Day 77, Changing of Plans

I decided that I can’t handle another week of being away from friends and family and just sitting around here.  So, I’m taking those nice French YSAs from last week at the temple and ravioli activity up on their suggestion: I’m going to their hometown, Avignon!  Instead of meeting up with Cassi and Eric in London on July 24, I’m meeting them in Avignon on July 19.  Big change of plans, but I feel good and excited about it.  Talking to Cassi and Mom helped me ground myself, too, because it’d been a while since I’d talked to family.

In other news, I went to church—not atypical in the least!  But this time, I ended up sitting apart from Teresa, which put me out of my comfort zone, but I ended up sitting near another YSA, who loaned me her hymnal for singing and led me to the YSA Sunday School after sacrament.  There, I met a couple of other YSAs and loved the lesson about Christ’s trial and death.  Yes, it’s a lesson I’ve had innumerable times, but this time, the teacher had us stop and think about the characteristics of Christ found in individual scriptures.  That itself was interesting, because it made me look a little deeper into the scriptures and see the differences between how the apostles, for example, handled the betrayal of Christ and how he himself handled it. The teacher then asked us how we ourselves can come to develop those characteristics so as to change and one day become like him.  One of the striking questions he asked was, “In what ways do we deny Christ and deny our faith?”