Parisian Paradise - Part VI: Church

Sunday morning, we awoke and ate breakfast again. This time, I constrained myself a lit bit more. But we did utilize the baguettes, meats and cheese to make ourselves sandwiches for lunch. Yeah, we're resourceful little cheapos sometimes.

We rode the metro to the stop closest to where the LDS church congregation met. Deidra had read a blog from someone who had recently visited Paris, which included direction on how to get to the church from the metro. We followed those direction until we got to the right street, but at the church address we saw only two large blue locked doors - no church logo or anything to let us know we were in the right place. We were confused for a while, but eventually Deidra found a Book of Mormon display with note in a nearby window, left for visitors from the missionaries. It gave us instructions for getting through the locked doors.

Upon entering the blue doors, we saw a cobblestone courtyard with a few parked cars. We came to find out that church was held in the various rooms surrounding the courtyard. Deidra and Whit went to Relief Society on the North side, while Brian and I went to priesthood meeting on the south side.

The official church website said that church began at 10:30 AM, and the blog Deidra had read said it started at 10 AM. We got there at about 10:15, and those initial meetings ended about 15 minutes after we got there. Apparently, church atually started at 9:30AM. But that was okay, because the first meeting was in French and we didn't understand much of it anyway.

The four of us met together in an English-language Gospel Doctrine class during the next hour, where it was great to actually participate and understand what was going on.

Finally, we all went to Sacrament Meeting together as well. This meeting was also in French, but the missionaries were translating into both English and Chinese. So we got to wear these fun headphones to understand what was being said:

I am sure that translating is a difficult job, and some of the missionaries were better at it than others (they took turns), so I think we missed some of what was going on throughout the meeting.

At one point, a speaker (who had recently returned from a mission) did not speak French and only spoke Spanish. So he spoke in Spanish with a translator who translated it into French. Then the missionaries would try to translate that French into English. I took off my headphones during that speaker, when I realized that I could understand the Spanish better than I could understand the Spanish-French-English translation.

And, and interesting side note - it turns out that I knew the Bishop of the congregation. He is American, and we went to church together when we were both single and living in Washington, D.C. Sometimes the church makes it a small world.

Church was another one of our favorite parts of our Paris trip, which some people have told us is a copout. But we felt very warmly welcomed and and saw a great deal of diversity throughout the congregation, which is sometimes lacking in Utah.  It was heartening to see our brothers and sisters in the gospel thousands of miles away and recognize that the church and its members are the same throughout the world.