Week 61

Elder Empey's new comp Elder Durrante from Minnesota 

I (Dres' Dad) sent him some pics form my mission and he has set this pic as his backdrop for his iPad.  So rad.

Dres has certainly got more Euro in his style and looking more and more French everyday

Here is a day in the life of Elder Empey.  He sends us daily journal entries like this.

Wednesday September 9th: 

so I'm in a train right now from Versailles to Rennes. We did an exchange with the APs, elder Latin and elder admaya. Man I love elder Latin. Yesterday morning we went running, and then got ready for district meeting. We went to district meeting and I gave soeur Walton a blessing because she got some bad news from home. Her mom has MS.

Elder Stephenson gave a decent formation. He gave it on obedience. I realized how much stuff gets diluted as it goes down the line in the mission. We went to a super awesome mission council where we got a great training on how we're going to focus on Christ and we're going to do it by only studying the bom, nt, and pmg. We gave this formation to the district leaders.

 

We went and caught our TGV to Versailles. I caught some shut eye while elder durant wrote poems in his book. Elder durant was contacting in the RERs like crazy between Paris and Versailles. What a stud. We got there and the APs were at the gare. Went back to their appt, dropped off some stuff, and planned for our exchange. I was with Latin. By this time it was already 6 so we didn't have much to plan for, all we had was dmp meeting and dinner. We went with the Versailles elders to the church and had the dmp meeting then drove back to the appt and planned for the next day. Elder Latin and I talked a bunch about the mission and stuff we could improve. I brought up the whole dilution thing and we talked about that for a long while. We're going to do another district leader training meeting this Saturday  to better give the mission vision to the DLs and make sure they know that their role is to transport this message to their districts. We ate some dinner with the others and then went to bed. Elder durant was cracking us up during dinner, what a funny dude.

The next morning we were able to talk about specific needs of our zone. Elder durant and I headed out after to catch an RER, I talked to this nice agnostic French lady. She was like "are you going to try and convert this dude?" Pointing to the guy next to her, and I said "after you leave, yeah" she thought that was pretty funny. Right as she stood up I started to talk to the dude, I hope she saw haha. I only was able to talk to him for a sec though before I had to get off. We were able to catch our TGV without sprinting for the first time in a while. So now we're chillin on the TGV, there's a young dude that was reading an English grammar book and now he's talking to us in English to practice.