May 19, 2014

A thousand words...

his picture. Is my favorite. So, yeah, that's going to be the meat of my email this week.

But other than that, it really was a good week. Heavenly Father was basically just throwing people at us to teach. Here's a quick story.

So, last Monday, I received, for the second time in my mission, a referral from church headquarters. A man named Pierre, who lives in our area, had asked for a missionary visit through mormon.org. We contacted him, and he asked us to come over Sunday afternoon. So, that's what we did! At first, we were talking, asking how he had heard of the church and everything, and he said that he had met someone in France who had told him about the church. "I'm more interested in the book, for now". So we sang, prayed, and gave him a Book of Mormon. At the end, he opened up a little bit more, and we found out several things about him. First off, the person who had talked to him about the church was his girlfriend, and she had recently been baptized in France. Second, she had been giving him missionary lessons over the phone for a while now. Third, he was planning on going back to France soon, and has already decided that he wants to get baptized on July 12th. So, yeah. That was our cool miracle for the week.

We also had to go to les urgences at the hospital this week. I debated on whether or not to include this story, but here we go! So yeah, a missionary which shall remain nameless got hit by a car while they were on their bike this week. Not seriously hurt, nothing broken, just very sore. I prefer to not give the name, because I don't know if they're planning on telling this story to their family just yet, but hey, it's an exciting one. As an interesting side note, french emergency rooms are much more calm than one would expect from a place with "emergency" in it's name. We show up, there's a line to talk to a receptionist, and when we finally get to her, the following interesting conversation ensues:

"Hi, my friend just got hit by a car, and would like to see a doctor."

"Okay, well can I see your [french social security card]?"

"No, actually, we're american. But we just wanted to see a doctor to make sure that everything is okay, and to-"

"Well we can't do anything for you if you don't have your card! How are you going to pay?"

"...well...we could just pay normally, I guess. Like I said, my friend just got hit by a car, so we would really like to see a doctor."

"Alright, well we need a copy of an identity card, two phone numbers, and a street address."

"Actually, I don't really know what the exact address is."

"Well, we can't do anything for you if we don't have the address!"

"...alright, we'll make a phone call..."

So yeah. Eventually we figured everything out. Everyone is fine now, but french hospitals are ridiculous.

And that's my story!

Love,

-Elder Santos