I got a date before Valentine's Day!

Hey all! Happy Valentine's Day or whatever. In France, Valentine's Day is just an excuse for people to glorify the "natural man" on every bus stop ad, shop window and grocery store product in sight. But we don't buy into it. My valentines will be my mother, my grandmothers, and the adorable 88-year-old lady living upstairs from us. And God. 

Transfers happened again. Are these going faster and faster for you guys too, or just me? I'm in transfer 10 now. Goodness. In a surprising turn of events, Elder Pumford was transferred out; he's going to my old équipe in Liège! One-and-done here, one-and-dead there. Some guy named Elder Carson will be my third companion in three transfers here in Amiens. He seems cool, from the little I've heard. 

This Saturday, I got a date! Her name is Getou (yes I know I spelled it wrong last time) and she agreed to set a baptismal date for the 9th of April. She wants us to meet her friends, and even brought her niece to church! So cool. 

And now, to close, allow me to demonstrate some Pidgin I've learned over the past transfer. 

I dey learnin' to talk Broken na, an' I fit talk'am small small. I no dey good befo'. Is bettah na. I for done write mo to una today, but I dey so busy. 

¿ Entiende ?  Probablement pas.  Et bah tant pis. We go talk in one week na. 

(Sorry that I don't have a lot of time today. Last p-day with Elder Pumford, we had to see all the attractions in Amiens. Which is basically just the cathedral. But it took some time). 

I love you all! Be good! Remember who you are! Love the world! 1 John 4. 

Elder Stanford
Mission française de Paris

Found by the cathedral 

Selfie with Elder Pumford and Larry

Transcendence

So we got a self-referral online from a masters student, and in the notes she said she wanted to see us in order to talk about transcendence. What does that mean, you may ask? We weren't too sure either. She met us at the chapel--younger than I thought she would be and super sympa--and ended up interviewing us about...everything. She turned on her voice recorder and asked us questions about our faith, what we did, what "rules" there are in our church, and most importantly, how we got our testimonies. It was really cool actually.

It turns out that by "transcendence" she just meant the idea of getting to a state of mind that's more peaceful and elevated than how we normally are. Basically she wanted to talk to us about feeling the Holy Ghost, though she didn't know that that's what it's called. We ended up talking for an hour and we got to testify about how we found that God was there and that our church was the right one to follow.

She asked me about my grandparents' conversions (shout-out to my awesome grandparents!), the relationship between my biology studies and my religion, etc. And now she'll use it for...something she's doing for school. It was an awesome experience that most people don't get to have.

We had an awesome discussion with Howard again. He's gotten real personal revelation through repentance, and felt the Spirit tell him he needs to move on from his past. This past week, he reflected that despite the fact that we ask for things in prayer, its main purpose is to align our will with God's. How cool is that?? This coming from a guy who said his one of his first vocal prayers ever when we first started teaching him. He is also a master of languages, as I mentioned last week, and we talked for a bit on the English language and how it was influenced by French rulers hundreds of years ago. It turns out the old English word for music was "dreamcraft," which was eventually overpowered by the French "musique." I'm calling it dreamcraft from here on out.

Jetu's doing well! Member referrals are the BEST. We will be giving her a baptismal date soon! Any prayers on her behalf are appreciated.

That's all for this week! Love you all! Be good.

Elder Stanford

Front and side views of the massive Amiens cathedral

Of dope amis and the Spirit

Bon. This week.

So we went to Versailles for exchanges on Thursday-Friday. I got to see my son, Elder Harris, there because he's in the Versailles ward as well. I also got to see the Paris temple under construction! The outer walls are up. It's beautiful. Here's what it will look like:

One of the missionaries in Versailles, Elder Martin, was in the US Navy before coming out on a mission, and he's going back when he's done. Needless to say, he is an advocate for working out hard in the mornings. He and his companion kept telling us about their ami, Phil, who meets them in the park to exercise in the mornings. So in the morning, we all got up at 6AM (all other missionaries get up at 6:30, but remember, US Navy) and ran to the park to go meet Phil. Turns out...Phil is just a gigantic log they had found prior. Like over 10ft tall, thicker than me, and wet. And we just worked out with his huge tree trunk in about a hundred different ways that I didn't even know were possible. Elder Martin was the only one able to pick the thing up with sheer man-strength and run around with it. So we returned home to Amiens with aching muscles and bruised shoulders to go with our slightly-wounded pride.

Have I told you guys about Howard? I don't think so. Howard is dope. He's from England. He's got a Ph.D. in philosophy, converted himself from agnosticism to Christianity by reading the Bible, and learned Greek and Hebrew in order to read it in the original languages in which it was written. And yet he still listens to us. How incredible is that??

Last week, we were set to teach him part three of the Plan of Salvation: what happens after death. But Elder Pumford felt really strongly that we needed to skip that and teach him the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ (faith and repentance). I agreed with him because he's better at promptings than me. With Howard, we went through the etymology of the word "repentance," because he's into that, then talked about how repentance isn't what most people seem to think, but it's basically trying to align our will with Heavenly Father's by making any changes necessary to orient ourselves closer to the path that He's traced out for us. Seeking that change of heart. When we came back later in the week, he told us about the incredible experiences he'd had in prayer due to that discussion. He felt feelings that were almost difficult for him to describe. He said concerning them, "One drop of that is worth the whole world."

Our recent convert, Larry, brought a friend to church! Her name is Jetu and she's come three weeks in a row. She said she's sticking around because of what she felt during an amis' class: feelings that matched the description in Galatians 5:22. She met with her and Larry this week and it went well! Larry testified super hard. We're seeing them again this weekend.

That's all for this week! Things are looking up here in Amiens. People around us are doing good work too and just inspiring us to be better. So that's what we'll do.

Love you all! Be good! Latah now.

Elder Stanford

A lot of change

Hey guys! Not much to report this week, but we've got a couple of good teaching situations lined up for next week, so good things are coming. To give you a sense of what this past week was like, it involved two trips to Lille, an impromptu ride home in President Babin's car, a lot of teaching members (10 of our lessons were to less-actives or recent converts), and Larry giving the most African prayer I've heard in a long time at the end of Sacrament meeting. It was in English, and as his enthusiasm increased, so did the volume of his voice, until he was just shouting English praises into the microphone. And all the white people were kind of terrified, and all the Africans turned into Evangelists for a bit and just started saying "Amen, amen" in the middle of what he was saying. And then it ended and the postlude music started and everything went back to normal. 

So one of the members we teach, Romain, is...kind of a hoarder. Earlier he told us he'd been having financial trouble with taxes and whatnot. While we were there, we looked around and saw these bowls full of small change--nothing more than 20 cent pieces--that he had been saving for years. And we asked him, Why don't you just cash all this in? But he has troubles getting out of the apartment sometimes, so eventually we just offered to take the coins for him and give him the money back. So we found a flimsy plastic bag to dump them in, and brought it around with us for the rest of the day, carrying it like a small child because otherwise it would burst and spill our coins everywhere. It weighed about as much as a small child, too. While walking through centreville with it, I was so scared to be approached by a beggar, because what am I going to say to him? I'm sorry, I have absolutely no small change to give you?

At Auchan, our current grocery store, there's a machine where you just dump in all your change, it counts it for you, and gives you a receipt with which you can buy food. Perfect--we'll just put in the coins, buy our food with the receipt, and give him the cash we would have used. Right? Well, we underestimated the ability of small and simple coins to bring great prices to pass. The receipt came out for ninety-five euros. And these stupid receipts force you to spend it all in one purchase, at Auchan only, and you can't buy gift cards with it or anything. Like a demonic missionary cooking show, to see how much p-day time they'll spend trying to spend exactly ninety-five euros on things they actually need. Two weeks' worth of food, some cleaning products and a set of ceramic cooking knives later (we were really out of ideas okay), we were on our way. And now we owe Romain almost a hundred euros.

That's all for now! Until next time...soyez sages!

Bisous,

Elder Stanford

PS Why did they give us iPads ?

                                                                 With "the Pumford"

                                                       With a recent convert Williams

The Kearon Conference

Hey hey hey!

So this week was the Elder Kearon Conference. It was awesome to be in a room with a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy, hearing what he had to say and being able to ask him questions. He said a lot of things that made me reflect on what I can improve in my daily missionary work. 

Elder Kearon is actually a convert to the church. That one fact made it so much more interesting to hear what he had to say. Not only that, but he discovered the church by being contacted in the street by sister missionaries, like I do on such a regular basis. He was baptized at 26, after over fifteen invitations to baptism. When I go out contacting, do I ever think to myself that I might go talk to someone who will end up being a general authority - someone who will lead hundreds of thousands of church members across a multiple countries? I'll give you a hint for the answer to that question: it's "no." But perhaps I should think that way. 

When someone asked him what made him stop when the missionaries contacted him in the street, he said, "Their smiles." What difference can a smile make? There's just one. 

Other things he said that I'd love to share:

- We are agents to act, not to be acted upon. Good things won't usually happen unless we make them happen. Attack the day!

- Feeling the Spirit for the first time is "like a little part of my soul was waking up."

- Don't compare yourself to anyone but yourself. 

- "Stop worrying so much. Just work really hard."

                                                       Last transfer district pictures

I will hit my year mark this week! It went by fast. I'm told the second year goes by faster than the first six months. According to missionary tradition, as you saw in The Saratov Approach, I should burn a shirt this week. I'll go with my 5€ impulse purchase from H&M that can only fit the skinniest of all ties under its collar. 

Any other news from this week will have to wait until next, because I am out of time. Love you all!  Soyez sages !

Elder Stanford

Just an email to let you know I'm still alive

Hello all,

We didn't get to see many amis this week. It was crazy busy, I went to Paris twice for transfers and whatnot, and the rest of the time just seeing LARCs (less-active or recent convert) that we need to take care of.

My language learning program on the iPad may be slightly too easy at times.   

These are my new contacting shoes that I found in the Strasbourg apartment.
Each weighs about as much as my old contacting shoes combined.
They will survive the apocalypse.
It's like someone polished two potatoes black, then cut sections out of a tire and slapped them on the bottoms. 

This is two transfers ago in Strasbourg when Elder Pumford and Elder Lucas came from Nancy for an exchange. Elder Pumford is the one who looks like Clark Kent.

Your fault for sending these [paper crowns] to me. 

Out our apartment window

I'm learning Broken! Remember the language I talked about a few weeks ago? It's how Koffi (a Togolese recent convert) and the Nigerian recent converts communicate. Koffi doesn't speak English and they don't speak French but they all speak Broken. 

So I learned that "dey" is a little like être, and every conjugation is the same: dey. So that word shows up in most sentences. "How are you" is "How you dey." And the response is "I dey fine." Then I learned about past, present and future! Examples:

He is not big: him no dey big. 

He was not big: him no dey big befo'.

He will not be big: him no go big.  

Next week the whole mission is meeting with Elder Kearon of the 70! So that'll be cool. And off we go back to Paris. 

More in another email! Love you all! Be good! We go see latah. 

Larry's story

Hey all! So transfers are this week, and we found out that Elder Smith is leaving to Rennes on Wednesday, after only three months here in the promised land of Amiens. We'll be going to Paris to drop him off and pick up my new companion, Elder Pumford. I know him already; he's a great missionary and I'm really excited to work with him. He's from Canada (first Canadian comp). Also, he looks like Clark Kent. I'll show you next week.

This week was Larry's baptism! Everything went well. Let me tell you his story. 

Larry is from Nigeria, born and raised, and has always been a really faithful guy. While there, he had a dream: he was flying high above the earth, looking down at it, searching for gospel truth. When he flew over Africa, everything was dark. But as he flew over Europe, he saw that some parts were lit up with the light of the true gospel. 

The exact same dream happened every night for a week. At the end of the week, he decided he needed to do something about it. So he packed his bags and flew to France, where the dream had shown him that gospel truth would exist, to begin a new life. Soon afterward, his friend Olive introduced him to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

The rest is history. After some time exploring the church and the Book of Mormon, a few lively debates with the missionaries, and an extremely sacred experience or two during church--the descriptions of which I don't view as appropriate material to just throw online--Larry was convinced that the gospel truth is found here. He is now one of the newest members of the restored church of Christ. 

Happy New Year! Soyez sages!

Elder Stanford

PS Church was great yesterday! We had the confirmation of Larry, one of our recent converts got the Priesthood, four amis showed up to Sacrament, we had a great discussion in Gospel Principles class with all our African recent converts, we taught Primary again, and we had my first branch council in Amiens. Good stuff.