Family!!!

My last few emails have been
really long. I guess I just miss you. Happy BNY anniversary and

Congratulations to Brad getting his mission call!!! Woohoo Peru! That's
sweet. Granted, he won't be speaking French, but still sweet.

This week was super crazy. I only spent about 3 days
at home. I spent two days in Versailles on exchange with the Portuguese
AP, and then two days in Mulhouse, with Elder Meyers from American
Fork, Utah. Both beautiful places and good exchanges. There is a place
in Versailles that the mission calls Consecration Hill. It is up by an
old chateau that overlooks Paris and it is where all the missionaries go
on their first morning in the mission to 'consecrate' themselves to the
work that they will be doing for two years in this country. I went
there last August and wrote in my journal everything that I wanted to do
during my mission. After tracting, getting let in and teaching a first
lesson in Versailles, Elder Duarte and I drove back to consecration hill
and looked at Paris in the dark night sky. It was one of those magical
moments. The entire city was lit up (hence the appropriate name 'city of
lights'), and the spotlight on top of the Eiffel Tower was spinning
around over the whole city. We sat underneath the stars on the cold
steps of the chateau for about fifteen minutes. I am going to miss
France. There are good and bad things, but it really has become a
second home. I get frustrated with the french people all the time but
when all is said and done I truly do love them. What a place to serve a
mission, huh?

Our zone (the twenty missionaries) had a really
great week. We more than doubled our baptismal dates and had twice as
many investigators at church this week than last week. Good week. The
whole mission has been progressing pretty consistently as a whole these
last couple months.

This week Elder Kopischke, the area authority
president of the European region is coming to our mission. He will be at
zone conference in Paris on Thursday, and then at a zone leader council
on Saturday again in Paris. So... we'll be rubbin' some big shoulders
this week ;)

Last Monday for Halloween we really wanted to do
something cool, so we got ourselves all pumped up to go to the circus.
but it was full... so then we moped around until we found a cool fair,
but it closed right when we got there...then we walked home and ate
cereal. Kind of lame Halloween but still fun. We saw some tigers, some
elephants, and a camel at the circus.

Anyway, I don't have a lot of cool stuff to talk
about this week. It was kind of hard to be away from Nancy for so long.
We didn't get a whole lot done with our amis, and a lot of them are
pretty uninterested lately. Remember Francoise our old baptismal date? I
called her yesterday for the first time in about a month and she hung
up on me when I asked if we could ever come see her. Yikes. It was one
of those weeks that I spent a lot of time contimplating the state of the
world today. I've thought a lot about how similair it is to certain
periods of time in the Book of Mormon. Blech. Let's all come unto
Christ. I've been reading a lot of his paraboles in the bible lately. I
love that :)

We did get invited over to a really cool couple's
house last night for dinner. That was very enjoyable. The man is an
interior designer and furniture fabricator. He had a sweet house :)

Ok, I've got to run. I love you and miss you. :)
Elder Benny Boy