#LightTheWorld

Bonjour! 

How is everyone doing? This week here in Canada was a little more relaxed than the past week but still great. 

Last Wednesday we decided to use the day in one of the other little cities in our area. My area is Mont-saint-Hilaire but it covers so many other towns as well. I decided to go out to a little town called Contrecœur. We have a couple of potential people out there but once we got there we felt like we needed to visit the member who lives there. He was super happy to see us and it turns out that he had some questions he was wanting to ask us. It was such a good visit and he fed us some cake that he made too. After that we went and visited this family we are teaching that are from Paru. They are awesome but have been kinda busy so we are trying to have these short lessons with them whenever we pass by. They didn't have a ton of time that day but invited us to come eat lunch with them next week. We also visited Fanel. He is our best ami. He had been in the hospital and at home resting because he got super sick. We were finally able to stop by his place and were able to go in and see him. The people he lives with are not the nicest to us but they were super nice that night. We shared a little bit with him and invited him to come to church again and he came. 

Thursday we had interviews with president Phillips. He is literally the greatest Mission president in the world. He spent the day just driving around the mission doing interviews because zone conference was a 4 for 1 type dealio so he didn't have time to do them then. After those we went to visit a member who hasn't been to church in a couple of weeks. We found out he hasn't been because of his culinary school and he had this cheese project to do. We went over and tried some of the cheese. Along with the 3 little wheels of cheese we ate there we also ate a giant wheel we bought last p-day and ended up eating about 1300grams of cheese in about two days haha super good. That night we helped a Mexican family in the ward learn some french. 

Friday we had district council and I gave this training on the importance of prayer. Prayer is one of the most important tools that our father in heaven has given us. We need to pray as if everything depended on Him and then act as if it all depended on us and then pray again to make sure we did all that we could and make sure everything is in line with God's will. After District Council we visited a whole bunch of potential people and then had diner with the only native English speaking family around. They are super nice and treated us just as if we are their family too. They invited us to spend Christmas Eve with them.  I'm super stoked. 

Saturday was the national day of service! I hope you all did something! We had breakfast that morning with one of my favorite families in the ward. We shared ideas on how to help the ward and our amis better and other ways to Light the World this month. Frere Dumas is fluent in English, Spanish and french so we asked him to come to a couple of lessons with us we need a Spanish translator here. After that we passed by a couple of other people including Ado. She is doing really good and got her hours changed at work so she will be able to come to church on Sunday. She just has to talk to her husband now and have him let her come.  She is awesome. We finished the night of with our weekly Saturday night volleyball. We had 14 people there and 4 of them were not members. The members that invited them even shared a little about the church while we were there with them. It was really cool to see the members just take over and do the missionary work. It was a good night. 

Sunday was fun. I woke up and found out Elder Halliday was super sick. He couldn't move very much and had a bit of a fever. We eventually went to church to see Fanel but Halliday stayed away from most of the people and I had to greet everyone. At church we found out from our ward mission leader that one of our amis that we have kinda stopped teaching wants to be baptized. She is an older Quebecois lady who the sister taught for a bit and then we taught. She knows the Book of Mormon is true and is basically a member but didn't really want to be baptized because she was scared of what her kids would think. She finally told the ward mission leader she wants to be baptized now. We are going to be working with her on that now! We left after sacrament and he just laid back down in his bed for the rest of the day. I got some good studies done and cleaned up the apartment a bit. I also made some pancakes for dinner but he didn't eat much. Before bed I gave him a blessing and hoped for the best. 

Yesterday we got up and Elder Halliday was feeling a lot better but still not 100% so we took it kinda easy.  We did some more studies in the morning and then went and got some pizza because we were both super hungry. We visited Douglas and he is doing good but still had some questions. We tried to bring Christmas into the lesson but we found out that he isn't a big fan of Christmas so that was kinda fun to help him understand the true meaning of Christmas and the Joy that can come from this season. Last night we had dinner with the Youan Family from Cote D'ivoire. They are a returning family and they are so nice. She cooked us some fish and meat with some bananas cooked in a couple of different ways. It was all really good. After dinner we had a small Family night with them. It was so much fun and so easy. Everyone needs to make sure they set apart one night a week to spend together as a family. It's so easy and can be so much fun. 

Well. That's about all I have for this week. #LightTheWorld has some amazing ways to help serve your family and friends. I invite you all to go find some way to serve this week and share the joy that comes from Christmas! Also don't forget to serve your ancestors by going to the temple some time this week!!

I love you all!

Elder Beckstrand

Our cheese. Soo much cheese.

We took this picture because we thought we looked like the people from national treasures in the opening scene. ahah