In July of 2015, I arrived at the halfway point of my service as a missionary in the France Lyon Mission.
President Scott D. Brown had been called to serve as our new mission president, and my companion and I traveled from Poitiers, where we were serving, to Bordeaux for our first zone conference with our new president and his wife.
Prior to meeting him in person, I had heard that President Brown was the first cousin of my paternal grandmother, and I was excited to get to know him and make that family connection.
As he made his presentation, he started to talk about an ancestor of his, beginning by tracing his lineage on a big screen. I noticed the name of my great-great-grandmother and realized that this was my ancestor as well.
President Brown told the story of Serge Ballif, a Protestant preacher in Lausanne, Switzerland, within our mission boundaries. Missionaries met Serge and taught him in the basement of the Lausanne Cathedral. They discovered how the Lord had prepared his grandfather, Jean François Ballif, who had written about the need for a restoration of the original church of Christ.
After his own baptism, Serge helped in the establishment of the restored gospel in Switzerland and throughout that part of Europe, a missionary himself.
Later, Serge and his family moved to Utah, but he returned to Switzerland twice to serve again as a missionary. Though his family had relocated to America, he kept the French tradition alive, and he taught his grandchildren how to speak French.
In my one-on-one interview with the mission president after the conference was over, I told him about our ancestral connection.
We rejoiced in the knowledge that the Lord had sent us both to be missionaries to continue the work that our forefathers had prepared for us.
I felt a deep sense of gratitude to the Lord for the opportunity to be in that mission at that time.
President Brown helped me turn my heart to my fathers without knowing beforehand, and became a source of spiritual strength and guidance throughout the rest of my mission.
Even before I arrived in the mission field, I knew that I loved France and my mission, but this experience gave me the Lord’s confirmation that I was in the right place at the right time. — Nicole Jacobsen, Palo Alto, California
