Episode 17: The Big City

Bonjourrrrrr

So to start off the week I totally ate it on the bike haha. AKA I crashed big time. I tried to hop on a grass median on a gravel road and I got flung. I'm just glad I didn't hit the barbed wire fence I landed right in front of tho...

But anyways this week was great! We swapped our pday to Tuesday last week to be able to travel to Papeete and go to the temple, and that was super awesome. The temple was really beautiful and walking around in Papeete for a couple hours was pretty fun! I think I've gotten acclimated to living in a little suburb though because being in a city felt kinda insane. After being in Taravao/Mataiea for so long where the biggest store is a place called Carrefour (small Tahitian walmart), going to Papeete and seeing a Billabong, and then a Lacoste, and then like 12 fancy restaurants all on the same street was crazy. Pretty cool. I did not, however, appreciate the rat I saw scuttle through the parking lot. 

On Friday we actually got to go back to Papeete again lol - every two weeks our mission does a "soirée au temple", AKA temple night. Basically all the missionaries from around Papeete, Faaa, Mahina, etc bring their friends and show them the temple and its super great. Our area is *technically* not close enough to Papeete to be included, but we asked our mission president and he gave us the thumbs up. We brought our friends Lucien and Poeiti, who we've been teaching since we got to the area. And it was SO GOOD! For my whole first transfer, Lucien wouldn't even talk during lessons, let alone make eye contact with us, but in these past weeks he's really made huge changes. When we were there, Lucien was looking at the temple and he said "I want to go in". Me and my companion were so excited about it hahah. I'm pretty confident he'll get to go to the temple.

We saw big big miracles yesterday. We had a *bunch* of friends come to church! First is our friend Vaitiare, who zoomed past us on her moped last week and started meeting with us again. She brought her son to church and they really liked it! Our friend Astrid also came, and she is just super super nice. We've been meeting with her for only about two weeks but she's already come to church and we're super happy about it! Then our little friend Tevanui showed up with her mom Poerava, and Tevanui actually has a baptismal date fixed now! She is seriously the cutest kid ever. She loves when we come do lessons with her and bring fun games and sing hymns with her haha. And it sounds like she really liked primary too! And THEN, huge miracle, we saw an entire family of friends pull up. We had been teaching them a few weeks before, but the lessons were very few and far between, as the mom would often cancel them or reschedule and then cancel them. She had also only ever dropped her kids off at the church in the past. But on Sunday they ALL came!! She told us that her kids told her to come - these kids are like 12 to 4 years old, they're such champions. 

We had a devotional yesterday, and something that was really emphasized was overcoming the natural man. That can mean a whole lot of things, and the definition will be different for each one of us, but essentially it is to overcome whatever tethers us to being of the world. Even emotions! Anger, jealousy, impatience, and even things like loneliness are part of the natural man. And of course, it's natural to feel all those things. But every step we take to overcoming them brings us closer to Jesus Christ. It's not expected of us to overcome the natural man in this life, but we are expected to grow, and to change. We may not be able to become perfect, but we can absolutely make steps towards an eternal goal.

Anyways that's all for this time, I hope you all have a great week!

- soeur snuggs <3