Bonne Année à tout le monde !!
Spoiler Alert: Bad Joke Ahead... Wow, I haven't talked to y'all since Last YEAR. Haha. That's a classic. I hope you all enjoyed 2016 as much as I did! It's quite bitter sweet because this is indeed the last email I will be writing as a missionary in 2016! So, let's take a look at some of our final 2016 Miracles and stories, shall we? :) A four-hour long rendezvous and a BAPTISM COMING SOON! This week we set a baptismal date with our lovely new Ami Emelie!! She invited us to come eat lunch at her house on Wednesday and during that four hours we covered just about every missionary lesson in the book. Haha! It was so great! As soon as we got there she pulled out a journal packed full of notes and questions that she had taken from the brochures and the Book of Mormon that we had given her, AWESOME! It took four full hours to go through all of them. Then, last but not least, we closed the lesson by inviting her to be baptized on January 21st :) She lit up and said with a smile, "Really!? You can help me be ready that soon!?" I immediately jumped up from the table and threw my arms around her, I just love her so much! The Missionary Window Spectacular. Our apartment windows are enormous. The best part is, so are all our neighbors' hahaha. It makes for great night time people watching. They stare at us, and we stare back. Although on Friday Night we decided to spice up the party a bit and do a little "Charleston" for our “across” neighbors' kids hahaha. We turned on some music and danced our way back to the 1920s, waving in the window to the kids while they ate dinner. They thought it was SO funny, they all started jumping up from the dinner table and dancing too! Which led to the father whipping around and looking to see what was causing his children to lose their table manners, oops. We dove to the side where he couldn't see us, until he turned around and we jumped back out to start dancing a second time Hahahaha. Sure enough, the kids leapt back up! Okay... maybe we shouldn't have encouraged them, but it was just so dang funny! W.O.W Contacting. With all of the alcohol wasted citizens wandering the streets this weekend, we thought it would be the perfect time to test out a new contacting method. We call it, "W.O.W" contacting... Or in other words, Word of Wisdom contacting. They great part about W.O.W contacting is that you don't even need to contact anyone, because they are all so drunk that they just walk right up and start talking to you! My second favorite part is when they tell you they are drunk and you respond with... "Hmm... you know that's very bad for your health!" Rather than what you're thinking... "Wait, You're drunk? I never would have guessed!" Hahaha. My companion and I actually had the opportunity to teach the Word of Wisdom to the entire Bus this weekend after being contacted by a group of drunk men, Lol. It was great! 3 Closing Prayers? Why not! We met with our cute new ami Linda on Saturday. Linda is a young woman about our age who we met a couple of weeks ago on the train. She came to the church and we gave her a little tour of the chapel before sitting down for our lesson. At the end of the lesson we invited her to try praying for the very first time. Surprisingly, she said yes without even a moment of hesitation! She said a simple, yet very beautiful, prayer and then finished with a great big smile on her face and says, "Ahh! Can we do that again!?" I have never gotten a response quite like that! It was so cute! So then I said the next prayer! At the end of that prayer, she looks at my companion and says, "Now can you say one in English!?" Hahaha. So, we finished our lesson with a solid 3 prayers in a row! That's definitely a record for us both. New Years Eve with the Bendios! We spent NYE with one of our very favorite mission couples serving here. It was easily the best New Years Eve I have ever had. They are the sweetest. We ate some yummy American food, exchanged family photos, and finished off with a BYU Christmas production :). By the time we got home (about 9:30) my companion and I were too exhausted to count down for the New year, so instead, we went to bed and then took a few minutes before personal studies the next morning and counted down with everyone back home who is eight hours behind us haha :). Best of both worlds! We got the countdown AND a full eight hours of sleep! 1 Year. 1 Resolution. 9 forty-day fasts. Over the past year, I have had the opportunity to complete 9 different, forty-day fasts. Which was my 2016 New Years resolution. These fasts included things such as: fasting from negativity, from stress, from unhappiness, from sugar, and many more! It's been a wonderful year! I wish I had the time to share all that I have learned over this past year, but that would take every single P-day for the rest of the 2017! I also might need it for my homecoming talk :) Although, there is one fast that I would like to share today--I titled my final fast of 2016, "40 days of Loving others More than Myself". It was quite the eye opener as it made me aware of just how many of the things that I said and did each day that were driven by selfish intentions. After having completed this forty day fast on Christmas Day, I decided that it is something I needed to work on for much longer than forty days. In fact, it's something I could work on for an eternity! But I figure 2017 is a good start :) So, I have dedicated this new year as, "The Year of Loving Others More Than Myself". I love you all so much. Thanks you for the incredible support you have been to me this past year. I would also like to wish a Happy Birthday to the greatest not-so-little brother in the World. I love you Jayden! Remember... even though you are turning sixteen... that doesn't mean you HAVE to start dating girls yet ;)... Much Love,
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Subscribe:
Tracie WysonI feel very honored to have had the opportunity to serve as a full-time missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the France, Paris Mission. Archives
April 2017
|