Humpty dumpt took a great fall

I am a little slow this week because I have so many things to do.  I had a little accident on January 8th that has also slowed me down a little.  I hope that I can get the video I made about it on this blog.  It has been posted to my Facebook page.  We have had snow for the past week which has slowed the traffic in Paris and made things sloppy with slush and slippery on hard packed snow.  They have very little snow removal equipment here and people are not used to dealing with this much snow.

Dixie and I are busy with institute assignments.  I will make a presentation to the young adults on January 25th about indexing and a family history institute class that I will begin teaching on Feb. 8th.  The emphasis is to get all of them involved in the church indexing program and then tell them about the class which will focus on personal and family histories.  We will help them complete a project by the end of May in which they will prepare a personal or family video sharing their stories.  Dixie is busy planning and helping prepare food for each family home evening as well as refreshments after institute classes on Tuesday and Thursday nights.  She has a huge responsibility to prepare food for about 60 prospective missionaries who will come to the St. Merri Center for an all day training experience on February 2nd.  We will be assisting in this effort once each quarter.  The importance of this training has increased as a result of the age requirement change for missionaries and the need to give them training before they enter the MTC.  We have heard from the French Branch Presidency at the Provo MTC that the length of time missionaries learning French will decrease from nine weeks to six weeks and this affects even those from France who will be leaving soon.  The number of missionaries serving from France, Belgium, and Switzerland will double from about 60 serving now to about 120 by the end of this year.  So every effort is being made to help them be better prepared even before they reach the MTC.  The institute becomes one of the biggest players in this effort and Dixie and I are thrilled to assist.

Family History work in Paris France LDS (Mormon) Temple

January 6, 2013

I have spent a lot of time this past week learning about the history of France and more importantly the history of the Mormon church in France.  The 3 part series mentioned last week, “The Road to Zion”, has been very helpful.  It can be accessed by going to http://soc.liE4plhgc on the internet.  This address will take you to the first hour’s presentation hosted by a young French sister speaking English and French.  She served as a missionary at temple square.

I mention this first presentation because it became very clear why a personal history is so important to our family.  I have been invited to teach an institute course next month about Family History and feel it is timely because a temple will soon be built here in France. 

Paris France LDS (Mormon) Temple

I have been encouraged to help the Young Adults of Paris become involved in Indexing which goes hand in hand with the Family History Institute class.  The project we will work on for the term is to prepare our personal history for publication or produce a DVD about our family.

 

The great cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France

The members of the church in France have truly been pioneers.  Since I was here in 1963 through 1965 the church as grown from what was considered a “cult” to a “religious movement” if you look at the definition in the French dictionary then and now.  The church has more than 115 buildings and about 30,000 members with third and fourth generations in the church.  Most of the wards have French members presiding.  There is a good history found on Youtube entitled “Road to Zion” in France.  It is a 3 part series produced for BYU TV.  A couple of members from the Talence ward in Bordeaux, where I served at the time, shared an in depth view of the building of a chapel on which I worked during my mission.  Some of the members who joined the church in the 60’s and 70’s when the greatest growth of the church took place in France, were interviewed.  Many of those joining the church today here, are pioneers in their own families and the strength of the church is in families.  We had dinner last week with one such family.  Brother and Sister Collin have one returned missionary son who is going to college close to Bordeaux, France, and another who will certainly go in 3 or 4 years, and two other children who are married.

Christian Euvrard, our St. Merri Institute director, is another individual who fits the pioneer profile and has done extensive research of the history of the LDS church in France and contributed a lot to the series mentioned above.  It is a pleasure to work with him.  He also serves as a counselor in the Paris East Stake Presidency.  He and his wife are great examples of how effective the leadership here in France really is.  We enjoyed a wonderful Sunday afternoon with them and their two boys, sharing excellent French food that sister Euvrard prepared for us the Sunday before Christmas.

We also took the time during this holiday season to visit the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris which is a few block from our building at St. Merri.  Notre Dame is celebrating 850 years of existence this yer.  It is an example of the cathedrals in Europe but the thing that echoes in that experience is how big and unused they are by the French people.  The numbers of people attending mass is ever decreasing.  Visitors can buy almost any souvenir within its walls as well as candles to be lit.  As we witnessed the noon mass with all the sight seers milling around it felt as cold as the building itself.  A far different feel from the meetings I am used to.