Week 31 "Hello from St. Quentin!"

Bonjour tout le monde, I love you all so much!  I have changed cities and now I'm serving in St. Quentin. The mission roller coaster went through even bigger ups and downs this week but overall it was a great, great week, because metaphorically, hey, I'm riding a roller coaster and riding roller coasters is fun! The week started with a fun finish to missionary work in Lille, with a night at the Gouttin family's house.  The following day I enjoyed my final day eating at the Jean and Dampt family's homes. The families and ward in Lille is amazing, but now it's time to move on to new things.  

Here we are eating with Pascal!

   Transfer day we woke up, ate breakfast, exercised, studied and headed off to the train station. I rode in a two level TGV, which was so cool.  Later Elder Smith and I met up then headed to St. Quentin, the new city.  St Quentin is beautiful; the first day Elder Smith showed me around the city and already I think it's really cool; it's situated on a little hill and there's a cool canal running through the center of the city.  Not too far from our apartment is the town Basilica, celebrating 1700 years since construction.  In brief, this is a really cool town!

The view from our appt. with the basilica above and behind

    With a small town comes small time between places and more time to find people, so we did a lot of that this week, which I honestly enjoyed. Even though we haven't found anyone new to teach yet, I felt so happy walking around and just trying to share the happiness I had.  Pretty physically tiring but all worth it, in the end we're alive and that makes me happy.  Despite our lack of new investigators we have a few already who I've met and I hope progress toward baptism.  I meet most of them this week so stay tuned folks.

The full moon my first night in St. Quentin

   The best part so far is the members and their food, ha. For a relatively small city the ward is strong here and the members really help the missionaries; I've felt the love of the members and it's only been a week.  Missionary work works really really well when members work closely with us.  There are a couple investigators we have who are close friends with members and that makes us really happy.  Pascal, one of the members here helps us a lot, and of course he makes good food.  

   I don't think I've had many weeks when I felt as emotionally, spiritually, and physically tried as this one. I haven't had many weeks when I've felt happiness like this one, just going out to work and being happy, and this is really hard to do but I'm sure it will be worth it.  I'll make some great memories here with Elder Smith!