Let
me preface this story by telling you all a fun fact: over the course of my
mission I've taught the gospel to people from over 25 countries, and met people
in a non-teaching capacity from over 25 more. This Tuesday I added one more
country to the list: Romania.
So
we were in Lille for exchanges. Me and my exchange comp, Elder Fonua from Hawaii,
decided to go batting (a missionary-invented word made by combining
"tracting" with the French word for "apartment building").
Around the 4th or 5th floor, we rang the doorbell of this family of five
Romanians--some of whom spoke very limited French, the rest of whom didn't
speak any at all. They let us in (which was already kind of a miracle) and
eventually we got across that we were servants of Jesus Christ, and we asked if
we could just pray with them because they couldn't understand much else. They
all got pretty excited to pray with us. All five stood up, and the women went
and got these prayer shawls (I'm guessing they got that from 1 Corinthians
11:5) and one of the women started praying out loud in her language. And then
the other woman joined her, both saying their personal prayers aloud beside
each other. And then the three men joined in one by one, so that five
individual prayers were all being said out loud simultaneously. I didn't know
what to do, so I just looked at Elder Fonua, bowed my head, and said my own
personal prayer out loud with the rest of them. God hears all of them anyway,
right?
After
a few minutes (and a few amens and hallelujahs) everyone quieted down one by
one. We looked up...and saw that one of the women was crying. Initially I
thought that she was just feelin' the Spirit super hard, but then she told us
that her husband was really sick. And before I could even open their Romanian
Bible and show them the verse that says elders can heal the sick with oil, they
were asking us for a blessing! Using this half-broken-French-half-charades
language, I'll just let you imagine. So we ended up giving a Priesthood
blessing to an ill Romanian man that we had met 10 minutes earlier.
We
set a return rendez-vous for the next day and left. Then the next night, as
Elder Smith and I were back in Amiens, we got an excited phone call from the
elders in Lille, who told us the rest of the story: they went back, and the
family of five had brought nine more Romanians to listen! As they passed around
a few Romanian copies of the Book of Mormon, one of the new people (who spoke
French) said, "I like this book. Can I have more copies?" When they
asked him how many, he responded, "Well, my Romanian congregation has
about forty people. Can we get forty?"
._.
Stay
tuned as the elders in Lille distribute forty BoMs to a congregation of
Romanian Christians. Will they believe? Will a Romanian branch be started in
Lille? Find it all out next time, on the new hit series, Why Don't We Ever
Just Teach French People.
One
other story before I close. So we met a man from Cameroon in front of the
Amiens train station to teach him. After a weird and slightly contentious
conversation (in the which he said it was pretentious to call ourselves
Latter-day Saints and judgmental to say our message brings people closer to
God), we offered to pray with him. Suddenly we became best friends as he
offered the prayer. As per his suggestion, we ended up the three of us holding
hands in a circle while he said a typical Evangelical African prayer (Oui Papa
trois fois saint, mon Dieu mon Roi etc). It wasn't that weird until he started singing
(while still holding our hands in front of the train station). He went for four
verses of song and then broke into falsetto, and Elder Smith and I could barely
control our laughter. So that's the story of how I ended up holding hands with
a big African man singing Jesus songs in his falsetto, while people walking out
of the train station observed.
That's
all I've got for this week. Merry Christmas everyone! Make it awesome, and
anyways focused on family and on the Saviour. Love you all!
Elder
Stanford
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