Be HIS Hands (Katie-Toul)

Hi :)

Okay, If feel like the week goes by so fast and then it's suddenly Monday again and I'm like, "But, wait! I won't have anything to write about!" Then I look at my planner and realize an entire week passed and that in actuality I have TROP (too much) to write about. Hm.

First off, I don't want you all to think I'm the missionary that's like, hey! Everyone! Be better! Because I am so incredibly imperfect that I don't have the right. However, I would like to share a little miracle about a member here and missionary work. 

His name is Frère Pagot, and he is an older man. One you might accidentally mistake for a Témoin de Jéhovah, (Jehovan's Wtiness) actually. But he is so sincere and so sweet. We are at his house for a soirée familiale (remember my easter miracle from last week??), and we are having a good time, but a little down because Brigitte's inactive son didn't come with her and that was kind of the point. So we're chatting with Soeur Pagot and Brigitte when Frère Pagot disappears. I look out the window and see that he is talking to an older man and I just smile. You know. What else am I supposed to do? The next thing I know Frère Pagot and this man are walking through the doorway! Frère Pagot says, "Look who I found! This is my friend Joël. He needs the Plan of Salvation." 

So we go and teach him the Plan of Salvation. It turns out he recently lost both his wife and a son, and has been having a hard time believing in God. But he is ready and willing to pray and read in order to believe again :) We even called him to sing happy birthday on Saturday, and he told he is progressing! Yes, in those exact words. He read the whole thing and prayed. Good boy, Joël ;) 

BUT WAIT, there's more. Frère Pagot, after Joël leaves, tells us that he has been praying for weeks for an opportunity to help the sister missionaries. Then when he was talking to Joël, he felt like he should introduce us. How simple and wonderful! And with that tiny act of faith, frère Pagot helped this man find God again. Incredible.

Now watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5NVypwnNfo

What does this have to do with missionary work? This hit me in the face this week when a different member mentioned it. WE ARE HIS HANDS. Notice how with each healing, Jesus first commands them to be whole, then He extends a hand. That is us. Without the help of the members (even more so than the missionaries), amis cannot progress, and these people who haven't taken a spiritual step like that in years, would never be able to take that first step again. My advice to you this week--be His hands :)

Angélique and Loïc are doing well! They are having TONS of opposition to the baptism, and also because they decided to get married first, everything with that is going wrong as well (of course). So please pray for them. 

We met a couple of polynesian ladies on Friday who said we could come by with a message of Christ on Saturday, which we did. During the lesson they were SO nice and wonderful and we were like AH! Golden! I think we might have spoken a little soon...because after the lesson we left them with a prayer and they even said they would come to church the next day. But about 5 minutes after we left, we got a phone call. I was driving and listening to Sr. Evans give me the strangest looks. Here is an excerpt from the conversation:

Visesia (poly): We were just wondering why you didn't do the cross sign after the prayer.

S. Evans: Well, because, we don't do that, because, uh, we believe that Christ lives and that the words of the prayer are more important than a sign!

V: Oh. You're not catholic.

E: No.

V: What is the name of your priest?

E: Um...our Branch Président leads the meetings and his name is Lionel Claus.

V: Who was the mother of Jesus?

E: Mary...?

V: Okay. That is good. We will still try to come tomorrow.

HAH. They just wanted to make sure . It turns out they are SUPER catholic and very practicing, and they had to make sure we were real missionaries and not fakes, so they quizzed us. I think we barely passed.

I love you all! Gros bisous!

Soeur Pettingill

We found a field filled with these dandelion things...cute right?

Well, for that one at least ;) 

French people and their daily bread. Goodness gracious.

We said goodbye to our cute american friend in the branch on Sunday :'(

This beautiful countryside village where a less-active lives

Week 2 Transfer 4 I love Brive (Jacob-Brive)

Well this has been a great week. I love the GOSPEL. So I have been feeling so much love for the Savior as I have turned to Him to help me with weaknesses and to help me become the missionary He wants me to be! I love Him. This week we got the chance to watch Finding Faith in Christ with Alain and I loved it. I love Easter, I wish I ate up the scriptures as much as I ate up the chocolate. And I wish I kept receiving more of the Spirit as I kept receiving more chocolate from members. I am going to have to bump up the quality of my personal studies in order to balance it all out. 

This week I had a lot of thoughts about how much I didn't understand the gospel from before my mission. It is amazing that no matter how much you shove and force and cram the scriptures and church and seminary and the gospel into your life, it really doesn't make sense until you share it. (Or maybe I just didn't cram as hard as I could.) It is amazing how if you just sit down and really think about the Plan of Salvation, then you look at the world and you realize WHY everything is there. You realize that NOTHING really matters that doesn't not bring us either closer to our Heavenly Father or that doesn't bring us joy. The plan is so simple but we make it so complicated sometimes. I love it so much and I feel like I have come to understand it so much more. How much do I still not understand. But in any case, thanks Mom and Dad. I get why you did what you did.

Some things that happened this week were we got to enjoy a family home evening with the return missionary in the ward who was serving in Provo. That was cool! That mission was a lot different than here from what he was telling us. In any case he is really excited to do missionary work and so while he is here we are going to be doing some work together.

On Tuesday I had an awesome exchange with Elder Pedersen who is a new Elder in the district. We got to do some fun things like contacting, eating Brive eclairs, and going to Ward Council. He is super awesome and comes from Denmark so he is pretty unique and speaks Danish. 

On Thursday we got to go to zone training in Bordeaux so that was super great! We got taught by Elders Beyer and Taylor! They explained how to set goals and why they are important and what make good goals! I really enjoyed that and it has been the theme since last transfer. After that, we all tried to set some goals and really break them down into the simplest steps we can come up with so all we need to do is go down the checklist doing the individual steps and boom you have reached your goals. It is so important to be able to accomplish that because if you can fix a goal and then diligently accomplish the little things (Alma 37:6) you can do ANYTHING you put your head to. Or so I hear. In theory it works but I do have a small growing testimony already that the reason I am here are because of the small spiritual experiences in my life. But I am going to start trying to apply this better in my life so that I can become more like Christ and develop faster and just get to the point that I want to be at! I love the gospel! 

We have interviews with President this Friday so I am super excited for that so I can figure out this whole missionary thing ;)

On Friday we helped move out another family in our ward of 5 so that is making the ward smaller but we are going to really work hard so that we can build it back up with a couple baptisms this transfer.

Alain is doing well but he is struggling to stop smoking. He really needs your prayers so if you could that would be wonderful.

Olivia went to Bordeaux on Saturday and basically got super integrated by playing piano at the Stake Relief Society activity and apparently she had a blast! 

Thierry, well we finished teaching him everything this week and basically he said is going to get baptized he just has to get there on his own time! He needs to feel comfortable with prayer so if you could pray for him for that (that he can pray ;))

And Bello is the African guy that Serge brought and he is super awesome! He came to church for the second week in a row and brought us a bunch of African food so that we can see how his culture is. We are teaching him how to read English and he is excited to be baptized!

I love this gospel. I know the church is true! Please!!!!!!! READ PREACH MY GOSPEL EVERYDAY!!!!! STUDY IT AS MUCH AS YOU STUDY THE OTHER SCRIPTUREs!!!!! IT IS INSPIRED FOR US NOT JUST ME!!!! INVITE SOMEONE TO FAMILY HOME EVENING WITH/ or without THE MISSSIONARIES THIS WEEK! BECOME FRIENDS WITH SOMEONE YOU DON,T KNOW SO WELL! I know it can be hard but it is soooo important! We are so blessed!

Love Elder Pettingill

Jacob sent home these pictures with no explanation.  Maybe it is the African food they tried?

Elder Pettingill with the Tahitian ; )

Elder Martinez

Week 1 Transfer 4 City 2 (Jacob-Brive)

Elder Martinez and Elder Pettingill

Well this week I wont be able to write much. It is Easter weekend and so everything is completely closed and we are already super busy so we cant come tomorrow. So in order to do emails all four of us are sitting here in the Bishop's office at the church playing poker (I taught them which I am not sure is good..) and doing 45 minutes rounds each so we don't have to spend 6 hours here.

So that is fun. To give the summary of the week:

Monday- We didn't have anything plans so we decided to do some missionary work in the morning and then finish off the night in our apartment. So we did that and then got invited to family home evening chez les Vilains (at the Vilain's house) with a recent convert Jean-Claude so that was really fun! We enjoyed really good food and got to see Frere Vilain's son Francois who lives in Paris for school and so he came down for the weekend. Frere Vilain said he joined the Paris mission Facebook page and he saw pictures of Sister Pettingill so that was funny! 

Tuesday- We spent some time doing port to port which was great! We got to teach Thierry at night and he had the awesome news that he finished the Book of Mormon! He said it was just the first lecture and now he is going to reread it by topic using the topical guide in the back to help him understand better all that. He is super awesome and was at church yesterday! We saw alain and he is super excited for his baptism soon and we are going to fix a two week plan to stop smoking so he can be prepared for that!

Wednesday- This was a little rough but it felt soooooo good after! We spent 7 hours walking around Brive with a list of signs that we can put posters up for free and put up publicity for the English class! That was super awesome because it gave us places to go and we got to see new parts of Brive that we havent seen yet! Also we got lots of sun and so I am feeling like a californian again slightly!

Thursday-We went to the Barrattos house and had a really awesome lesson with them! They are such an awesome relatively young family in the ward with two young kids! They just bought a house that was built in the 1800's and it is super cool! We had an Easter meal with them (lamb and potatoes)

Friday- We did some planning and them headed out with the O'Mullan family to do service with a family that just moved and the mom just hurt her arm trying to do too much (sound familiar?) So we helped them put up some stuff and then came back and got dressed  and the O'Mullans took us to our lesson with Serge. It was great because he brought a friend that he (Serge) wanted to hear our message! That was cool and the guy ended up coming to church. Later we had English class with 6 nonmembers! Also there was a missionary that just got back from his mission in Utah and so he got released while we were doing the English class. Also we had a friend of Matthew (our old ami that wanted to get baptized) come to us and ask to find out about our church.

Saturday. We went to Tulle and had an awesome lesson with Olivia. We taught her the Plan of Salvation and it was super awesome because it seemed like everything kind of made sense for her. SO we fixed a baptismal date for the 17 of May (Jacob's birthday) right before she heads back to the US on the 20th. That was so cool!

Sunday- We had a ward repas (meal) and then Elder Allal who just got back gave a little presentation of his mission. Then at night we went to the Huberts with Thierry for an another awesome Easter dinner!

Well I got to go!!!

Love Elder Pettingill

Don't have cocoa powder and trying to make brownies? Just use chocolate milk. (Katie-Toul)

Hi everyone :)

What an incredible week. I feel like sometimes my emails take a more spiriual turn and sometimes I just highlight all of the hilarious things that happen to us. Let's go with the best of both worlds for this round?

Our mission had a goal to have a soirée familiale (family home evening) every single night the week of Pâques (Easter), Monday to Monday (so 8 fhes). At the beginning of the week we weren't sure we were going to have one every single night...actually we didn't have very many set up at all. But slowly everything arranged itself and we had one set up for every single night. And they were going great! The goal was to have a less-active or an ami de l'église (investigator) at each one, and it was working! Until Friday came around, and the family who we had planned to have one with on Saturday cancelled at the last minute. We were slightly frustrated, but did everything we could to find a family to have one with. The problem is in a branch with only a few active families, it was pretty hard to find someone we hadn't already used. BUT. We prayed. So obviously, with prayer, everything just works out. Right?

Soeur Evans was having kind of a sad day, so I made her a flower crown

 Wrong.

Saturday came and went. We tried everything. We prayed and prayed and pleaded and begged for Heavenly Father to help us have a miracle. Nope. And to top it all off, it rained a lot. By the end of the night, we were cold, discouraged, and tired.

Waking up the next day was harder than usual, though we put on smiles because we (well at least I) LOVE church. It was still rainy and we were still tired. But we had amis come that we weren't expecting and we taught some spiritually uplifting lessons, so all was well. Then the cool part comes. When church ended, we went up to a member and asked if it would be possible to see them that night with their less-active son (we had an fhe for the afternoon but not for the night), and she proceeded to tell us that we already had something set up with them and another family in our branch! Huh? I mean, we'll take it! Then I walked outside. The sun was SHINING and it was absolutely beautiful! Talk about resurrection symbolism. Even though our answer didn't exactly come when or as expected, we still had 8 soirée familiales. We just needed to trust a little. :)

Christopher's chess board

Speaking of fhes, let me tell you about a couple of them. The first one this week was with a member and her non-member husband and son, Patrice and Christopher. Tahitian wife, french husband, mix son. So funny :) Well, in order to try and interest Christopher a little more (who is 18 and very uninterested in the gospel), we decided to compare the Plan of Salvation to his favorite thing of all time--chess. Chess you say? Yes!

tiramisu with speculoos (like a ginger snap cookie)

Chess=Plan of Salvation. Duh. The objective of chess, in case none of you know, is to win. What do you do to win? You move your various pieces around in a strategic manner and try to take the opponent's pieces with your own. Sometimes you make mistakes, but hopefully you learn from them. What if you were to try and win at chess using only your one pawn? Or even the whole row of pawns? Could you win? Probably not. Luckily we have extra pieces to help us. What if you try playing without any kind of a plan? Could you win? Not likely. There are also rules that you must follow that keep the game in line and everything just. This is the same. God gave us commandments to follow. He gave us a plan to follow. He gave us extra help to get us through life. And by the end of the game, using God's plan, we WILL win! Cool, huh? :) Tiare, the mom, made this incredible tiramisu au speculos. TOO GOOD.

We also had one with crazy, super French people that took almost 3 hours! We only had a 10 minute spiritual thought. Hah. SO many courses. When has eating ever had to take that long?? Never. Goodness gracious, French people. But it was fun and lively and we got to eat a lot...so that's always good...right? 

ANGELIQUE AND LOIC. Have I even told you about them yet?? They are incredible. She is the sister to a member in Nancy, and she wants to get baptized. She has a date set. They are planning on getting married (she is also expecting a baby) as soon as possible. We have taught them a lot this week, and he is less believing, but yesterday at our soirée familiale he was expaining to the member how much he likes our branch and the people and good he feels and how he is not baptized YET. I have so much love and hope for these people!

What a crazy fast week filled with so much fun and wonderful missionary things. 

Also, this afternoon I made brownies. Unfortunately, we had no more cocoa powder, and because it is jour férié (public holiday), no stores were open. So I used chocolate milk powder. We'll see how this turns out :)

Joyeuses Pâques! (Happy Easter)

Love,

Soeur Pettingill

We made a quick with just poireaux (leeks).  Who knew?  French people love poireaux and some members gave us some fresh ones from their garden.

Happy Easter!

Happy Cambodian New Year anybody? (Katie-Toul)

Hi everyone :)

We met a lady last night who told us that the next day is the Cambodian New year! That's why she had food set out for her ancestors. She was very old and couldn't really speak French...but we obviously understood some things. 

So how is everyone doing? I love being a missionary. This past week FLEW by...I barely had time to breathe, and now suddenly I'm sitting at this ghetto internet café doing emails again. It just blows my mind. But a busy week is a happy week as a missionary...and actually, probably just in general. I don't really remember though. Let me tell you about some of the miracles we saw this week.

Making cards at Sisters' Conference

We had a SISTERS CONFERENCE! It was so wonderful. All of the stuff we did was super fun, but my favorite part was seeing all of the people I love SO MUCH in one place at one time! One of the funniest things about it (I thought) was what we had for lunch. Normally, at conferences, we have sandwiches and apples or something. This time we had croissant sandwiches, fancy salad, apple, and a giant chocolate macaron for dessert. So fun, so good. :)

We also had a really giant miracle that happened all throughout the week. At the beginning of the transfer, our district leader told us as that as a district, by the end of week 6, he wanted us to have taught 60 lessons (in one week). So this week was the week. And our district goal for this week was to pray at every single prayer during the day (which is a lot!) that our district will reach this goal. AND. No, we didn't teach quite that many, but we taught the most we have ever taught in a week, and during the slowest week of a transfer. Me and soeur Evans were extremely blessed to have lesson after lesson just handed to us by the Lord. We met so many incredibly people this week, and saw so many teaching miracles. 

Here's one: Soeur Evans was telling me while walking about how during her whole mission, she has always wanted to teach someone who is really searching with real questions for the truth. For the most part as missionaries we convince people that they are searching. But we always hear those stories about the miracle ami who was found because a missionary was at a certain place at a certain time. So we both start personally praying for someone who is truly certain. THE NEXT DAY. We get a call from a member who has been on the brink of becoming inactive (we had met them exactly one time since being here). She proceeds to tell us that she has this friend named Aurélie who keeps asking her questions, so they set up a day to talk about the answers to those questions and wanted us to come. I asked the member if there was anything in particular we should prepare as a lesson, and this is what she said: "No, nothing in particular. Aurélie is just really...searching for the truth." 

Okay, Heavenly Father. 

And the lesson was incredible. She is completely searching and wants to see us again! And do you know

what the wonderful thing about member referrals is? The people they bring are so NORMAL. They are just normal people with normal lives. Often, the people we find, feel the need for the gospel because of something they're lacking (often temporal needs) in their lives. YOU, members, know the normal people who are searching for something to fill the lack of spiritual in their lives. 

We also ate MacDo with our Président de Branche. Ew.

Gérard is incredible. We watched President Monson's talk with him, and he said that he had this question that he has been searching for the answer to for years and years and could never find it. Then, in that 15 minute talk, the exact answer he was looking for was there. He was so excited to go home and watch the rest of conference to "find the rest of his answers" :)

Samedi (Saturday) sport with Tahitians anybody?? We played volleyball and met lots of new Tahitian member referrals :)

Angélique and Loïc are our most recent, coolest people of all people, amis. Angélique is the sister of a member in Nancy, and she told us after the conférence de branche on Sunday something that excited my heart a tiny bit. She said, "I just feel so good here. What do I do to get baptized the fastest??" Her brother, Jean-Jacques, also just got baptized in Nancy. We were able to go because she went, and I got to play the piano. Hurray! :) She is so cool. We should probably let her know about all of the commandments she's going to keep soon. ;)

37 = number of cats we saw this week.

Let me just tell you...prayer WORKS. Thank you all so much for everything you do! I love you trop! 

gros bisous!

Soeur Pettingill

Happy Birthday, Josh (Jacob-Brive)

Well I had a thought on Tuesday where I realized it was Josh's birthday but I hadn't realized when I was doing emails last week. Haha so pass along a happy birthday :)

Well I am sitting here doing emails and there is this Jewish women just talking my ears off. When I walked in she said 'Oh you're evangelist?' and ever since then she is just talking all about America and how she is looking for work. When she found out that we have 8 kids in our family, she offered her services to help out with all the cleaning and work there must be... I said I would ask.. So yeah do you want a Jewish women to come help? She even said not paid, just to be fed and logging would be fine. She even speaks French so ;)

Sending off Elder Tihopu

But in any case I got the news on Friday, and Elder Martinez and I are going to stay together so that was exciting! We set some goals for this transfer and got into action by heading off for a nice morning run to the park! It felt great! Especially since last week I had 3 exchanges and we had to wake up at 5h30 every morning to head to Perigueux to do the exchange. We did that 4 days in a row and so I didn't get to work out much! I feel like I learned so much this week. I have been trying so hard to learn to be more diligent with all my work and in learning. I figured out that is the key to becoming or to develop in any area that we would like to be better. I want to do so much but it is hard to grow if we don't continue and diligently work at it...

As far as this week:

We went to FHE with the Vilains and Thierry so that was super fun and Thierry got to enjoy the 'FHE culture'. Then we went Tuesday and taught him about tithing and fast offerings. So that was fun. He didn't quite accept it yet. Elder Yeung and I did an exchange that was super good. I learned so much from him about being BOLD! and then I did and exchange with Elder Tihopu (who left this afternoon and is going to Toulouse). That was great and I had lots of fun. Then on Thursday I went to Perigueux (I didn't get to see Aunt Jeannette's lady's friend unfortunately) and the exchange with Elder Loera was super great. He is going home tomorrow and so it was fun to be able to learn so much from him and get some perspective before he heads home. I almost did a baptismal interview for their investigator (now member) Daniel but I taught him like 3 transfers ago so Elder Strom the ZL did it. Then on Saturday we went with the Fulcrandes to the Baptism and so I got to see my first baptism in France!!

It is sometimes hard to not baptize every week (like Mexico) but then I just tell myself. I signed up for this mission not to baptize but to be obedient and to INVITE! I think that is one of the most important things ever is to not lose that perspective and to always look for opportunities to invite. Because if the Lord wanted me to baptize he would make me baptize.

I love the gospel and I wish that I was just a little bit better; thank goodness for the Savior, I know He lives. I am so grateful for all the wonderful examples in my life!

Love you!

Elder Pettingill 

Coloring Easter Eggs

Goodbye!

A Good Week (Jacob-Brive)

Hello again!

Thanks so much for the letters and emails!!!

This week was great! Like I said in my email last week which was very short.. We went to Rocamadour! It was super awesome and soo pretty! The reason that it was built was that they found the body of a man completely intact without any degrading of the body. So they decided that made him cool and made a Saint. St. Amadour. We enjoyed the day with Frere Bennedetti who took us along the tour which he has decided to do with missionaries somewhat often because he did that with missionaries when he lived in the north. His family is so awesome!

Frere Bennedetti with the Elders

They live in Tulle and so every time we want to go teach Olivia they have offered to feed us and then help with our lesson! They are so cool! For Rocamadeur Sr. Bennedetti made us all lunch and it was soooo good!! He also just for fun brought along cans of sardines for all of us that he got in Spain. So I tried my first sardine.. Not too bad actually! It just tastes like tuna! Frere B. is also extremely smart and loves to read! He is so funny because he found several books, one about the people of Haggoth (the group in the Book of Mormon who left in boat) which was over 1000 pages and is claimed to be the real history of the people. He also has a book from a guy that claimed to have translated the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon and it is almost three time the size of the Book of Mormon. So those might be some good reads if you get some time to throw down a good couple weeks of straight reading (maybe Adam would be a good candidate to tackle them) ;)

Elder Tihopu and Fr. Bennedetti

Elder Pettngill and Elder Martinez

Elder Pettingill and Elder Hunt

Tuesday we started the missionary work again and on Tuesday we got to teach an awesome Spanish family from Elder Martinez' city! They are also the Martinez family so that was cool.. It was really weird because they would be speaking in Spanish and then we would be speaking in French and at one point the dad switched from speaking to Elder Martinez in Spanish to me also in Spanish. He just sat there for like 4 minutes speaking in Spanish to me and I just nodded my head like I understood what he was saying (I got the general sense but I didn't really know what he was saying at all). His wife is atheist after things that have happened in her life and told us that we were completely crazy!! She could not understand at all why we would "throw away" two years of our lives when we could be having fun and enjoying the sun of Spain :) She wanted to let Elder Martinez call his mom because she knew that she might be worried :) They are great and we are going back on Friday to teach them again. Later we got to teach Thierry with Frere Vilain  and that went really well. Thierry has read almost half of the Book of Mormon and said he wants to read it a second time using the guide to the scriptures (with topics) to help him learn. He came to general conference for the Sunday morning session and left because had to do something so we didn't get to see how he liked it.

Alain is doing really well. We got to see him with Fr. Deneuche on Wednesday and that was so good! Fr. Deneuche just stopped smoking with his wife and so he was a great help and strength for Alain. Alain after that decided that he would not buy anymore cigarettes and was strong in his decision. He is so awesome!

Elder Olsen and Elder Pettingill

We had district meeting this week and it went pretty well. I knew that because I would not be very good at presenting I needed something that would blow away everyone and make them think that I was really cool. So I bought everyone a Big Brive speculoos eclair with Elder Olsen (we were on an exchange!)

Brive District

Then we woke up early and got out early to get the eclairs before Elder Hunt and Tihopu knew and hid the eclairs. then we ran from the gare (train station) to the Perigueux chapel and hid the eclairs all over and one in the closet in the chapel. Then during the meeting Elder Olsen helped me by using visual to teach the principle of goal setting (get a brive eclair), faith, and setting sub-goals to give us to map to get there! (I gave him a map of brive) Then while he was wandering around the room I kept talking and everyone thought Elder Olsen was being weird until he sat back in his seat with a Brive eclair! Everyone then was very very excited to show their faith (ESPECIALLY Elder Hunt) and see if they could get the Brive eclairs for themselves. 

So I know that this church is directed by servants of God because of the amazing conference that we had! I absolutely loved it all and loved all the talks!! Elder Holland said “it is worth it to defend your faith with kindness and long suffering. “ I love it.

I know that this church is CHRIST's church. I love the Lord and am trying so hard to keep his commandments! Please take Elder Ballard's invitation to bring one person forward for the missionaries to teach! 

Con amor,

Elder Pettingill

I asked Elder Pettingill what he thinks will happen with transfers next week.  Here is what he said:

I think I will probably stay and maybe Elder Martinez too. I am not really sure but I am completely content in any case :)I just love Brive and we are just teaching so many cool people that I would love to continue with them!

Elders having fun in the apartment

A little awkward, as usual (Katie-Toul)

Hi!! 

Do I sound excited enough? It's funny, looking back at my week I want to say, "Man, what a WEIRD week. What a weird, awkward week." That's the sad thing about French...they don't have a real word for awkward. Poor frenchies. But seriously though, there were countless times where after a small though enormously awkward moment me and Sr. Evans would turn to look at each other and just, well, awkwardly laugh. So here are some of the wonderfully awkward moments of the week:

This thing is a DOG. He's huge.  This member family
has two of them...crazies...

Okay, comme d'habitude (as usual), let me just start with an update on our car situation. A mission couple came this week and switched cars with us because the lease on the old car was up. AHEM. Let's just say...we are driving in style. Totally forgot to take a picture with it before emails, but I'll have one for you next week. AND Heavenly Father knew that I just started getting used to/LIKING the stick shift, so He gave me an auto :) Although something kind of funny that keeps happening that didn't happen too often driving in the States, is we keep getting lost...because of the GPS. A lot of streets in France turn into other streets without really turning or changing. So the GPS will say in his nice, Australian accent: "Turn right on rue de blah" and so I turn right. But what he really means is go straight. So we have ended up going in a lot circles this week, and sometimes multiple circles if we still don't figure it out. But we're learning :)

We started out the week finding this fun/interesting/really cool couple named Catherine and Denis. The first thing they let us know is that no, they are NOT married, and that yes, they are living together. "We are living in sin." Yes...for now. ;) With this Easter Finding thing we're doing, almost all of our lessons are about the Plan of Salvation, which is really interesting because we get to see all of the different point of views. Catherine believes in reincarnation and Denis believes in eternal life, but eternal life where we still have trials and hard things happen (so basically eternal earth life). It's so interesting to listen to their ideas and then slowly unfold for them what God came up with before this life. Catherine is especially cool. She told us that she knows we didn't meet her on the street par hasard (by chance), but that God put us all there on the same street at the same time. I'm excited to see her strengthen the testimony that she already has!

Along with new names, Gerard also gave us 
what he called a"petit brioche" 

 We also had this interesting lesson with Gérard, a long-time ami from the Elders. He is very intelligent and basically knows everything about everything. EXCEPT when we taught him about prophets and dispensations using a cool little diagram thing; he told us he learned something new. He is really into knowing things are true by the Spirit, and he is working on reading the Book of Mormon. He even told us that he already knows it's true! He then proceeded to tell us that because it's a rule that he can't use our first names, he decided to create names for us. Um. Okay? So he gave Sr. Evans the name of Délicate and me the name of Délicieuse. Neither of us are really sure how we feel about it yet....

We did however meet one of the nicest, coolest people ever this week. She lives two floors right underneath us, and her name is Suzelle. We got home with 5 minutes to spare, so we decided to stop in real fast to see if she could come to our Branch Conference we're having in a couple of weeks (we had met her a couple of times in passing already). She said she would love to! She might be working, but pray that she can come! She is from the Mauritius Islands and speaks English and French fluently. She recently moved here with her husband, and her sister-in-law is a member! How cool is that? We like Suzelle.

#frenchpizza

Wasn't General Conference incredible? I just LOVED it. We didn't have any of our amis come, but I think for the most part it was because it was at Nancy, and not even that many members from our Branch came to Nancy to watch it when they could just watch it in the comfort of their homes. But we'll see throughout the week if they (our amis that is) decided that it would be worth it to listen to a few hours of a prophet and his apostles and other inspired men. I just loved it. And especially after kind of a tiring week, general conference was exactly what I needed to boost my energy level. 

OH! I just have a quick word of advice for y'all. Let's say you are craving pizza like a mad person and you realize that it's cheap pizza night at a pizza place right by your house so you consider buying two and then eating them both in the same night. Don't do it! Because chances are, you will probably have a mangez-vous of pizza the very next night. 

I love you all with all my heart!

Soeur Pettingill

Along with a view of his giant dog, the nice member gave me
some dp from Lux, two things I love very much

No, it's not cinnamon rolls, but roasting shamallows over the burner with petit ecolier
 cookies to make s'mores 10 seconds before conference starts...pretty close :)

Toul District--it was supposed to be a mug shot.
Apparently not everyone got the memo.