The Belg Life!

 The Belg life! Well this week i didn't eat any fries or waffles so it was an odd week for a true Belg man like me. I can't believe i've spent over half my time in the field in Brussels. For sure i'll have to come back here and visit some of my favorite spots. But i think my time may be running rather short. Back to France with me. 

This week we had a nice zone conference with all the missionaries in Belgium and it was just so much fun. Sadly, the chapel's heating decided not to work so we were all kind of freezing. It's ok because we all understood the message anyway. Find families! that's the message. It's a lot easier said than done but we are doing are very very best. 

After all the crazy stuff was finished it was time to get back to work and i've found that this transfer Friday's are our lucky days. Friday morning I was sitting in the foyer while my companion was teaching himself how to play the piano just waiting for a man named Renaud to come. While i was sitting there an African man came to the door and this was very strange because it was rather early in the morning and there weren't any other missionaries there. I opened the door and the man told me that he'd gone to the office of tourism to find out where our chapel was. He'd heard from a Muslim friend he has that we were a church with good values and that you can often find young Americans out on the streets preaching the good word. So we thanked Heavenly Father for the nice muslim man and we started teaching this guy, Jean Pierre, in the church. The only thing was that Jean Pierre had showed up 5 minutes before Renaud had planned to come. Luckily, Renaud was late so we had time to teach them both. We engaged Jean Pierre to come to church and Renaud accepted to be baptized when he knows it's true and also to come to church when he isn't working. Sunday, Jean Pierre kept his engagement and he came to church. After these Rdvs we had another planned with our ami Jean Martin. We've been having some troubles with him but the Rdv was smoother than usual and we even got to eat some spicy potatoes with him! WOO

Sunday was also a really great day. We had Jean Pierre at church and also we had our other 2 amis who are 19 years old named michelle and aimé. They are both from Congo and while i was sitting next to Michelle he asked me how the baptismal process works. I told him that he needed to gain a testimony of the restored church and then just follow the lessons and he'd be good. He said he wanted to start the process. I guess it didn't understand that with our former Rdvs we had already started the process. Oh well after church we took him and aimé with one of our members who is also from Congo and we had a powerful lesson about the restoration of the church. This week we are planning to fix baptismal dates with them because they have a strong desire to be baptized so why would we deny them the right? After this great lesson we had another wonderful chance to talk with an ami who is also 19 years old named Olivier. We had a really cool member with us and he helped us a lot because Olivier is having cold feet about his baptismal date. The member was baptized 5 years ago and he told Olivier about how he had the same experience. The lesson ended with us all deciding to pray and find out which date is the right one for him and then next week setting it. Hopefully everything works out how we planned. We had the chance to end the night with a family from Equador. Their son recently received his mission call to madrid spain and so it was fun going to eat some good latin american food with them. One thing I love about brussels is the fact that we can see members from all over the world. From Russia to Latin America and everywhere in between. I do miss the great French members though.

That was my week

Elder Oliverson

Baptisms for everyone!

 what a fast week here in brussels. we had our exchanges with the assistants on monday which went by super fast, mostly because they were really short. I will tell a little story from monday night. So i was with Elder Coffey who is an assistant and we were heading home from a different part of paris and we began to talk with a lady on a train. she was a scientologist but super open and really nice. our stop came and we both kind of panicked and just jumped off train without getting the ladies number. we were both pretty bummed but there was nothing we could do because the train was off. luckily we gave her a book of mormon so we weren't as ashamed in ourselves. we got out of the gare and elder coffey checked his pockets and realized that there wasn't a phone in any of his pockets. he ran back into the gare trying to find the phone and he didn't get it. i bet you can guess what happened next.. yes i called it from out international phone and the lady on the metro answered. we met her the next day and got the phone back. luckily the lord knows we're young and gave us another chance

the baptism of una was the next big ticket this week and it was super good. the ward came out and supported and una was loving every second of it. we had to do the act of baptizing him twice because the guy baptizing him forgot the lines but other than that everything went super smooth. it was cool because the person i trained (Elder Eldredge) actually found him. so basically it was like an alley oop. he throw the ball up and i dunked it. haha. but really it was cool because he came from strombeek and gave a talk and everyone was really supportive. things are really going so well in Brussels except it's getting to be really cold. i'm sure i probably whined about the heat and now i'm whining about the cold. i love the cold just not when it's rainy. the dry utah cold is certainly where it's at. well i guess till next week

elder oliverson

 this week i'm going to start off by google translating the e mail that i wrote to the mission president this week!

The opposition continues this week but we managed to keep our date of baptism . In a busy week it was too good things. I got the testimony of the persistence this week. There was one week on the port to port in a neighborhood not far from us. We knocked on the door of a family of Sweden . The woman told us that it was not possible to enter , she said that the missionaries often go but never return . She invited us to come back when her husband was there. This week we came back and told us to come back in 45 minutes. It was great because we had an appointment with another family in the same street . We made an appointment with another family and we came back the third time. She said they were not interested in the message. They were left with a small card and we continued the week. Thursday we received a phone call of Brother Bernard makes communications church in Brussels . He told us that a woman sent him an e email asking if we could come back and share the message . We came back and did a little how to start teaching . This week we will share the proclamation of the family with them!

as you can see crazy things happen all the time in the mission. this week was busy and we got to watch our amis meet the members at the ward halloween party. It was fun to see the members just talking to our amis and letting them know how welcome they were. Great week.