Week 5!

Bonjour!

 

So not too much really happened in the way of new info for this week. 

 

As of Sunday, Soeur Archambault and I are the sister training leaders for our zone. It's not too much of a change, but we have more meetings. We do get to do the official welcome for the new district coming into our zone tomorrow night! We're so excited. We're getting 5 new elders and 3 new sisters. We were assigned to be the new sister training leaders because we're officially the sisters who've been here the longest. We work with the zone leaders a lot. They're two elders from the other district (I think I send a picture). They're a lot of fun.

 

A LOT of our zone left yesterday morning for Paris and Lyon. We had 4 sisters and 9 elders leave, so we're pretty small right now. I can't wait to get our new district in tomorrow and not have so few of us! It was pretty bittersweet to say goodbye to everybody. Everyone that was here when we got here is gone now. It's really weird.

 

This morning, we went to the temple. Soeur Archambault and I walked there with our zone leaders and the other 7 sisters in our zone. We were almost there when we see two guys in suits sprinting away from the temple. Upon closer examination, we realize that those two guys in suits are none other than our two elders. They had forgotten something and they sprinted all the way the three blocks or so to their dorm and back and managed to not be late - and in SUITS! The two of them running in suits had to be the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. We were all dying laughing.

 

Oh yeah, and I can say one whole word in Tahitian... repentance. So I'm pretty much fluent. I don't know how to spell it, but it sounds like it would be spelled Tata'arapa. 

 

Elder Bednar came and spoke to us again last Tuesday night! It was incredible! He continued to answer the questions he received on Christmas. I took a lot of notes that I'll have to send a copy of sometime.

 

Yesterday, during a lesson, Soeur Archambault was showing our investigator (Frère Headrick) the finger tricks to remember the 10 commandments, and there's one where you make a gun symbol. She got really into it and accidentally stabbed herself in the eye, then nearly fell out of her seat. So basically, the whole lesson stopped and Frère Headrick broke character for a good 5 minutes or so.

 

I think that's all I've got for this week! Je vous aime beaucoup et comme Soeur Archambault dit, "Je sais que Dieu vous aime"!

 

-Soeur Frost

The last bolder sentence translates to, "I know that God loves you!"

About Me (from official missionary profile)

I thought I would share Jordan's missionary profile for anyone who might have stumbled across this blog so you can know a little more about our fantastic daughter.

Hi I'm Jordan Frost

I grew up in the Kansas City, Missouri area. I study violin in college. I converted to the Gospel. I'm a Mormon.

About Me

I study violin performance and music education at my University, and will try to play any instrument I can get my hands on, given some instruction. I've studied violin for nine years (and counting!).  I have three brothers and a sister, all younger than me. I have a "blended" family. I love playing tennis with my Dad. My family stretches far beyond blood, and I form close familial bonds with people easily. I love to read, especially anything written by Victor Hugo. I've studied French for five years, and I am so excited to use it in the mission field!

Why I am a Mormon

I was baptized on August 13th, 2012. I distinctly remember being at church earlier that year during a fast and testimony meeting and just feeling the spirit so strongly that the very same day, I said to someone, "I think I believe in Mormonism". The wisdom to fast and pray about my feelings only intensified the feeling that I know this is right. A few weeks later, I was reading the Joseph Smith History and it just hit me like a ton of bricks that these were perhaps the truest words I had ever read in my life. That fall, I was baptized and five months later, I decided that I needed to go on a mission so that others may feel what I felt and come to know the truth and peace of His church. There is nothing more right than this Gospel. I can feel it as I study the scriptures, as I go to church, and especially as I talk to the children in nursery, as they tell me that Heavenly Father loves them with such conviction that I can feel the Spirit emulate from them. I am a Mormon because I have received personal revelation that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the one and only true church, and is led by a true prophet of God, who receives revelation for us and directs us on a path that leads us closer to the Almighty.

Personal Stories

Could you talk about your baptism?

When I was baptized, I was 18 years old. I had accepted every single part of the Gospel as the truth that it is, and I was then baptized by my father. It's an experience I will never forget, and not just because the hot water was broken that day and so the baptismal font was ice cold! That day was the beginning of a new life for me, one that I'm still working on every day, and one that has brought me more joy than I could possibly have ever imagined.

How I live my faith

I teach senior primary. That is, I teach all of the kids who turn three in the year of 2013. They are an incredible group of kids and I absolutely love being involved in their life. In all honesty, they teach me more than I teach them. When I'm away at school, I'm heavily involved in the Young Single Adults (YSA) group in my area. The people I meet through that have become an amazing support system, and are some of my very close friends. I occasionally play violin at church, generally with the choir. Visiting teaching is something I don't do enough, and something that also helps me out a lot. It's an amazing support system and I have learned so much and gotten to know so many amazing women from both being the visitor and the visited. On December 18th, 2013, I report to the Provo, Utah Missionary Training Center to prepare to serve as a full-time missionary. I am called to serve in the Vanuatu, Port Vila mission, as well as the New Caledonia mission district.

Week 4 - Bonjour! - Lessons, Language Learning Mess-ups, and Elder (Walter) Bonhomme de Neige

Hello!

So this has been a really awesome week! Soeur Archambault and I have been teaching a lot of really great lessons, so we're liking that. We had both of our investigators (read: teachers) commit to baptism this week and actually gave a mock church tour. The tour was a little rough in French, as we're lacking in conversational vocab, but it went really well overall.

While the two of us were teaching the other day, the Elders snuck out and built a snowman right outside the classroom window, so when we came back there was a snowman staring at us through the window. It was a major source of fun for a few days as we kept modifying him. At night, you could only see him if all the lights in the classroom were turned off, and we managed to really scare Frère Nash with that by having him stare out the window and turning off the lights. He said it looked like a monster with giant bug eyes because we gave him glasses and he was snowed on so much that he didn't exactly look like a snowman as much as a snow blob. Eventually he melted, and now he's a chunk of ice outside our classroom. I thought Elder Broadbent might cry when he saw the snowman, named Elder Bonhomme de Neige (bonhomme de neige means snowman) dying.

So as we learn French, there are bound to be a few incredibly embarrassing things said, right? Well this was an interesting week for that. First, Saint Esprit means Holy Spirit, and sang means blood. The difference between those two is not exactly huge in pronunciation, and so Elder Broadbent found out this week he's been praying for the "blood Spirit" instead of the "Holy Spirit" for around three weeks now. The other really funny one was when Soeur Archambault tried to tell me to "Frappez la porte!" (knock on the door) and she said "Frappez la morte!" (hit the dead.) Our teacher even came out of the room to laugh about it when he heard that, and I'm not sure we're ever going to let her forget it.

So that's about it here! Oh, and we're pretty sure we're having another member of the 12 come and speak with us tonight, so that's awesome!! Love you all!!!!

-Soeur Frost

Week 3 "A partay! And some other things as well, I suppose"

Below is the latest email from Jordan we received yesterday.

So this was another great week here! We very much appreciated the party gear - we took lots of pictures that I'll have to send to you a little later. What started out as our small district eating junk food and drinking sparkling grape fruit turned into the district of 6 elders two doors down hearing us and stealing the noisemakers.... So it was a success? We had a lot of fun! I've got pictures of our teachers in funny hats, plus all of my district and most of the other district who joined us.

The next evening, the other district had stolen one of the funny tiara things (dubbed "party crowns" because that makes it more manly when you're wearing a sparkly pink/purple/gold hat) and were forcing Frère Laguan to wear it. At the point I caught on, I was asking a question while sitting in my rolly desk, and all six elders were about ten feet away from us, with me in between them, staring at him and slowly advancing in a pack, because he had taken off the hat. It was terrifying, and I wasn't even the one they were after! He quickly answered my question, and then whispers to roll my desk into the middle of the hallway, successfully blocking almost the whole hallway. He then took off in a dead sprint, quickly followed by all the elders, two of whom vaulted my desk. I'm told they chased him to the parking lot, then stood at a distance and watched him get into his car. Never a dull moment!

Last night, Soeur Archambault got a Dear Jane letter... from her FHE brothers from school. They wrote a letter as a group acting like they were breaking up with her for a girl "who doesn't object to a $5 engagement ring from Walmart". It was so funny! Also, she says it's not cold in Kansas City, because where she's from they don't cancel school unless it's colder than -45 degrees Fahrenheit. ...I could never live in Canada.

We got new teachers this week! We've only had one class with them, but they're pretty cool. 

Yesterday morning, Soeur Archambault and I both went to take showers in the morning and successfully locked ourselves out of the room. We had to borrow a key card from another sister to get access to the other floors to look for someone with a master key. Finally, we got back into our room, but forgot to bring the key card to access the floors, so we ended up stuck out in the stairwell. All in all, it was a great big fail in true "us" fashion. We were 20 minutes late to class. Luckily, so was our teacher! 

Well, I think that's all I've got for you. Love you all!!

Week 2!

Below is the email we received from Jordan:

"Bonjour!

Christmas here was phenomenal! We had Elder Bednar come and speak to us! It was so awesome, he handed out 200 cell phones (no, we couldn't call home on them) and gave us a number we could use to text questions to the iPad he had with him on the stand. He spent an hour and a half answering our questions, with help from his wife. Sister Bednar is awesome :) The rest of Christmas was great as well. We had a talent show, and ate kettle corn while we watched The Mormon Tabernacle Choir's Christmas concert from 2012.

We've had a fun week in our District. We're all pretty close already. We had a substitute teacher all week named Frère Nash. He's awesome. He keeps referring to us as "the funny district" because of the things we say to each other and because we can't even sing one hymn together in French without cracking up because it's just so bad. We call ourselves the Graveyard Choir.

Yesterday, we spent probably a half hour trying to determine Elder Woodbury's "type". I think he was a little bit embarrassed. Okay, more than a little bit.

Soeur Archambault and I had two "investigators" that we were teaching last week. One in French, the other in English. On our last lesson with the French one, he committed to baptism, so that was an awesome success! We tease our elders because we got a commitment first. We also had our English investigator ask us this ridiculous question that we didn't know the answer to, so we spent the entire next day finding her the answer. We asked the class next door, their teacher, and Frère Nash, who finally gave us the perfect answer. Then, she didn't show up to our appointment. Talk about disappointing. But the French "investigator", Steven, turned out to be our new teacher, Frère LaGuan, who's a really cool guy. So now we have two teachers!

We're all excited for our New Year's Eve party tomorrow night that our district is going to throw together. It'll be awesome! Love you all!

-Soeur Frost"

Here are a few pictures Jordan shared with us.

The Christmas tree they made for their room

Jordan's District outside the Provo Temple (A District is the group you train with)

Jordan and her companion

Week 1!

Below is the email we received outlining the adventures of her first week.

Week one! Allons-y!

Bonjour!

This week pretty much rocked. I love being here, and my district is the bomb.com (and since my district loves puns, we decided we're actually the BoM.com- get it?) and there's only four of us, including me! Soeur Archambault (my comp) is awesome. She's Canadian, and so we talk about the differences between here and Canada all the time. She pronounces her long A's differently, so 'bag' sounds kind of like 'beyg' and it's fantastic. Elder Woodbury is super dorky and we tease him because he has a song reference for EVERYTHING. But really. Everything. Elder Broadbent is really funny. He likes to make dorky faces and he can be pretty sarcastic and always tells these outlandish stories. The four of us are together more than 10 hours a day, so we're getting to know each other pretty well, and everyone else in our branch knows us as "that one district" because we only have four and each of us is going to different missions! Elder Broadbent is going to West Indies, Elder Woodbury to Canada, Soeur Archambault to St George Utah (yes, French speaking! She'll be in the visitor's center) and then me :) We want to take a picture by the big map so we can show where we're all going.

We had a goal setting meeting yesterday, and we set a few goals:
1) Focus. We all like each other, so we get off-topic really easily
2) Memorize the First Vision in French by January 5th
3) We have to give one compliment every time we insult each other. We all tease each other a lot, so we decided that would be a funny one. So basically, every time we tease Soeur Archambault about her accent, we then tell her her hair looks nice today or something of that nature.

We took several pictures, but I forgot to bring my camera when I went to do laundry (that's where I am now) and so we're going to save some email time and send them in a little while.

French is coming along really well. After I got here, they tested my french and wanted to move me to a three-week English program, but I don't think that's going to happen anymore. Probably just because it had already been two days and I would have been pretty behind. Everyone in our district has studied French before, so we're actually a week ahead of where we should be because we don't have to take nearly as long to learn things, since this is mostly review for us.

There's a sister across the hall from us who has a master's in violin! Plus, her comp plays piano really well. I checked out a violin from the MTC, and the three of us are performing prelude music for our branch's sacrament meeting this Sunday, and we're going to be working on a piece to audition to give a performance in a bigger meeting. I'm super excited. We're doing a really pretty arrangement of Silent Night. Our branch is made up of half of the French-speaking missions, so it's a pretty small group. It's going to be totally awesome.

One last thing. I got like 2 letters and 4 packages today.... You all rock ;) although the rest of my district definitely teased me about it as we carried them across campus all the way back to our rooms! On that note, you all should write them a letter! They're awesome people, and we have the same mailing address, just change the name and take away the FEB09 VAN-PV under the name. Elder Woodbury hasn't received anything yet, and Soeur Archambault doesn't expect to get anything because of how long it takes to mail things from Canada.

Also, if you are able to access it (I'm not sure, since it was a talk originally given in the MTC a few years back), look at Elder Bednar's talk entitled "Character of Christ". It seriously is life-changing!

I love you all so much! Keep being awesome!

Soeur Frost

Just like that, she is officially a missionary.

It's been a week since Jordan left Kansas City and reported to the Missionary Training Center (MTC). I apologize in the delay in writing this post; however, I'm still picking up the pieces of my heart.  Jordan has never been one to set small goals; she dreams BIG.  Huge audacious goals. Like the time she wanted to complete a half marathon, or when she asked me to train her for her first sprint triathlon.  Like I said, BIG goals and dreams.

I would be lying if I said that I was on board with the idea of her becoming a missionary when she first told us.  I was worried about her scholarships, her education and most selfishly, us not being with her for 18 months.  It took a while, but I finally was on board with her dream of a mission.  And here we are; 1 week down and 77 weeks to go.

Which brings me to the drop off at the airport.  It was H-A-R-D.  I told myself I wouldn't cry, and I did SO well...until the final hug.  Here are some snapshots of the good-byes.

 In true Jordan fashion, she tries to lick me.

 

The relationship of these two is one that parents pray for. Makes my heart happy.

 Our girl

 selfie time!

 I was on the verge of tears, so she said, "Squirrel time!"

 Jordan and Tyler with their mom

 Jordan with Tyler

with Tyler and Nathan

...and just like that, she's gone.

Thankfully, Rich was able to fly out to Utah with Jordan.  They flew out a day early and they were able to visit In-N-Out for some delicious burgers. (YUMMY!)  They were also able to visit Temple Square all lit up for Christmas.

unedited/unfiltered photo of Rich and Jordan at Temple Square

The final hug.

With that final hug, she is officially a missionary, Sister Jordan Frost.  Return with honor, we'll see you in 18 months.