16 Agosto 2007

Mamma mia!

There's so much to write about and just not enough time! I'm writing a day late because yesterday was the 15 of August and here in Italy that's a big holiday where everything is closed....so we as missionaries have to stay in our apartments pretty much all day and clean from ceiling to floor! We cleaned everything!! The Elders painted our apartment last week and so now our apartment is looking real nice and just feels clean and free of clutter! Now today, we get to take our p-day.....and we are so lucky because we get to go to Siena and watch the famous "palio"!!! Probably only Dad knows what that is....but it's just a traditional horse race that takes places 2 times a summer in Siena. So we are heading out to go there in half an hour! I'll tell you all about it next week!

This week has really been a great week...

Thursday we were able to meet with a couple of our inactives. Marlene, who I'm pretty sure I've talked about (an excommunicated member who's getting re-baptized in Dec), is coming along. We are trying to help her realize the importance of keeping the commandments. She's still smoking and we'll have to hop on that one pretty quick! She's really amazing though and just a smart lady. I really enjoy our visits with her because I can be bold with her and she can take it! We are taught as missionaries to be bold. I bet I would be safe to say that that's one thing that many missionaries struggle with. But I've found that that's why it's important to have such a good relationship with your contacts...so they can trust you...and it becomes more of a friend... friend relationship... and not an investigator... missionary relationship. I struggled with this at first with Marlene because we are both pretty stubborn people but who would have known it would be the right match! She's awesome and we'll keep working with her. We also met with Jantina. She still has her baptisimal date for the 18th of September. We are trying to figure out a way to confront her husband and somehow find an in with him so that he will be accepting to learn a little bit more about the church and what we are about.

Friday we did our weekly planning and then got to ride our bikes up the steep hill to service... playing bingo with the old folks. Always a laugh! Good times.

Saturday we passed by a contact that the sisters before me found. She turned out to be really awesome, maybe I told you about her already. Her name is Antonella. She's awesome and speaks english perfectly. We helped her with her english because she's working this week at UNICEF. In turn she offered to help us with our Italian. So I decided that we might as well just teach her about why we are here and what we teach. We taught her about the Book of Mormon and the basics of the restoration. She was focusing more on helping us with our Italian but hopefully she got something out of what we shared. I hope that we can continue to help her and eventually teach her.

I came down with a cold saturday and really wasn't feeling too hot. But we had a member coming from an outlying city to have an appointment with us and she was bringing her friend who's a non-member. So we had planned to watch the restoration video at the church and just kind of introduce him to the church. We met them and went to the church, where we'd watched DVD's before, and I went to put the dvd in but the player wasn't there! I was already feeling pretty crappy with my head all congested, barely being able to think clearly. So while Sis. Call amused them with her piano skills, I went in every room in the church to hunt down the dvd player! I said to Heavenly Father, please help me find this dvd player because I'm not in a state, with my cold, where I can just whip up a good lesson! So then, I searched a little more and found the player up on a cupboard, in it's original box! Wierd! Anyway, I was then able to set it up with all the many cords, and we were able to watch it! This members friend, who's an african man, was touched and we gave him a Book of Mormon. He called us this week and said he started reading it and that its "bellissimo." Truly an answer to a desperate prayer! I'm so grateful for a loving Heavely Father who answers our prayers! I've seen it in these past few weeks more than ever in my mission. The Lord knows that I need help as a trainer so he's truly helping me! After that lesson I was feeling so bad that I made the executive decision (of course guided by the spirit!) to go home at 8 so I could sleep for an hour. Hopefully my comp was okay with that but I really just wouldn't have been able to talk to anyone in a cohesive manner and better to rest and be able to work the next day than wear yourself out and not be able to work the rest.

Sigh....now...I'm pretty much over the cold. Sunday was full of church, correlation meeting, and then doing chalk down by the mare (sea). Monday and Tuesday were normal days. We had a good appointment with Svieta from russia. She's so busy with her work etc, but she promised she would read from the book of mormon this week. Yay! Well, I think that's probably one of the most detailed emails I've ever written! I better be going now...gotta catch the train to the horse race!

I love you all and know that I know this church is true! Keep on reading and praying and having your personal spiritual experiences because that is what keeps us going!

Love,
Sorella B.