Happy 4th of July. Our holiday ended well because we were able
to Skype with some of our children and grandchildren.
We have been busily engaged during the past two weeks with
taking care of necessary office business before President and Sister Murdock
departed for home. We then focused our
attention on welcoming President Roney and his wife and helping them understand
their administrative responsibilities.
We also had the opportunity to participate in meetings with them as they
met first with the mission leadership and then with missionaries from the Lyon
Zone.
President and Sister Roney are from Provo. They have eight children and four
grandchildren. They have two married
children and two children currently serving as missionaries. One son who just returned from a mission a
year ago is spending three weeks here while their three youngest sons who are
11, 12 and 17 will live with them in France and attend school here. President Roney served a mission in the
Toulouse, France mission during the late 70’s.
He founded NuSkin and left his position as chairman of the board to
serve as mission president for three years.
President and Sister Roney invited us to the mission home that
is located in Ecully, a suburb of Lyon, for dinner on Sunday evening. We enjoyed seeing the mission home and
meeting them for the first time. They
are very friendly and expressed appreciation to us for our service. We helped them get acclimated to their
administrative responsibilities on Monday.
They and two missionary assistants conducted a leadership session with
the zone leaders from throughout the mission on Tuesday. We were invited to participate. They taught the gospel of Jesus Christ while
they presented their vision and plans for the future direction of missionary
work in the mission locations where we serve.
They plan to conduct meetings throughout the mission area to present
their vision and plans the rest of this week and next week. President Roney will also interview every
missionary during this time.
Their first zone meeting occurred today for the Lyon
Zone. The Lyon Zone includes
missionaries from Lyon, St. Etienne, Grenoble, Valence, Besancon, Dijon, and Chalon.
They will conduct meetings on Thursday and Friday in the Geneva and
Lausanne Zones. Next week they will
conduct meetings in the Nice, Bordeaux, Toulouse and Montpellier Zones. One of their main themes is that our job on
earth is to learn what the Savior taught and obey it. They gave each missionary a small journal to
use in writing down this theme and other main points that they presented. They also encouraged us to search in the
scriptures and Preach My Gospel for sixty major teachings and commandments that
the Savior communicated himself or through prophets. Another major theme centered around the
second great commandment of showing love for others. They asked us to write the things that we
learn and related scriptures and stories in our journals. He said that these journals if used
productively will become a precious resource for giving talks and teaching
others.
These past two days were very inspirational for us as we
participated with President and Sister Roney and the missionaries in being
taught the gospel and feeling the spirit.
We know that President and Sister Roney were called by Heavenly Father through
a prophet to lead the Mission Francaise de Lyon at this time and that we will
be greatly blessed with the opportunity to support them as we go forward in
this great work. We were also excited to
hear that an apostle of the Lord, Elder Neil Anderson will visit the mission
for a week in November when he comes to speak at the Bordeaux Stake which is in
our mission and in the Paris Stake the following week. He served as a missionary and as a mission
president in France and of course speaks French.
I will tell about the kiss/quiche story that we related over
Skype today. When we first arrived at a
neighbor’s home for dinner last Friday evening, the sister arose and said what I
thought was “quiche” because she told me that is what she was serving. I translated to Sister Jeppson that same word
and that we were going to eat it for dinner.
However, we soon learned that I had misunderstood. What they really were saying was the English
word “kiss” trying to remind Sister Jeppson that French friends will kiss each
other on each cheek as a greeting.
Everyone at the dinner got a big laugh out of our misinterpretation of
what they were saying. Then the next
Sunday at church, they teased us with the words quiche/kiss as some of them
stepped forward to greet Sister Jeppson and kiss her on both cheeks.
Our service here continues to be an international event as
we meet people from different countries.
A week ago we met an “amie de l’eglise” (someone learning about the
church) from a city near Bejing, China at a showing of the movie Seventeen
Miracles on Friday and at church meetings on Sunday. She had been invited to these meetings by a
member of the ward who is a Chinese student that was baptized in April. During these events, we learned that this
Chinese “amie” travels to the church building to and from the same metro
(subway) stop that Sister Jeppson and I use.
At the end of each meeting, we had the opportunity to walk with her and ride
the metro together. This gave us the
opportunity to get better acquainted and discuss the gospel. She has been studying French for sixteen
months in Lyon and has applied for graduate school. She seems very interested in BYU.
NOS PETITS-ENFANTS
Earlier in this letter I mentioned an important thing that
our new mission president taught us: “Our
job on earth is to learn what the Savior taught and obey it.” He mentioned that there are 60 commandments
and teachings that the Savior communicated himself in the scriptures or through
prophets and asked us to write them in a journal that he gave us. With the help of your parents, we encourage
you to discuss this in family home evening and communicate to us by e-mail some
of those commandments and teachings that you would recommend to us to study and
write in our journals. Our mission
president suggested one resource for this search of 3 Nephi 11 in the Book of
Mormon which relates what Jesus taught when He appeared to the people on the
American continent after his resurrection.
He also recommended the resource of “Preach My Gospel”. We love you.
We attended Luisa’s baptism service on July 7th
at the stake center in Ecully, a suburb of Lyon. The talks on the subject of baptism and the
Gift of the Holy Ghost were well prepared and given by members of the
Villerbanne Ward. Luisa was baptized by
Rock who is from the Congo. She bore her
testimony after the baptism in Spanish.
Elder Escamilla translated into French for her. It was a very humble and heart- felt
testimony. The next day her ordinance of
being confirmed a member of the church and receiving the Gift of the Holy Ghost
was performed by Elder Hughes, the other office missionary that helped teach
her. The Elders continue to meet with
her and teach her the after baptism lessons.
This past Sunday, Luisa had the courage to bear her testimony in French
during sacrament meeting. The week
before, Noella, another new member from Madagascar, gave her first talk in
sacrament meeting using the scriptures and did a wonderful job. 
