Elise's mission letters

  "There  are no rules to weekly emails. You can literally do whatever you want." -me to my companion 27 seconds ago Iaorana tout le monde! Bonjour et hello! I hope you have all had a good week. Even more than that, I hope you tell me about your good week. Please email me. Our good friend Crystal is preparing to get baptized next month! She really really wants to take this next step but still has a lot of thing she needs to do, so pray for her! We had some fire lessons with her this week about the Word of Wisdom and the Plan of Salvation.  We also taught a fire phone lesson to our friend Maria. She mentioned that 2 years ago, she received a small pass along picture of Christ. She has this image taped by her bed and it has really helped her. This lesson taught me that our simple acts of kindness do not go unnoticed. I am sure that the missionaries who gave her the picture originally were frustrated that they never were able to schedule lessons with Maria, but I hope they k...

  So this never sent from last week. Whoops. Iaorana tout le monde!  This week was a crazy one so strap in for some spelling mistakes and stories. (Hopefully I don't sound impatient and tired in this email. We just took an hour and a half to drive 10 miles so I am this close   to losing it.) Speaking of impatience, I made my film debut this week when I appeared in a Facebook video about patience and virtue! I went on exchanges with Hermana Lander y Hermana Bascom. They speak Spanish and made a video detailing the lives of a woman without virtue and a woman without patience who fight until a shoulder angel teaches them about the Christlike attributes. The video was in Spanish and because I do not speak a lick of Spanish, we figured out which character had the least amount of lines and assigned the part to me. I was the unvirtuous woman and my Spanish vocabulary now includes such insults as "you're ugly" and "nothing can fix your face." The link to the video i...

  Iaorana and bonjour to'u mau hoa!  To be completely honest, this week has not been my favorite week of the mission. It has been pretty hard and rough but! Life goes on.  Ontario is good! It is a fun city that is on a grid, which makes it easy to find stuff. (Sighs at Murrieta which is a mess.) There are lots of trees and mountains!  This week, our ward had a primary program! Primary programs (church services where the young children give the talks and sing the songs) are supreme. I felt the Spirit SO strongly during the songs that these children sang.  Like I said earlier, this week was really hard. One of my goals for my time in Ontario is to write down 1000 different things I am grateful for. If my math is correct, which it probably isn't, that is about 25 different things each day.  It has been a challenge to think of new things, but it has taught me that even during the rough weeks where we feel little and unloved, there are multitudes of blessings th...

  Iaorana! Bonjour!  Let's start this email by talking about a strange fever-dream hike I went on.  We woke up last Monday at too-early a.m. and then left in the dark for a hike with our zone.  The second we thought we got to the top of the summit (and thus the end before we headed back), the member we were with said: "And then we will go down this hill and then up this mountain and then up around there..." For a second we thought it was a joke. It wasn't. After getting to the top of the mountain, we walked for another hour and a half before heading back down. The ugly Murrieta mountains made their comeback BUT! There were some pretty cacti and a cool field. So it was good in the end.  And then, our whole zone ate... Oatmeal! And pumpkin pie!   Now, I am not against oatmeal in any way. I love it. However, oatmeal is the weirdest food for a group of 15 teenagers to eat. Add in the pumpkin pie, and it made for an interesting meal at 8 am.  Other not...