leader.  He spun an elaborate tale of a woman he met while in Reims who told her that her family of 8 was going to move to Charleville where her husband was going to be the manager of the new KFC franchise.  Because they had visited family in Utah and had gone to church they all wanted to be baptised.  The Elders were very excited until Ed told them the fictitious woman's name - last name Poisson, first name Avril.  He got them good.

And now for the thanks.  Speaking of Elders, we said goodbye to good old Elder Daines on Wednesday.  We drove him to the gare early in the morning.  He was transferred to Lorient in Brittany.  He was with us for 6 months.  He was an amazing missionary who worked very hard and made a big difference here in Charleville-Mézières.  He will be missed.

Lynn gave all the guys haircuts on Monday.  This happens about every 8-12 weeks.
She also was able to help one of our new members here, Beauty.  She's a real sweet heart.  She had a bunch of clothes that needed some fitting.  They were able to adjust many new outfits for her to wear.  She was pretty excited about it.  She continues to have multiple opportunities to use the old, rickety sewing machine we acquired from an old missionary apartment we closed last year.  It's been a real blessing to help those here who need it.  It keeps threatening to quit working but each time it finds resurgence and continues on.

Without missing a beat we had a new Elder arrive by suppertime on Wednesday.  Elder Asato is a blue or a brand new missionary from Kearns, Utah.  Charleville is his first ville.  We picked him up and gave him a short tour of the town.  He is getting over his jet lag and is doing just great.

As a follow up to our last post regarding our 4 missionaries who were injured in the Brussels bombing, they are all progressing.  Elder Wells and Empty have returned to Utah and are in the University of Utah hospital.  They are healing well.  Elder Norby is still in the hospital in Belgium being well cared for and is accompanied by family.  He was taken out of his coma this week.  His progress is slower because of the seriousness of his injuries but it is steady.  Soeur Clain is still in hospital after getting an infection.  She is expected to make a full recovery, though and looks forward to completing her mission.  All these missionaries and family members are grateful for the blessings they have received, for the medical care they are receiving, for the support they feel from members and family and for the prayers that have been said in their behalf.  We continue to pray for them.

On Thursday disaster struck in the Reims missionary apartment.  A tap started leaking in the night and caused a great deal of damage in the missionary apartment and in the apartment downstairs.  Ed had to head there to take care of things.  He ended up replacing the tap which took a good chunk of the day.  He talked to the downstairs neighbours and viewed the damage.  After consulting with the mission office, insurance papers were filled out by the neighbour and sent to the office.  Everything was operating well when he headed home.

Seriously we need to do a post just on the interesting signs here in France.  This one says "All other Directions".  Really!!

New companionship: Elder Englebrecht from Aurba and Elder Moore in Reims

As most of you know, this weekend is General Conference weekend.  This becomes a little more complicated in France because of the 8 hour time difference and the limited capacity of the wifi in our building.  We have to download and store on a memory stick any sessions so that we can to lighten the load on the wifi.  We have to do this in both French and English.  We can see 2 sessions live but eight hours later in our day.  One session we watch on our own at home and the remaining sessions we watch a downloaded version.  As a result we were at the church from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. last night and from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. tonight.  However, we make the best of the fact that we are blessed with General Conference by sharing a meal together with our Branch members and by visiting with them.  We also had a visit from a family from Lille who are bringing their son here because he will be doing military training in Charleville for a few weeks.  That is good news for us.

Delicious French Chocolate from the Easter Bunny.  Thanks Isabelle.

Elder Wilson picked the great back seat.  That way you could conceivably have a little rest unobserved;)

Well that is it for our week.  Everything else is going well both here in France and at home.  We are truly blessed.

Au revoir de la France.
Lyndi-Lou and Eddie, too

Trips and Tragedies

Sunday, March 27, 2016

It's Easter Sunday.  Joyeuses Pâques.  We are especially grateful for the Saviour, His Atonement and Resurrection that we celebrate today.   With this in mind we are sharing a link to a beautiful video called Hallelujah.
New Video A Special Easter Message Follow Him and find new life.
This week after a bit of a recess we got back to our apartment checks.  We headed to Luxembourg and Metz.  We also had some additional business to do in each city.

In Luxembourg we were asked to buy and deliver some new mattresses.  The Elders there had been replaced by sister missionaries and they were badly in need of new mattresses.  We stopped in Arlon, Belgium and picked these up on the way to Belgium.  They were very grateful.

Us with Sœur Proudfoot and Sœur Cornetta

Luxembourg

From Luxembourg to Metz is about a 40 minute drive.  We headed to the Elders' apartment, had a great visit with them and inspected their apartment.  Afterward we had a package to deliver to the Luc Royer household.  Luc and his family had visited with us in our branch in Charleville one Sunday.  Their daughter, Lisa, had just left on her mission to the United States.  She had left some things behind that she asked to be delivered to her home.  These things were given to us by another Senior Couple.  We had a great visit with the Royer's.  They are a great family and we love visiting with them.  They gifted us with a lovely old map of the Ardennes.

This week we had an amazing missionary activity.  We had every missionary in our zone meet in Reims for a day of contacting.  This amounted to 32 missionaries.  In the morning we went out street contacting around the church in groups of two or three.  We had a lovely lunch prepared by the ward's Relief Society.

In the afternoon we all headed down to the city centre where we divided into three large groups.  We set up a table in three places and from there we headed out finding.  At each table we had materials to hand out and a video about the Saviour to show.  The day was amazing.  We had good results and it was fun working together with so many missionaries.  We clearly felt the spirit and learned a lot, too.

Tragedy struck our mission this week.  As you no doubt know, there was a terrorist attack in Brussels on Tuesday.  This resulted in 34 dead and over 200 injured.  We have prayed and fasted for those who are injured and for the families for those who were killed.  In the midst of tragedy there are always uplifting stories.

Four of those injured were LDS missionaries, colleagues of ours who are serving in the Paris, France mission.  Elder Norby, a senior missionary was taking a young sister missionary, Sister Clain, to the airport accompanied by two younger Elders, Elder Wells and Elder Empey.  Soeur Clain, who was called to serve in Ohio had started her mission in Belgium while waiting for her visa.  As fellow senior  missionaries we know Elder Norby and his wife quite well and had recently gone out for lunch with them during a recent training session we had in Belgium.

These four faithful missionaries arrived at the airport minutes before the first bomb exploded.  This was followed by a second bomb.  Needless to say they were in close proximity to these explosions.  They were injured by shrapnel and burns.

We will not go into the details of their injuries but they are hospitalised and in pain.  Three of them are in the hospital in Brussels and one is in Antwerp.  Elder Norby was put into a coma by medical staff to help him manage his pain and his care.  The missionaries have received surgery where and when necessary.  

The church responded immediately.  Our Mission President and his wife, President and Soeur Babin, went up to Brussels to be with them and to support them.  They have done a great job of keeping us informed.  Salt Lake has sent over family members to be with them.  The church has issued statements which are available.  All are praying for the survivors and for the families of those who did not survive.

Through this tragedy these faithful missionaries and their families have shown amazing courage.  They have expressed their love of missionary work and of the Saviour.  They have shared their strong testimonies with the world.  They are an examples of courage and faith to the rest of us.  We can strengthen our own testimonies of  our sacred callings by following their example.  

This week marks our 12th transfer here in the mission.  We have been blessed to have served with the young Elders who make up our District.  Elder Nagloo, from Belgium is being transferred to Paris.  He is currently serving in Reims.  Elder Daines in being transferred to Lorient.  We will really miss them.  They been part of our District for 6 months.  Elder Daines command of the French language is great and they are both excellent missionaries. Plus we'll miss Elder Daines wonderful home-made bread. ;) They're ready and excited for this opportunity.   

As you can no doubt imagine these events have been difficult for us.  We cannot help but be affected by the random evil and callousness that are behind these acts of violence.  But we are strengthened by the courage and love that we see in the survivors and their loved ones.  We thank them for their example.

We are extremely lucky and blessed to be serving the Lord in this part of his vineyard.  We love our calling.  We are grateful for the faithful colleagues we work with and for the great leaders we have in the mission field.  We are surrounded by faith, diligence, obedience and courage.  This can only have a lasting positive effect on our lives.

Happy news in our family is the upcoming baptism of Sam, Dustin & Lindsey's son.  We're sharing the cute invitation his talented mom made.  We're pretty excited for him. Doesn't he look so happy! 

We continue to do what we are here to do - to support, to teach, to love and to spread the gospel and we love doing it.  May you all see the hand of the Lord in your lives.  We certainly see this regularly, especially this week.

Au revoir de la France
Lyndi-lou and Eddie too.

Birthdays and Blessings

 Sunday, March 20, 2016

This week is always a birthday week in our family.  In the space of 4 days we have 4 birthdays - Ed's Mom, the 17th,  Amy, and Ed's brother Darrell, the 19th and Ed's Dad on the 20th.  

We like to phone the person whose birthday it is.  This is always great.  It is often sometimes difficult when contacting my parents because they are often not in their rooms where their phone it.  We had to chase my Mom and dad down with the LPN at the nursing home.  It was a great talk with them though when we finally got through.  I think they enjoy it as much as we do.  Unfortunately, Ed messed up on the time change when he phoned his Dad.  He ended up phoning him before 7:00 a.m.  Fortunately he didn't answer.

Well, that's enough about birthdays.  Let's move on to blessings.

We'll start with the blessings of families.  While we are in France we try to manage the affairs of Ed's parents and his brother.  This week we needed some help with a couple of issues with them and we quickly got some help on the home front.  In the past we also have had to assist them with a number of things from finances to house maintenance to healthcare.  We truly feel supported and blessed by our family.  We try to include them as much as possible in our mission.

Secondly, we are blessed because of our mission.  We often comment to each other how lucky we are.  We feel the hand of the Lord in our lives.  He blesses us and our family regularly.  We are blessed to be in a lovely Branch with great people.  We are blessed by the support of our Branch members, the Friends of the Church and the younger missionaries.  We are blessed with the great leaders we have the privilege of working with.  We are blessed by the culture, history and the beauty of living in France.  we are blessed by the many friends we have met here.    

We are blessed to be able to work hand in hand with younger missionaries who are great examples of diligence and obedience.  We were able to take our Elders to Bouillon castle during their P-Day where we saw a falconry show.  We also stopped for fries and a sandwich.  

He wasn't behaving!  He say's he's innocent.

They have one day a week where we can do that sort of thing with them.  The rest of the week they are hard at work.  We often have them over for lunch or provide a meal at an activity for them.  They are always so grateful.  On Friday they showed their thanks by having us over for lunch.  We had home-made soup, home-made bread and fruit.  It was lovely and very much appreciated.  Funny story though.  When we first arrived they had the table set up like this; looking like it was going to be Kraft Dinner, Candy and oil.  (All the things we're trying not to eat!) They're a couple of characters.  Both are wonderful missionaries.

After they brought out the food they'd actually prepared.  It was great. 

Thirdly, we are blessed by the spirit we feel continually in our lives.  We are fortunate to have great examples here in France.  Our teachers at church, the members that we work closely with and the teaching we do regularly are great conduits of the Holy Ghost.  He blesses our lives and watches over us and protects us.  As we help people come closer to our Saviour we feel the spirit as it uplifts us and the people we are helping.  What a faith building experience.

This week we had a Consecration Day in Reims for the second time.  We spent the day there.  The young Elders went out contacting and met with some success.  We stayed at the church ready to provide an Open House experience.  The bishop's wife provide us with a great pasta lunch and had a lovely day. 

The next day we helped Beauty, a member of our little Branch, move to a new home.   It's not a very big place and it's further away from the church but this morning she was off bright and early to walk to get there on time.  It took her 45 minutes to walk from her home to the church.  And she always has a smile on her face.  We are so grateful for her.  She is trying to learn the language and look for a job in a country that is difficult to assimilate into.

We also headed to Liege, Belgium.  We have become quite friendly with the new missionary couple that lives there, the Slaughters.  We had lunch together, did some mission shopping at Ikea, saw some sights and had supper together.  It was a great day. 

We love the moss on the trees.  It looks quite cool.

Just passed by these three horses on the way.  They needed their pictures taken.

Beautiful stone.

Funny little homes.  Such character!

Love the door.

Saint Bartholémy Church

Cool baptismal font inside the church.  It's one of the 7 wonders of Belgium

A mobile butcher

This is a fascinating place.  Motagne de Bueren.  Nearly 400 steps.  Lynn climbed them all!

One of the doorways on the way up the stairs.

Isn't this so appealing!

How would you like to live 1/2 way up the stairs?  Keep you in shape getting your groceries home.

Whoo Hoo!  The top!

Kiwi tree.

Just another great street

Sweet looking place.

We had a great day at church today.  Lynn and I both spoke.  It went well and people enjoyed what we had to say.  Lynn did a great job with her French.  We also had some good classes today.  Ed finished our meetings today by facilitating a self-reliance session.  He has 5 people in this group who are all learning job seeking skills through the church's self-reliance program.

Our weeks fly by as we are always very busy.  We enjoy all that we do.

Au revoir de la France,
Lyndi-lou and Eddie, too.