Sunday, October 10th - Church in Europe

Today we decided to go to Martigny, Switzerland for church. It's only about 20 minutes by train from Aigle, which is the town at the base of the mountain Leysin is at. It was quite the experience getting to church. After we arrived at the train station in Martigny we had a hand drawn map of the directions to get there. We were supposed to go to this particular store and then cross the tracks. What we didn't realize is that there were several train tracks and after about ten minutes and realizing we were in a very industrial part of town we decided to turn around. There were some people in camp trailers nearby and we decided to ask them if they knew where the church was. Of course none of them spoke English so we relied on Becky Drebin to use her french to ask where it was at. They didn't know where the church was, but we found out we were going the wrong way because we were told there is a small Portugese Cultural Center across the street from the church and the people we were talking to knew where that was. We crossed back over the tracks found the building again and realized there was another set of train tracks headed in the opposite direction of the way we had been originally going. We correctly oriented ourselves with the map and easily found the church. We arrived right on time for sacrament meeting.

The church in Martigny was a small branch with the building in a strip mall type building. Sacrament Meeting was all in French and because their microphone system wasn't working the translation ear pieces didn't really work. Although I couldn't understand most of what was being said it was amazing to be able to recognize and feel the spirit as these members bore their testimony. I had the opportunity to share my testimony and one of the missionaries translated it into French as I was speaking. It was a unique experience and again left me thinking the gospel fills in the gaps where our languages and cultures do not meet.

My spiritual thought came from our experience of being lost and realizing that although we had a map, without proper orientation we were still lost. The same is true with the scriptures. We have this "map" to make it back to our Father in Heaven, but unless we align ourselves with the scriptures through daily study, we will not be moving in the direction we need to get going.

After church Becky, Milo, Ben, Jolynn, and I stuck around Martigny to explore a bit.