France Lyon Mission

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!    Well it is winter here again in Tarbes.   It is 36 degrees F right now and 90% rain predicted today.   Being from Poway, CA, we are not used to all the rain, colder weather, and lack of sun.   Though I would like to report that we did have a direct ray of sun a few days ago between 10:24 and 10:32 AM which was nice.   Actually, the locals say this has been more of an odd year. To top it off I (Marc) have caught a bad cold, which although bad, is an improvement over the flu, so I am not complaining too much. In our branch yesterday we restarted Sunday school and thus added a 3 rd hour to our worship service.   We had a class for adults with 24 attendees and a class for the youth with 3 attendees.   We had some great discussions and everyone seemed to enjoy the class.   We are using a manual that covers the basic principles of our church https://www.lds.org/manual/gospel-principles?lang=eng It explains what our ch...

This week at Church —Today the records of two new members to our Branch were read in!  They are both single brethren and each bore an emotional testimony today during Fast and Testimony Meeting.  One bore his testimony in his native language, Spanish, with our French/Spanish/Chinese speaking Elder as a translator.  Fast and Testimony Meeting is held the first Sunday of each month where we come fasting from food and water for 2 meals over a 24-hour period.  We give the cost of the missed meals to the Church to support those without daily food and with other needs.  And we grow spiritually closer to Heavenly Father by placing our temporal needs to food secondary to our spiritual desire to be more in tune with the Voice of the Lord. It really works!  The testimony portion is a free-will invitation to come to the microphone and share spiritual experiences where God has visibly blessed our lives during the past month.  We ta...

30 April 2018 Pics  below Toulouse, France (Tolosa in ancient days) —this week it was our turn for a missionary conference!   The young missionaries meet every 3 weeks for a District Conference, every 6 weeks for a zone conference and several times within a transfer period (6 weeks) to do exchanges with other young missionaries.   They come back refreshed, motivated and filled with new ideas.   Since there are only 2 missionary couples located in the western end of France and France being a very large area, it’s hard for couple missionaries to have similar experiences.   So we created our own mini Seniors Couple Missionary conference in Toulouse.   We already have a Stake Conference (a collection of several congregations of Wards and Branches make up a Stake) on Saturday and Sunday.   Since the other Senior couple from Australia and ourselves are both here for the conference, we added two extra days before the Stake Conference to enjoy the ar...