Serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in northern France, southern Belgium and Luxembourg.

Monday, May 25, 2015

A productive adventure

Well, here I am. Back in this burning-hot Internet cafe with a bunch of beard-and-ponytail "League of Legends" players of varying degrees of cleanliness and life goals. One of favourite times of the week.
So. Funny story. We went to a ville called Choisy-Le-Roi, which is not the nicest or fanciest of villes, to visit our ami Patrick. The neighbourhood this guy lives in is essentially like God spilled a cup of Haiti into the Europe recipe. Constant Haitian music playing, dudes hanging out doing n'importe quoi, not a white guy in sight except the two naïve little Mormons hiking around trying to talk to people about Jesus.

We got to his apartment only to find out he'd be a little late getting back, so we decided to leave and go contacting for a bit before returning. We stepped out of the building to find 5 or 6 policemen in bulletproof vests, one holding some kind of big automatic weapon, looking all menacing and stuff. We tried walking away but one of them stopped us and asked if we lived here, what we were doing, etc. After those questions he then asked us to go against the wall, feet wide apart, bags open, for a drug search. I felt like the guy in Saratov Approach: "You don't know much about us, do you?" During the search he was like, "What are you guys, Evangelists?" to which I responded "We're Mormons actually." The guy looked at his policemen buddies and said "They're Mormons, logically they're not going to be drug consumers." I guess he did know a little bit.
So that's the story of how I got felt up just a little by a policeman in France. (Or was it Haiti? No wait, France. The policemen were white.) On the plus side, we had a good lesson with Patrick, in which we committed him to come to church every week that he's in town and to a baptismal date of June 20th.
Also, we set 3 baptismal dates since last week's email, for a running total of 4. Good things are happening. Each has individual concerns that could keep them from doing it, so our job now is to help resolve those before the big day.
Not much other news. We're finally seeing amis in progress again. We're helping people to help themselves and find the help that the Lord can offer to anyone who seeks it.
God is good. Y'all should be good too.

Elder Stanford
Elder Stanford leading the music in the Antony Ward Sunday School
(photo credit Shawn MacDonald)

Elder Stanford and Elder Harris

Opening the Canadian candy
sent by my loving mom through Shawn MacDonald

Thank you Shawn!

The Pfost family also visited the Antony Ward
(Michelle Pfost was companions with Danielle)

(photo credit Mary Pfost)

No comments:

Post a Comment