1) Today was a district p day, so we went to Geneva ! We visited the CERN museum, which tried to teach us about particle accelerators, properties of protons and electrons, dark matter, antimatter, and more stuff I can't remember. My brain was like, in shock, because it's been a while since I thought intensively about stuff like that, but it was a lot of fun ! And I did learn / remember some stuff.
2) Also, here is your cultural education for the day. The senior couple taught us about a Swiss holiday- heck, not even Swiss, like, Genevan- called Escalade (which is like, the action of climbing, in this case, ladders). Apparently in the 1600s, the city was attacked by the French to try to force them to be catholic, but a woman making soup on the city wall dumped it out on some of those soldiers climbing ladders, and then the alarm was sounded and the city was saved. To celebrate this, they have candy shaped like vegetables that they put inside a chocolate cauldron, which is then smashed while they all say death to tyrants. I love Switzerland. The vegetable shaped candy is called marzipan / massepain (languages depend), and the cauldron is marmite. You can use that as a conversation topic at Thanksgiving if there's a lull in the conversation or you're tired of talking current politics and would like to discuss 16th century Genevan politics instead.
3) A fun moment this week was when we contacted around the lake in the evening because we got to a rdv half an hour early. The scenery of the lake in the evening with mist and snow on the mountains, and swans (one of which flew past us) was kinda unbeatable. The water was like, a clear turquoise close to us, then a bit deeper blue further or, then the close mountains were blue, and the far ones were purple. So that was pretty magnificent ! And the high we got from talking to people about what matters most, even if most people didn't want to talk much, got us really well set up for a lesson. Just a pretty, picturesque moment 😊
4) This week we worked really hard on calling the numbers in our phone's contacts - people that have been interested in the gospel in the past. We were almost done one evening, and we had every intention of finishing calling all the numbers... but then one guy talked for like, an hour and a half. The first half hour was good, I fit 4 scriptures into the discussion, and he's interested in meeting with us. He just also wanted to talk a lot. 35 minutes into our dinner hour, Soeur Grindstaff rang the doorbell to give us an out 🤣 ... we small talked a bit too well at the beginning 😅
5) We had some really good lessons with our friend Stephane, and he's making some really cool progress ! He brought a friend to one rendez-vous, and we were able to teach him some too. I don't know how much he'll accept it, but he learned and got invited to be baptized, right along with Stephane ! Stephane prayed for the first time in one of our lessons (he didn't feel comfortable up until now), and it was so cool to hear him talking to God for himself. He's asking with such sincerity that I'm sure he'll get answers soon (and he's already starting to !). It was so cool, he told us that if he missed his first bus, he usually just didn't come to church, because with Sunday bus schedules he'd be really late. We told him if he missed a bus, there's a member that drives us, and could probably drive him. He missed the bus yesterday, but we'd checked our phone right before he texted, and then we were greeting people. So we found our right before church started. We apologized and told him to come late anyways. I got the distinct prompting that it was okay, everything was going according to God's plan. We didn't see him until the end of church, when he walked out of priesthood (the men's class for the second hour of church). It was REALLY good, apparently the teacher invited them to share their experiences, and it was a super well planned and well executed lesson. He stayed afterwards talking to other amis and members while we were in a missionary coordination meeting. He's starting to feel at home, which is AWESOME!!! So that was our favorite miracle this week- his journey.
I hope all of you have great weeks, and sorry this email was a bit all over the place !
❤ Soeur Cate
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