Elder Ian James Smith

  Hello everyone! We're still here on a mission in Saint-Quentin France and I'm doing great. We saw soo many things. Tuesday was my hump day and we are officially starting the 365 day countdown to my release date. The mission is so fast it's hard to not let it flash before your eyes! We didn't do anything to celebrate because I didn't even realize we had passed my hump day until yesterday. Wednesday was a pretty normal day. We met our friends Geino and Marie Ange on the road we also had District Council. I took my last sector for granted a little bit because we had in person district counsel every week now most of our district councils are on messenger by video call. On Thursday we saw an absolute miracle and we found 5 friends on the street in a 2 hour time period! We also got a really good boulangerie Thursday as well. Friday was one of my favorite days of all time on my mission we decided to go to Laon, France. If you go here look  fran up Laon, France up on goog...

 June 23, 2025 Hot!!!  It was so hot here in Saint-Quentin this week. I've never eaten more popsicles than in the last week. We only had one fan that worked and it is a mini fan, so yeah. But the Lord's work didn't stop.  We did a ton of finding like normal, we also had an exchange which was awesome. We went to Lille and  did an exchange with our ZLs. I learned a ton up there to bring to Saint-Quentin. Also I don't know why but I seem to find and be companions with people from French Polynesia.  On Friday we crossed this family from new Caledonia and they are so cool. It was Elder Tuua and Tupana who initially talked to them. And then we were near the river when I saw them and we started talking about church and all it was a super awesome experience.  Sunday came around and one of our amazing members brought her friend with her to church! She is soo cool and we're excited to teach her it truly was a fun week.  We just went grocery shopping and bou...

June 16, 2025  Bonjour a tous!  This week was super different. On Wednesday we had to say goodbye to my Tahitian Elder Tuua. I will miss him! Just before he left I got a Tahitian tie and a pin with the Tahitian flag on it. I also got a photo and I put it on my photo album. We also grinded out the last week here finding 15 new friends, absolutely amazing! Nãna Elder tuua a la prochaine mon frère . Then we picked up my new comp Elder Butler. It was weird speaking English for the first little bit. He's from Cedar City. He is an awesome Elder and I'm excited for the next couple weeks of missionary work.  We absolutely saw the hand of the Lord in the work here this week and a ton of people were put in our path to receive the gospel. We met a super cool guy, but I felt like David next to Goliath. His name is Ned and he is 6'5 225 pounds of muscle. He's super awesome and loved the Book of Mormon we gave him.  It was soo hot I was melting this week. I don't know why we ate ...

June 9, 2025 Bonjour a tous! Transfer News is in: my Companion Elder Tuua is leaving me and going to le Mans and I'm receiving Elder Butler from le Mans so they literally just flipped lol.  Saint-Quentin is still an awesome place. Yesterday night we tried to do service and serve soup at this big community party. But when we got there we were informed that this massive cauldron was broken, so they just had a tons of cold soup in the center of this big party. But it's ok because our member literally knows everyone in this city and he was able to hook us up with free peanuts-goat.  Chez Michele: we have a member whom we all love very dearly but he's soo funny! It's completely unintentional, but we get to his house and he spends maybe 30 minutes looking for a piece of paper (like tearing apart his apartment while we're just there watching him). So he gave us coke and this non alcoholic drink, it was actually so gross it was a taste that you'll have in the back of yo...

June 1, 2025  Bonjour a tous! Fun fun week, We started off with Zone Conference in Lille. We were there a day early to do our interviews with President, after our interview was over we did some contacting with another Elder named Elder Gardner from St Omer. Then we then slept in the Lille apartment with 12 other elders in the same apartment!  The next day was ZC where we learned all about contacting grey dots and how awesome our mission as a whole is doing. We had to say goodbye to some awesome missionaries going home this transfer Murdock, Henrickson see ya on the other side. Later that next day we had a surprise exchange with the Charleville Elders. I said surprise exchange because I told them we would do an exchange after District council and they bought tickets for after Zone Conference. Then after that we had an exchange with the Zone Leaders. So we had a crazy week. This transfer flew by! We find out the transfer board this Saturday. So it was an insanely fast trans...