Monday, October 27, 2014

Sunday, October 26, 2014 "Saw a lot of the mission"


Salut Famille! 

Hey no worries at all, I got on really early this time so don't worry at all. We have all kinds of crazy things to do tonight to get ready for conference, so we are going to have a long night typing up a lot of things, translating, and all sorts of other things that need to be ready for the missionaries tomorrow. Haha, so tonight is going to be pretty crazy!

Ah, Brother Shumway is such a great man. I love him so much. 

I was thinking that my life was getting pretty crazy. . . and then I realized that I have it easy compared to you mom! With your new you new job, all of the things you are doing for the family, all of the quotes that you are finding, my application, it sounds like you have a ton going on right now so I can imagine why you were sitting in your pajamas at 10:13 haha. Thank you so, so, so much for doing that application for me. I cannot thank you enough.

I am really glad to hear that Bubba's ankle isn't broken! That is so awesome! Hahaha, Caden is a nut.

Happy birthday Grandma Peg! I love you. You are such an amazing person and have influenced me so much in my life.

This week was a great one again. As you could have guessed, we saw a lot of the mission again this week. . . 

We started off the week by doing a service project Monday that completely wore us out. We cut logs for this really cool guy from Afghanistan that we met when we were knocking doors. I thought that I was tired before we started working, boy was I wrong, I was exhausted once we were done!

Tuesday was a blast because I was able to work with some of my favorite companions from the past, Elder Dalton and Elder Taylor. It was awesome because we set it up that in the morning I was able to work with Elder Dalton, and then in the afternoon I was able to work with Elder Taylor and we taught Neson and Michael! Neson is doing so great and is as happy as can be!

Wednesday we headed over to Grenoble to do a huge a activity with a district over there. We spent the day with a bunch of different missionaries and we set the goal to pass out a whole box of Book of Mormons and teach twenty lessons together. We totally did it! However it was freezing over there!

Thursday was great! We went out to this little city called Bésiers. We went to a small district meeting with some of the missionaries over there and then in the afternoon I was able to do an exchange with another one of my favorite companions, Elder Crawley over in Montpellier! It was so much fun! :) We got some great work done as well!

Friday we headed over to Marseille and I got to watch another one of my favorite companions Elder Einerson give an amazing district meeting. He did such a great job. The meeting was so inspired and it was well needed because during the conference we were able to take some time, relax and think with some music playing in the background and set some goals for the future. In the time that I had to think I sat back and tried to pick one attribute that I thought was one of the most important attributes that can be found in all of the people that I love the most, and among others one of the attributes that came to mind was happiness. We talked about that same thing in an email a few weeks ago as well. 
One of my favorite talks is called the Abundant Life, it is a talk by Joseph B. Wirthlin.
In this talk he says that happy people:
1. Drink deeply of living waters.
2. Fill their Hearts with love. "We don't have tears here." Joseph Smith
3. With the help of their loving Heavenly Father they create a masterpiece of their lives.

I love all of these points. The first one is great because it talks about scripture reading and the importance of that. I have seen my life change as I read my scriptures. Next, we focus on love. Everything that we do is out of love. As we learn in Matthew 22, the most important commandment is to love the Lord and the second is to love our neighbor. I can testify that the key to happiness is love. When we constantly feel the love of God in our lives, we are happy. Having and feeling the love of God daily in our lives truly changes us and allows us to create a masterpiece out of the clay that our Heavenly Father has presented to us when we came to this earth. One of my favorite quotes is, "Hell is where the man I am meets the man that I could have become." Joseph Smith. We have the opportunity to become something great in this life. I know that happiness is a great place to start, and true happiness comes from the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I love you all so dearly,




Elder Beyer

Monday, October 20, 2014

Sunday, October 19, 2014 "2 days in Corsica"

Family!

Bubba what are you doing trying to break your foot?! You shouldn't be letting those big guys roll on your feet! That is so great with Caden though. Nice work big guy! Keep working hard and enjoying every second of it. Mom! That birthday sounds so amazing. I would have loved to have had the same thing for mine! Dad, you didn't spoil me like that last March! ;) I am glad to hear that you had such a great time though. I started laughing so hard when I read about your experience golfing with Brock. . . He has matured so much. . . before he never would have come back hahahahaha. I love it. I can't wait to get back and play some sports with him to see for myself. :)

This week was as usual a pretty crazy one and man did it go by quick.

Monday we worked so that we could move our P-Day to Wednesday and do something fun with the Elders in Corsica. Later that night we headed out to Aix-en-Provence to do an exchange with the Elders over there. By the way, most of the time when we are traveling it is to do exchanges, not really to speak at conferences. So, we did an exchange with them Tuesday that went really good. I was with Elder Palmer. That night we actually headed down to Toulon to take a ferry to Corsica. You would not have believed the boat that we took. It was this giant cruise ship looking thing. Not only that, but the inside of it looked exactly like a cruise ship! Minus a lot of the fun things. . . but there were a lot of similarities. Before the boat took of we headed up to the top deck so that we could get an awesome view of the coast while we we floating away. . . it was pretty sweet :) It was really dark so we couldn't see much, but it was still a really cool experience.

We slept the whole boat ride over that night and we got to Bastia in Corsica around 8:00 that morning. We then hopped in the car and headed on over to meet Elder Pedersen and Elder Castillo. Elder Pedersen planned out a sweet day for all of us so we hopped in the cars and started heading up into the mountains. In a small city we met up with Elder Powell, Elder Smart and Elder Andersen and then drove a little bit further to our destination. Corsica reminded me a lot of Utah to tell you the truth. The area that we were at looked a lot like the mountains back home. For the next few hours we went on an amazing hike up the side of a rocky mountain until we arrived at a seriously breath taking little lake. We stopped and ate lunch there. It was such a pretty place. After sitting there for a little bit we headed back down and this is where it got interesting. . . 

We were making our way down and at about the halfway mark Elder Elvidge slipped and fell and completely sliced his hand open. He walked over to us to show us the blood running down. We then quickly made our way down, so that we could shoot on over to a hospital to get his hand stitched up. As you can imagine, Corsica was not the most ideal place for that. Finally we found a hospital in a nearby little town. To keep it short this hospital was tiny, when they finally realized we were there they took us to a small room, the doctor might have been intoxicated and was wearing jeans and a tee shirt (normal for France though), and then they stitched him on up haha. . . that is definitely an experience that we are never going to forget. The whole time the doctor just joked around about how much he hated people from England. Crazy experience. However, the nurse was really nice and after joking around with her about how that doctor scares away all of the children and how we chose a bad day to stop by she gave us some free bandages for his hands. When we went to pay after everything was all finished up the nurse said that everything was all closed up, and because we were leaving that night across the Island she didn't charge us anything haha!

That night we drove to Ajaccio! The next day we had an awesome exchange and I got to work with Elder Powell again and Elder Smart. It was a blast. We taught four lessons!

That night we took the boat back again and found ourselves in Toulon again the next day.

The weekend went really quick, but we were able to do a lot of missionary work in our sector which was wonderful.

I really like that quote that you sent mom. One of my favorite quotes in PMG is that more important than speaking is listening. Now, this concerns teaching lessons, but the principle is the same. In life we have so many instances where we forget to listen. We are so busy that we forget to take a little bit of time, relax, and listen to what our Heavenly Father wants us to do. 

I know that when we take time in our lives to kneel down and try and figure out what our Heavenly Father wants us to do that we are truly blessed. Our lives change by listening instead of speaking.

I know that this church is true. I know that Christ lives and that He loves us.

Have an amazing week!  Love,
Elder Beyer

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Monday, October 13, 2014 "Mission changed my life"

Dearest family!

Wow! Football season is truly in the air! The photos that you sent out are seriously awesome! I loved them. I looked at the photo of Bubba and for a second there I thought it was Caden. . . stop growing or I won't be able to beat you up when I get home. . . Ha ha. Congrats on being a captain Caden! That is so cool! Oh, by the way I love that primary song! That is one of the best! I think that that is a great idea to try and come back in March. Were you thinking to do it the same way that you did it with Brock and just go with you, dad and me? Elder Taylor is such a great guy. I was really excited because he actually got transferred back to Lyon and he is currently serving with Elder Dalton where I used to be! So I get to see them every once in awhile! He was able to write that note because they came in to watch the last session of conference and he wanted to jump on and say a little something before I finished up.

Good luck everyone with the games this week! 

Okay. . . so, like I said, this week has been absolutely crazy! 

We have pretty much driven all over France this last week. We have been able to see so many beautiful things over this last little while. I think that my favorite part of our mission that I was able to see this last week was when we were in Switzerland. It was seriously breath taking. We got to drive through mountains, rolling green hills, all sorts of beautiful scenery for quite a few hours. 

The drive was actually pretty great too. Elder Elvidge and I got to spend about four hours talking to President and getting to know him. The more that I get to know him and his family the more that I love them. They are such great people and they have such righteous desires. It was so interesting talking to him finding out how almost every single thing that he does in life or in business is centered on moving others closer to the Savior and strengthening his family. I really loved getting to hear some of his secrets on how to have a happy family. One thing that he said that is very similar to what we have in our family is that everyone needs to be each others best friend. He talked about how you need to spend lots of time with your family and extended family to the point that they all want to spend more time together than with their friends and eventually they replace their friends with their family. So thank you for all of the family trips and times that we went up to our grandparents houses to spend time with the family. 

To answer your question. . . there are two office elders and they are awesome. We get to spend so much time with them and they help us out a ton. There are two other senior couples in the office and to thank us President and Sister Roney took us out to eat Friday night to the nicest restaurant! It was a lot of fun being together with everyone in the office. They are all so amazing because their work is so hard and tiring and yet they always have smiles on their faces!

The other day I was talking with my mission president and he said that someday you will get to a point in your life, you might already be there, where you will say and be scared as you say it, What would my life be like if I had not served a mission? My mission has changed my life so much. I couldn't imagine what my life would be like right now if I had never chosen to serve the Lord, and it truly scares me thinking about that.

This next week is going to be crazy again. We are driving down to Aix tomorrow, taking a boat down to Corscia the next day, spending a few days out there, then coming back and going to Nice. . . then finally coming home. 

This week is going to be very tiring, but I am really, really excited!

Good luck with work this week mom and dad! 

I am very lucky to be where I am at right now. I have learned so much already and I think that over the next few months I am going to learn a lot of valuable things that are going to help me all through out my life. 

I love you all so much!

Have a great week!

Elder Beyer

PS. . . I didn't get the package yet! I probably will not get it until next Saturday because we are never here!

Monday, October 6, 2014

Monday, October 6, 2014 "Crazy Week"

Hey there family!

Oh no! Coach Beyer! Bubba! What happened? Don't worry. . . now you can just work them in the mini bowl. It's true Bubba. . . if you can drive with mom she getting really nervous and yelling because she is so scared you are going to crash. . . then you can drive in any situation :) Hahaha! I forgot about that until now! That is really funny.

I will make sure to thank Sister Clark and Elder Kennard. They are so awesome. :) Thank you so much for getting that ready so fast mom! You are the best :) Brother Shumway is seriously the greatest. :) 

When I left on Thursday Elder Dalton went with another couple of Elders who are serving in the same area as us for a little while and he also spent some time with the office Elders. Yeah, Elder Taua was the old AP. Hey! They sent the photo! Her parents were seriously so awesome. We had some much fun entertaining them for a couple hours while they were waiting to see their kids. The Richarson's actually left me a BYU shirt in the office too! You are going to have to send them an email thanking them for me!

Okay,

This week was seriously so crazy. It started out by doing numbers Sunday night. We finished numbers around 3:00 and got up around 6:00 to get everything finished up and sent off. Monday we took care of all of the missionaries going home and we drove them all over to the Roney's at night to have dinner and a testimony meeting. Elder Elvidge and I got to cook the chicken on the grill and after we ate we got to go and entertain the families who were coming to pick up their missionaries! It was a blast!

We got home late Monday night and we just stayed at the office elders apartment to avoid having to go all the way back home and losing lots of sleep on the trip over. Tuesday morning we got up bright and early to start preparing for the new missionaries coming in. We had everything prepared for the conference so we headed off to the airport to pick up them all up. We got there about 10:00 and started the wait. After a few hours we got a call from one of the missionaries telling us that they were stuck in the London Airport and wouldn't be coming in until midnight! That completely ruined all of our plans! We had sandwiches in the car already ready for them and our whole day was planned out on them getting in that morning. . . so we quickly headed back to the office to try and plan out what we needed to now do with them coming in so late. 

We have got to finish up so I will try and finish my email later!