70th P-Day (63rd in France)

The Christmas spirit is finally upon us here in Versailles. 

Last Monday night we met with a new investigator, Alain, at the temple. The visit went really well and we're really excited to see him again! 

The next morning we had a breakfast appointment with the Grasser couple (the German couple originally from America that we met with last week). This was my first ever breakfast appointment on my mission and oh so good. They made us pancakes and eggs, both of which I haven't had in so long. This was definitely the highlight of my day. I love them! Then we hurried off to Paris to have interviews with President Sorensen. He was running very behind schedule, so we were there for a while. During the waiting period, the mission had a French doctor come in to give us all free flu shots, even though some missionaries opted out. We also went caroling during all of this waiting in downtown Paris. It was a little intimidating at first, with how many people were walking around us and how few of us there were, but it quickly became so much fun! Lots of people stopped to hear us sing and we were able to give out some invitations to our special "Come and See" Christmas Sunday worship for the 23rd. That night we had a dinner appointment with the Delrieu family from New Caledonia whom I love! They're so fun!

Wednesday we had district council and a dinner appointment with the Bamy family. The dinner was great! I set it up with them, because I didn't really know them and I wanted to build that relationship. We did a pizza party with them and their three small children and then shared a Light the World message. The mom also asked us if we had been invited to anyone's house for Christmas and we said no. She immediately proceeded to ask her family if we could come and they said yes! The Christmas party will be huge, as it is a mix of both sides of her family. The Babins (last mission President of the Paris Mission) and the Causse's. Both could be considered the "pioneers" of the church in France, as they are very well known and respected. I'm so excited to be spending Christmas with them as this is a huge blessing. That night was great and I really love the Bamys!

The next day was essentially just a lot of finding. We did find a really cool Haitian family, however, that want to invite us over to eat :).

Friday was another day of finding. None of our investigators right now are progressing, so that's a little disappointing, but it's all good! We ended the day off with some KFC, so that was definitely the highlight.

Saturday was a busy day for us. It was our ward Christmas party and we had to get there early to help the Relief Society presidency set up. We have some awesome women in this ward, let me tell ya! The party started off with an auction of different members and services that they were offering. Points counted as your "spending money," and most of the points were earned by different spiritual things/ service opportunities you had done the past month, so as you can imagine us missionaries had a lot to spend haha! Elder Bunker and I got an exotic meal, a walk in the park of the Chateau de Versailles with a snack afterwards, and American cookies, all offered by different people in the ward. Then we feasted! It was so good and a great way to spend our day. Especially with the terrible riots that were happening in Paris at the same time of this event. For those of you wondering, Versailles is a very safe place to be. I haven't seen one protester here and it's very calm. Downtown Paris is definitely another story haha, even though it's only a 20 minute drive away. I love the Ward that I'm in and I'm so grateful for them. 

Sunday was fun. I translated every single thing in sacrament, because all of the other missionaries were too far apart for me to pass the microphone to them. This was quite the experience. After sacrament, a member of the bishopric asked me to give a talk in sacrament next week. With more and more people visiting the closer it gets to Christmas, I'm going to need all the prayers I can get. Otherwise my nerves will kick in and it will all go down hill haha. I thought giving a talk in French in an 80 member ward was hard enough, now there's around 150 active members (not including all of the visitors/tourists). I'd say that that is quite the change haha. That night we had a Christmas concert at the church from the Morphis family. Their son served as an Assistant in our mission and just returned home to Quebec where they are from. Well, his family travels all over the globe performing for firesides/devotionals. They market themselves as a comparison to the Von Trapp family and actually sang lots of the songs from the Sound of Music. It was a very good event and pumped everyone up even more for the holidays. They said that they're looking for more places to tour to, so if you're a Stake President who is reading this, get ahold of them! I promise you will want to have them come and perform. They speak fluent English and French, and do a gospel Q&A afterwards for people that have gospel questions. 

Today we are going back into Paris. I'll let y'all know next week if I see anything interesting haha. We are going to try to go to the Louvre, so that's exciting. 

I encourage you all to light the world this December. Follow that calendar. I've noticed some people in the Ward over here who are really doing it and I have been able to see how it's been blessing them and their families. Making a difference in your communities will also make a difference in your own life. Get out there and serve others! December is the perfect time to do so and you won't regret it. It's such a great thing to do! :) 

I love you all! Till next week! 

Elder Connor Anderson

69th P-Day (62nd in France)

Hey everyone! I'm just going to jump right in to the weekly run-down.

On Monday we visited an in-active family. They said that the reason that they went in-active was because you have to pay a full 10% tithe to enter the temple and that they believe that Jesus wouldn't have a "monthly membership fee" in His church, because that's not what church is about. This was a hard one for us to try to figure out a response to. We're now going to be visiting them as much as possible, so here's to hoping that their hearts will open back up and that they'll be willing to come to church again. Afterwards we went to a huge mall in Paris, La Defense, to window shop. The stores here are so cool! 

On Tuesday, Elder Bunker and I went to the church to set it up for the tri-zone conference that we would be having the next day with Elder Johnson, an area authority. This year the Senior Couples convinced our Mission President to decorate it like Christmas, so it was fun to set up! We visited another in-active that just moved into our ward boundaries from Peru as well. A young adult, around the age of 23 named Willy. He was really confused as to how we got his address LOL, but was really open to chat. He was baptized when he lived in Herriman, Utah for an exchange program a few years ago, and when he left Utah he immediately went in-active. It's a little hard to communicate with him, because he speaks no French and only a little bit of English, but we made it work. We're excited to continue working with him. To finish the night off, we went to a member family's house for dinner. They just moved here from New Caledonia and are so cool! It was a great night and they want us to go over and eat with them once a week from now on! Score haha!

The next day was the tri-zone conference. We had some missionaries spend the night at our apartment, so we all had to wake up early and get ready. We then walked to the temple where the day was started with a temple presentation by Elder and Sister Woods who run the Visitor's Center. Afterwards they provided us with Costco muffins! I hadn't had those in so long, so it was oh so good! Then we all walked to the church for the actual conference. It went on forever, but the lunch was really good. The senior couples prepared a Christmas style lunch for us all, again all from Costco, making us all feel right at home. I'm so grateful for them! We finished the night with a dinner appointment with the Grassers. They're a very interesting couple from America who have lived in Germany ever since they were married. They also own the only pumpkin patch in all of Germany, so that's cool. Anyway, they just moved into an apartment right across from us so now they want to feed us all the time. They're so nice and we're blessed to have them so close (even if they are technically in a different ward boundary, with different missionaries lol). It was a really good day!

Thursday was also a busy day. Some more missionaries stayed with us the previous night, so we had to wake up extra early to see them out. That night we had a dinner appointment with a family from Spain in our ward, the Fraguas. They are so cool! Because Elder Bunker wanted more time to find, we decided to go on splits with the Brussels Zone Leaders who happened to be staying with us that night. I went with Elder Fund, one of my best mission friends, to the dinner appointment. It went so well! I honestly love this ward so much and they all make the best food. 

The next day we met up with Fanta, a girl that I contacted last week, at the temple. It went so well and she was super receptive. We're handing her over to the Sisters to teach, but I'm happy that we were able to find someone so cool. 

We started Saturday off with our Jehovah's Witness friends, for our weekly 15 minute "bible study" haha. At least they were super nice and complimented me on my style this time. Later we went to the church and set up for a baptism for the Antony ward, which meant that I got to hang with Sister Ethington even more! That was fun. Then we ended the night with a raclette/ping pong activity with some of the young adults in our ward. It was a good day!

Sunday was interesting. I finally met Sister Ethington's grandparents, because they visited the Versailles ward. They were so nice and the grandma was super excited when she found out who I was. In third hour it was announced that we still hadn't been invited to anyone's house for Christmas, and immediately a guy said that he wanted to have us over, because his family likes us a lot! I feel so loved in this Ward. After church, a filmcrew from Salt Lake came out to film a French promotional video with our ward to put on the Church's website. I'm front and center in the clip, so be on the look out for that in about 1-2 months. That night our stake had a Christmas fireside. We missed half of it, but it was really good! We have some musicians in the Paris Stake! It was good to chat with the members afterwards and I really am so grateful for them. 

I've done a lot of pondering this week about what type of member I want to be when I return home. One of the main things that I want to do is really get to know the missionaries and love them. I encourage each of you to contact your missionaries and invite them for dinner, take them out for dinner, take them somewhere on P-Day, or even give them a referral of someone to teach that is not yet a member. I promise it will make their day! I'm so grateful for members. Without them, missionary work would be impossible! So get out there and help your missionaries!

Thanks for the well wishes once again! I love you all! 

Elder Connor Anderson

Last pic with Elder Crockett

Raclette dinner with the single adults

Pic sent to my mom from a visitor to the Temple

Last pic with Elder Melandon

Family from our ward on splits with Elder Fund

Aurelien from our ward

Baptismal Food

68th P-Day (61st in France)

Hey, everyone! I don't have a ton of time, so I'm going to give you a brief run down of everything!

On Tuesday we got to teach about Baptisms for the Dead to our young adult convert, Aurelien. We taught him at the Visitor's Center with Elder Woods about the importance and purpose of Baptisms for the Dead, because it was to be his first time. It went really well and it was nice to explain everything to him beforehand. Right after, the Sisters at the temple told us that a young adult in our ward, Laura, really needed a priesthood blessing (the older sister of the young girl we blessed last week) and that because Aurelien was with us we could go, because the girl was alone at her apartment. We took Sister Ethington's car and drove off. This was a really cool experience as well and we were really happy to be able to do it all with Aurelien. What a great convert he is! After all of this, we returned and went to the mission office to meet up with the new missionaries and take them street contacting for their first time. This is a definite perk to serving in Versailles. It was so fun to do this and brought back all of the memories that I had. I got to "mother" (as we call it) two Elders for a few hours. Elder Paxman from St. George and Elder Jensen from Washington. They were awesome and I'm so excited for them to be in our mission. Tuesday was definitely a good day! 

Wednesday was good as well! We got to finally do Baptisms for the Dead with Aurelien! This was my first time doing Baptisms in so long, let alone even being in a body of water (swimming and all that stuff isn't allowed), so it felt really refreshing and I was excited. Aurelien opted to baptize me for his own family names that he brought, because he said that I look exactly like how one of his grandpas did at my age. It was a very spiritual experience that I will never forget. When we finished we were able to see all of the departing missionaries, as they exited their temple session with President and Sister Sorensen. It was nice to say bye to some old companions and some other missionaries that I served around. Then we visited some members, the Magnan family, and that went really well too! Two good days in a row! 

The only thing worth mentioning about Thanksgiving is that we had a dinner appointment with a young family in our ward. They are really nice and fed us Raclette. Not super American, but I'm not in America am I? Haha! Anyway, it was a nice way to end a long and slow day and I'm just thankful that someone was willing to let us come over at all. 

Friday we met a cool woman named Lolita while finding! I'm excited to see where she goes and I'm really hopeful! We then ended our day with our first meeting ever with the Ward Mission Leader since I've been here and that was really important. Member work is starting to build up and I love that. We have a lot of people to work with in Versailles!

The next day we went to a baptism in the Chesnay ward for two young girl converts. It went really well besides the fact that they had no cook, so they assigned me the job involuntarily. I had to make cheeseburgers with toasted buns and all the works for 20 people, making enough that everyone can have at least 2. That was stressful and unfortunately took me away from the baptismal service, but made them all happy. Eating afterwards was delightful though! That night we met a solid investigator, Fanta, in downtown Versailles. Too bad that she's a young adult female, because we'll have to hand her off to the Sisters to teach. Either way, I can see her progressing like none other! 

Sunday was really good. It was the Primary program in the ward which is probably my favorite Sunday of the year. We also got a lot of member work in as well. After church, the mom of the two daughters who we had previously given blessings to throughout the past two weeks asked me for a blessing and gave me a pie in return lol! It was a very good blessing and she was very thankful for it. My new nickname in this ward is Joseph Smith now, because apparently I look like him. Out of Ken, Joseph Smith, and Baby Trump I honestly can't tell which one is the worst haha. Maybe I'll let you all decide. Email me what you think lol. At least this ward has fun with me! I love making them happy! ;) We also met with our Jehovah's Witness friends and they were annoying this time around. Never again... They have been officially dropped haha. And then we took a cool guy that we found from Afghanistan to the temple. It was hard to teach him, because he didn't know any French and barely knew any English, but we gave him a Book of Mormon in his language and let the Spirit do the talking. It went so well!

I'm so grateful for the temple. This week was such a blessing and I saw many miracles come out of the temple. Please go do temple work! It will give you more peace than anything else in the World. Bring new converts, old converts, and life-long members with you. The temple is a blessing for everyone. Take advantage of it and go!

Thanks for all of the Thanksgiving messages. I LOVE YOU ALL

Elder Connor Anderson

67th P-Day (60th in France)

Hey everyone! This week went by really slowly, but that's just how life is sometimes unfortunately. 

Tuesday was kind of awful... I was super drowsy and basically couldn't move at all. I didn't know why, but it definitely wasn't fun; Especially when the whole day is filled with finding. That night we went and found the referral that Elder Neil L. Andersen gave us. He, unfortunately, wasn't interested. 

I wasn't drowsy anymore the next day, but I did have a major sore throat, sore legs, and a fever. This was a complete finding day as well, so that was fun! We did, however, come up with a new finding method-- a temple survey, with candy as a reward for taking it. Old people didn't enjoy this method AT ALL, but college and high school students sure did! We still have a long way to go to perfect this style of finding, but it looks like it could be successful. I'll keep you all updated. Creativity is something I'm trying to involve with everything we do, making the work more enjoyable for us and for others. That night we had our last district meeting of the transfer. I'll put our group photo in my album this week!

On Thursday I self diagnosed myself with Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease. I've heard that adults don't typically get it, but that it's still possible. I guess there's a first time for everything. It would explain why my hands and feet hurt whenever they touched something and why they had red dots all over them. I remember that the Hall baby from last week had it, but I never touched the baby and the symptoms didn't appear until this past Tuesday night, so I'm still confused as to how exactly I contracted it (if that's what it was). With limited resources for my research, all I was able to find on solutions was that there's nothing to cure it... You just have to live with it for a week and then it will go away, so that's exactly what I did. It was terrible, however, in the sense that I couldn't touch anyone. Everytime I handshaked someone I felt terrible. I'm just hoping that it's not contagious if you keep your hands washed haha. 

Anyway, I spent my morning baking an Almond cake with lemon buttercream for a temple Sister's birthday. It was from scratch, cost a whopping 27 Euros, and looked awful. It still tasted good though, so that was a bonus! Catch a pic of this in my album this week! Then we took it to the temple and surprised her with it. After that, we went to an architectural evening at the temple with the architect of the temple who is not a member. It was really cool to hear all about the construction and design process. Obviously we can all tell that a lot of work went into the temple, but it definitely was a lot more than I thought! The event was catered, so after the event we ate with everyone. It was so good and gave us an opportunity to share the gospel with all of the non-members there. One of the families invited us to eat with them after the holidays, so that's exciting! It was a good night for having been such a terrible morning haha!

The next day we met up with Kavish for one last time. It wasn't a good experience. Just a lot of walking in the cold, trying to find a McDonald's for him to eat at. We eventually found one, after walking through 2 1/2 cities for about an hour and a half. Once there, we had no more time to teach him, so we just left. That night, however, we had a dinner appointment with the Meunier family in our ward. They are so awesome! They made an excellent dinner and we had good conversation. I'll include a selfie that we got with the dad in the album. 

We were all over the place on Saturday, but the coolest part was the baptism of a 24 year old girl named Christelle. Her parents are both members and her dad got to baptize her; it was a beautiful experience. Afterwards the Sisters and ward members threw her a surprise birthday party. It was quite the time! Later some Sisters called us, telling us that we needed to get over to a member's house that they were at, because the young daughter was super sick and needed a priesthood blessing (they don't have a dad present at home). Well, she lived quite a ways away and we technically needed a third male present. This left us scrambling to find someone and a way to get there. A temple Elder lent us his car, and we had to beg a member of the bishopric to go, but we ended up making it happen! They were very grateful and even gave us a cake to send us home with. 

Sunday was good! To start, church had a full crowd. Bishop Causse (who is the presiding Bishop of the whole Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) was in attendance because his children are in our ward, and he was even one of the speakers. IDK if I told you all, but the translation sets are working again for visitors. This was quite the meeting to translate. Bishop Causse's talk was so good. On a more close to home level, a family from Draper was there and the mom works at Kauri Sue (by where I used to live)! Such a cool connection. I love Latter Day Saint tourists haha. I also got dinner appointments with many members for this week, which I love. Gotta get those ward connections going!

Today we found out about transfers! I'm staying another 6 weeks here in the great place that is Versailles. I could not be more excited to spend Christmas here; there's no better place to be! 

As for my spiritual topic this week, I encourage you all to go to a baptism. As a missionary, they really are one of our favorite things to go to/help participate with. The importance and significance of a baptism is bigger than we sometimes think. Study the importance of baptisms and really think about how necessary they are. I promise that you will be going to the next baptism you're invited to afterwards. They really are more than just a social gathering of people, with refreshments afterwards. It's a person who is covenanting with God, being cleansed from all of their sin, and showing that they desire to follow Christ. Baptisms really are something so beautiful, that we have the opportunity to have on this Earth thanks to the Priesthood and the authority of God. Study baptisms and go to one!

Love,

Elder Connor Anderson

66th P-Day (59th in France)

This week went by pretty quickly! 

Tuesday night we gave a blessing to a struggling German woman who had previously been prostituting herself out for a place to stay. She came to the church and was waiting for members/anyone with the Priesthood to arrive. She was really grateful for the blessing and said that it gave her comfort to know what to do/where to go in life. 

The only thing worth mentioning from Wednesday was that we had a really good district meeting. 

Thursday was an impromptu exchange with the Zone Leaders in Paris. I was with Elder Durrant this time. Exchanges involved a lot of finding at a place called, "Chateau Rouge," which is essentially a highly African populated area of Paris. We didn't really find much success there, but it was actually quite fun! One of the pics in my album this week is of what I like to call, "Tumble-weave," like tumbleweed, but with weave pieces. The streets of Chateau Rouge are filled with tumble-weaves, so I got a good kick out of that. Then we went to the Paris ward's Bishop's house (the Hall family), and did service with the mom and daughters. We made hundreds of sandwiches for refugee families. They only live a 10 minute walk away from the Arc du Triomphe, so they live in such a cool location in downtown Paris. The Halls, if you couldn't already tell by their last name, are American and awesome. They moved to France right after they were married and only planned to stay a short couple of years, but have already ended up staying well over 20 years here, with the dad serving as Bishop for a good chunk of that time. The thing that's cool about them, is that all of their children were born here and have gone to French schools. They have all of the positive traits of an American family and all of the positive traits of a French family combined into one. After we did the service, she made us burritos and chocolate chip cookies (all with 100% Kirkland ingredients, love my Costco). It was such a good night! I LOVE the Hall family. Now we are all friends on FB and I'll definitely have to see them again when I come back. 

On Friday we went to go find a referral that Elder Neil L. Andersen sent us. He didn't open his door, so we left a Book of Mormon with a note in his mailbox and we're hoping that a miracle comes from this! I'll keep you all updated, don't worry. After this we went to Ward Council and boy do I love this ward! They are awesome! 

Saturday we had another rendez-vous with our Jehovah's Witness friends. They finally gave Elder Bunker a physical copy of their bible which he's been wanting for a while. They clarified with us that they are not trying to convert us and just want to study the bible with us, so IDK where these weekly meetings will go, but I guess we'll see. We'll probably end up dropping them soon haha. In the meantime, our lessons with them are only for less than 30 minutes each time, so they're not wasting too much of our Saturday mornings. Then we went to Burger King to eat lunch with two members. It was awesome and they are both so nice. A selfie of all of us is in my album this week. The old guy is a member who loves America and Trump and kept saying that I look like a young Trump. I took it offensively (people saying that I look like Ken is 100x better than Trump in my opinion), but at least he was meaning it as a compliment. Now my nickname to him is "Trump Jr." Oh boy haha. The young guy is named Isaac and he's actually preparing to go on a mission right now. He was way fun and we get along really well. It was a good time for everyone. Later this night we did some finding in downtown Versailles and met some cool people. We also got to help some English speaking tourists with directions to places which I love. Two were females from New York. They loved the Book of Mormon musical and actually wanted to stay and chat with us about what a mission is like, so that was cool. Right after them, we helped a Russian guy out who totally was hitting on me the whole time. He immediately asked for my instagram/Facebook after we started pointing him in the direction of the train station. He later professed his love for me, just as Kavish did last week. Oh boy. This is a weekly occurrence at this point lol. He is going to visit the temple when he comes back to France next month, however, so I guess that that's the positive that came out of him meeting me. Who knows, maybe he'll be converted back in Russia. Only time will tell. 

Sunday was quite busy. The translation sets are unfortunately working again haha, so I'm back on duty. 2nd hour I was with my ward BFF, Sister Sanna, again. She taught a great lesson to the youth and then wanted to invite Elder Bunker and I over for dinner with the Sister missionaries (because she doesn't have a husband or a male child over 18). Well, because our Mission President has prohibited Elder and Sister combined dinner appointments, this sadly isn't possible. That news broke her heart. Hopefully we can get over to her house with another male member sometime soon! Later that night we had a dinner appointment with a different family in the ward, the Viennes. They are awesome and made a great dinner. I literally love this ward so much! 

My spiritual invitation this week is to really study Christ and try to implement his teachings into your life. Service, love, gratitude, etc. There are so many things that we can all improve on in this life, and acquiring Christlike attributes should be some of our top priorities. The more we all strive to be like him, the better of a place the World will become. This is God's Plan for all of us, to become as Christ is. I invite you all to strive for this in your own lives. 

I love you all! I hope you all have a great week! Thanks for all of the prayers and messages. 

Elder Connor Anderson