Hot!

Here is the latest email from Bethany in sweltering Paris! It sounds as if things are going slow but steady for her.   Dear Family and Friends,   Wow! So many things happening in the Ward! Congrats to everyone who had babies, new houses, new callings etc. A special thank you to Brother Hess for all of his wonderful years of service to the Ward. He has uplifted me and several others over the past 5 years. I also want to thank everyone who has sent me letters. We missionaries always love them, I'll try to respond asap, but sometimes that can take awhile. This week was soooooo HOT!!!!! The mission president had to text everyone yesterday to remind them to drink lots of water and do door to doors in the shade. Also there is no air conditioning in France except in cars, which we don't have. It's also been very humid, as in Alabama humid, which means our apartment is like an oven when we come home and it's hard to fall asleep at night. I wish we had some sort of fan to plug in, but we don’t. Then, to make things worse, the elevator broke and we live on the top floor, six floors of stairs! Today seems cooler though and we might go into Paris for P-day and visit my old neighborhood. Because the vacations are still in full swing we barely had any lessons and mostly spent our time contacting. I've got a watch tan now. Who knew I could tan? I took a picture, but I forgot my cord for my camera so I'll send them next week. We continued to visit our amie (by the way we call investigators "amis" which means “friend” in French), Mireille, and still couldn't get a baptism date from her, but she still loves having us come over and receive reading assignments in the Book of Mormon. We started noticing a pattern in the type of questions she asked.  They were mostly about adultery. I learned a lesson in listening to the need of our amis and not just thinking about what I’m going to say next. We managed to find out that she has been tempted several times since her divorce by a married man who wants to have an affair with her! She's been struggling with making a decision and by discussing it with us and having us testify of the importance of the Law of Chastity we hope there had been a bit of a break through. We also realized that she needs to be taught the atonement a little better.  We had a few other lessons and maybe some returns. If they don't cancel on us at the last second... Yesterday we contacted a woman on the street who was interested in what we had to say and gladly took a Book of Mormon. Soeur Dremeaux spoke to the mother and, in order for them not to have any distractions, I played with her 4 year old son Reuben who had a bunch of Spiderman toys (pronounced Speederman here). She said that her live in boyfriend (the father of her children) was of another faith, but left them and has been looking for some other religion. We prayed last night that the woman would show her boyfriend Moroni's promise in the Book of Mormon and that he would follow it. Her too of course! Another cool thing is that we've totally run out of copies of the Book of Mormon and it's only the 3rd week of transfer! The sad thing is now we have to be extra careful about who we give them to until our order comes in. Well, that's all for now.  Bethany