Chère famille,
Its been a great week. We've been really
blessed, and its always a great feeling at the end of the week when you can tell
yourself that you love being a missionary. This means so much to me and really
is special time.
In other news I couldn't help but notice the 24th come and go, the day Randa dropped me off in the MTC a year ago. Mind-boggling how fast its gone.
We had a lot of just great experiences this week that are signs of advancement in the work.
First, after our weekly
missionary coordination meeting Elder Castillo and I attended ward council for
the first time in my 4th month service here in Lormont. The lack of coordination
with the ward leadership has been one of the big stumbling blocks in the
progression of the work here. (Its been weighing heavily on my spirit for a long
time). And it was evident by just our attendance in the meeting that the
leadership was excited and ready to act to help us and the ward. It was really
cool. We got to talk with them directly and figure things out that they wanted
or needed and we were able to discuss things that we needed. And the whole
atmosphere changed. Instead of the awkward "hows the work going?" that we get
every week at church, we were actually able to discuss and solve and it was very
apparent that the ward leadership was overjoyed to help us and synergy was the
result. Like I said, from what I felt, they were very happy that we were there.
And of course there are still improvements to be made, but I'm really happy and
quite relieved that this gate of communication has been opened.
Sr. Founkeu one of our less active members from Cameroon (the one that made us the fish a couple weeks ago) is back from her trip to Cameroon and we got to see her wednesday, which was fun. She is rather sad about a family situation going on in Cameroon and so we talked her into coming to church.
Thursday We passed Sr. Mueller, the relief society president, who is really sweet and always seems to be a bit nervous. She served a mission in southern France as well 20 years ago. We passed her to try to see her less active husband, but he wasnt home so we ended up talking to her for almost 30 minutes at the door. And at the end she said she had a couple of neighbors she wanted to invite over to meet us one afternoon and we could just have a little party together. Great to see the missionary fire rekindled. This is the new thing that we are working on with members. Is to set times to do something fun with their non member friends, something low pressure that will allow us to get to know their friends. And then we can go from there. Of course follow ups are key to all of this but Its cool to see stuff moving along.
Church was quite fun yesterday as we had the ward meal afterwards and its great to build these wonderful friendships with so many different people. I love it so much.
As far as summer goes,
we're excited for the heat to go away, but we did have a couple crazy storms
this week that we worked through, which actually is fun.
I love you all so much and hope you are working continuously on your testimonies!!
Beaucoup d'amour,
Elder Montgomery
