Bonjour tout le monde!
I hope you all had a great Easter! I love getting to share
the message of Easter, of Jesus Christ and His atonement, with the people here!
I feel a huge amount of gratitude for my Savior and for the Gospel. I know it's
true!!
This week was actually pretty slow. It was the end of the
two weeks of school vacation and it was Easter weekend, so people were just in
vacation/party mode a lot of the time. But we still had a good week and feel
the hand of the Lord in this work.
On Saturday, we'd been out all day trying to contact, but no
one was out and no one wanted to talk. We were pretty discouraged and it was
the end of the day. We could've just gone home but we decided to try one more
building in Nogouta. Each building has 3 apartments in it, so 3 doors to knock
and 3 potential contacts! We walked around a bit trying to decide on the
building we should do and then I saw one and said we should do it. Soeur Brown
was thinking the same thing. So the Spirit was guiding us for sure!
We go to
the middle door because it's open (always do the open doors first, haha) and a
lady and her kids came out and we introduced the Book of Mormon, and they were
super nice and accepted to read it! We'll just have to follow up on that in a
little bit :)
Then, feelin' really good and motivated, we go to the door on the
right and this Kanak man opens the door. He wasn't super duper interested, but
he accepted a Book of Mormon, and what I always say is that it's better that the
book is with them rather than with us. You never know who will read it
eventually! So that was good.
Then we go to the door on the left and a
Caledonienne opens the door saying they're in mourning and were about to go to
Easter mass. Soeur Brown didn't understand the mourning part, so she was
just like, "Can we just leave you with the Book of Mormon before you
go?" and I was like, "The Book of Mormon brings us the comfort and
peace we need in difficult moments. Jesus Christ knows and loves you and you'll
feels His love as you read it." Then the lady said, "I definitely
need that!" and accepted the Book of Mormon. Follow-up next week!
It was a
really cool experience. Heavenly Father sent us to that building to help those
people, but he also sent us there to show us that He cares about us and wants us
to be happy in the work. Afterwards, I was so overwhelmed with the feeling of
His love that I cried. It was definitely a miracle for us, and we are so
grateful to have experienced that.
Other than contacting, we haven't had any opportunities to
serve after the cyclone. People just cleaned up fast and are picking up where they left off. Marie-Christine was telling us her cyclone story, and
she was saying that she was making all of her kids (her grown up kids that live
with her) be quiet because there's a person in the cyclone and you can't make
him mad or call him over to you, haha. She said they were making fun of her and, honestly, when she was telling the story she got pretty worked up and serious
about it and it was hard for us not to laugh, too. Haha, we love
Marie-Christine. She's our favorite :)
As we're out contacting, we explore the secteur, too.
Yesterday while we were on the Dumbea side of our secteur, we found a staircase
leading down to the river that follows along the main road. The staircase ends
in a big concrete slab, so today we're going to go down and have a little
picnic and explore the river. Je profite des P-days qui me restent! [I'm taking advantage of the P-days that I have left!]
Well, voila quoi. C'est la semaine! [That's the week!] I hope y'all have had a
good week and a great Easter!
Je vous aime!!!!
Soeur Matheson
