Elder Jacob Ewing

Happy Russian Christmas everyone. Now you might be asking if Russian Christmas is a big deal here in France, well no, it’s not…unless IT SNOWS A WHOLE BUNCH!!! Okay not a whole bunch, not even a little bit, but it snowed big old fatty down feather flakes all morning long. None of it stuck, but it threw Elder Steenblik and I back into the Christmas Spirit, so we popped in some Christmas tunes and ate leftover Christmas candy all morning. Good times we had.

So last week I told you that our phone was broken. Well that continued on for the rest of the week up until last night. It was a horrible week teaching wise. Because of the lack of a phone we would have to run up to the church to make calls, and with the holidays and all the buses weren’t running as frequently as normal. So we ended up walking to the church a lot this week. A lot, a lot, a lot. But with every trial there comes blessings. And last night we were truly blessed.

So to set the story up. Yesterday was District Meeting (again the holidays have messed up our meeting schedule) in Bayonne. It was good times all around with much discussion and teaching and all that. We finished the meeting off by celebrating another holiday I didn’t totally understand. But I’ll try to explain it to you…the first Sunday after Christmas French people buy a really delicious pastry/cake that is amazing. Hidden inside of this deliciousness is a little plastic baby. Whoever gets it gets to wear a crown and be king for the day. So that’s what we did, we ate this almond pastry cake, Elder Barrus got the baby, and he was king for about five minutes. Good times.

Our bus home wasn’t until 2:30 so we ran up and got kebabs at this sweet kebab shop. Totally yummy and with good company it was a blast, until…the Simpsons came on. We didn’t watch it and we really tried not to listen, but all any of us could say is that the French Simpsons sound funny, and really weird. From there we ran to the Bayonne Elders’ apartment so Elder Steenblik could make weekly calls, and then we headed out.

Bus ride home was pretty uneventful. We got home and ran to check the mail. Low and behold Blessing #1 came along…tons of mail. Thank you to everyone that sent letters and such this holiday season, you rock. In the landslide of mail we had Blessing #2 …the new SIM card! We ran up to our apartment ripped through our letters and plugged in our new SIM card. Alas our new SIM card is really cool with more space and a new logo, but it didn’t have any of our numbers saved from our phone book. That is where we hit a dilemma: do we stay inside and enter phone numbers all night or do we go out and get new phone numbers to plug in. Well, we chose the later and bam! Blessing #3–a lot came that night. It was so cool…we gave away a Book of Mormon, got 3 numbers, had 21 meaningful contacts, found an old ami, and cleared the air with a girl about what our church was all about. A good night it was. They don’t come around very often but when they do it’s really nice.

Last week we had a couple good breakthroughs. Alexandrea (mom of Adrian and Angelena, girlfriend of Bryce) said that she wants to keep having the missionary discussions but not chez la famille Boquion. Which is so good…while we love teaching la famille Boquion its tough because we’re teaching to two kids, an inactive, a non member, and two active members. So its really, really, really tough to make head way there when we’re speaking to so many different walks of life. Anyway, we have a RDV with her chez l’Eglise and we’re going to have a killer lesson with her! woOt!

Also, we passed by our TJ friend and set up another RDV with him. There’s a ex-TJ member in Bayonne who we’re going to ask a couple question just to clarify things, but for Romain we going to have an awesome lesson with him too…and hopefully his wife.

Michael is back from Spain, so we’re going to take Johnny (our Rugby playing Tongan) with us. We’re hopefully going to be able to talk about authority with him–hat is unless we get t-boned by another history of the Bible lesson. But we’re hopeful.

Let’s see what else…oh yeah Peni and his wife have agreed to set a date to go the temple and be sealed. (They came to all three hours of church this week!) We gave Peni’s wife the Stop Smoking plan and we’re hoping this time she’ll take it seriously. We’ve been hitting them with some pretty heavy lessons this week, so we going to take a break and watch “The Testaments” with them this week.

Well, I think that’s about it…kind of a short email, but c’est la vie. Hope things are rocking chez vous where ever that might be, and happy new year!

Je vous aime,

Elder Jacob Ewing