March 5, 2019

Bonjour mes amies! Well it was a lovely week. I got permission from president Phillips to call Caroline on her birthday and it was so fun! I love seeing my family! It brings so much more joy to this work and really gives me a boost of energy for the rest of the week! She is such a sweet thing and growing up so fast! All of them are! They say that the feelings you get being around family and loved ones are the closest feelings associated with heaven. 100% true. Family is central to everything and it is the most important thing to our Heavenly Father. I know that's true.❤ The English elders in the area gave us oodles of referrals this week! We had a pass off lesson with them for a lady named Mirphanou. She wasn't there but her daughter, Saphira, was, and we went back to teach them the next day. THEY ARE SO ELECT. They had great questions and a true desire to learn more about this message. We taught them the restoration and invited them to pray about it to know if its true, and also to read the Book of Mormon. They eagerly said they would! We had ANOTHER lesson with them two days later and taught them the Plan of Salvation. Again, super stellar lesson! I have so much love for them! It is also very interesting because Saphira speaks better English then French, so we taught the lesson kind of half and half, French and English. It was soo nice to be able to teach in my first language! That kind of thing doesn't happen very often haha. I really love them so much! Unfortunately they are going on vacation for the next few weeks which makes me really sad, because I really want to keep teaching them! Also, transfer calls are this Saturday (already!!) and so I have no idea where I will be next week or who I will be with! But I am excited to see what the Lord has in store for me! We had exchanges this week, so I got to spend the day with sister Ellis! She is such a ball of sunshine! We met some super cool people while finding and I gave away a book of Mormon at the door to a cool dude named Raoul. We also had a great lesson with Lourdia and this time, her husband Ethienne sat in! We had a member couple join us. They were so great! They both had such great answers to their questions and their pure testimonies were so very powerful! As missionaries, we have so much appreciation for members who join us for lessons. SO so much. Members bring a powerful spirit and are able to befriend our amies better than we ever could. We hope that they will make the decision to come to church this week. If they do, they will have friends to support them and make them feel welcome. Another super cool thing that happened this week was that we had a Facebook finding miracle! Sister Stephenson was talking to a guy on messenger named Norvan. He speaks Armenian! We just so happened to have an Armenian Book of Mormon in our car and he just so wanted to meet that day! So we met him at the nearest Tim Horton's and had a really good conversation (over really good hot chocolate haha)! He said that some guys (elders) had given him a copy of the book of Mormon several months earlier and he had never even opened it. But he promised us that he would read for us. Aw haha. He was very kind and had a cool outlook on life. I hope that he follows through and does read. There is more peace in those pages than he could ever imagine. More answers than he ever thought possible. This Book is powerful. I have a testimony that it is true, and written for us in our day, to help us through these perilous times. I am so grateful that I get to go out every day and testify of it. I want every single person to have the chance to feel of it's peace and power. Nothing else could have gotten me through the hardest times in my life except this book. Read it. read it every day. It has the answers to even our most specific questions. It is true. I know that it's true. I hope that all is well with all of you and that you are finding joy. There are so many things to be joyful over❤ Much love, Soeur Bates