12 MARCH 2008

Ciao tutti,

Nothing too out of the ordinary to talk about this week. It's been a pretty normal, great week.

Probably the craziest thing that happened is that Monday was my last zone conference in the mission! I can hardly believe that! The departing missionaries always stand and give their "dying testimony" so I had the opportunity to do that along with 3 other elders in the zone who are going home the same time I am. It was hard to stand and try to express all my feelings about my mission to everyone. But it was a good experience to stand and bear my testimony to the other missionaries. Zone conference was really good. The assistants always do an amazing training and this time they talked all about testimony and how important it is that we are able to express our conviction of the truthfulness of the gospel with power so that investigators are able to feel the spirit and make commitments. I learned a lot and am working hard to be able to do this with the people we work with. I also really liked President and Sister Acerson's trainings. Sister Acerson walked us through the Book of Mormon and we read together many of the "dying testimonies" of fathers in the Book of Mormon to their sons. Really powerful testimonies and a good study for all of us to do. It was an inspiring conference!

We are still doing lots of finding work in hope to find new investigators. Saturday we did an exchange with two girls in the ward. I went with a member my age from Thailand, her name's Shane. She's been a member for a couple years and is planning on going on a mission sometime soon. So I went with her and we did some park and house. It was fun. My comp went with another girl and they did finding work in another part of Rome. It's awesome to work with members and be able to set up these exchanges! Each companionship took about 15 pamphlets on Joseph Smith, the family proc. and English class fliers, and then a Book of Mormon and we challenged ourselves to give it all away in the hour and a half that we had. We were able to give it all away and to teach some good lessons. Also on sunday we got to go sing in piazza del popolo. It was so fun to see my "kid" again, Sister Call. I trained her up in Livorno and now she's down here in Rome. It was cool to hear all the updates of people back in Livorno, like about how Jantina is doing so great and visiting teaching etc. (If any of you remember her!) I also got to talk to lots of neat people. I got a phone number so hopefully that will turn into something.

We had an appointment last night with Yana and her mom. We focused the whole thing on prayer with our invite to have her pray with us on the spot. We planned out a really good lesson on why we pray and how we pray, trying to put into practice everything we learned at zone conference. We bore testimony of the power of prayer and then at the end, after having explained how we pray, handed her a paper with a few examples of what to thank heavenly father for and what to ask him for, knelt down and asked her to say the closing prayer. She totally got so scared and we kept encouraging her and telling her she could do it! But in the end she just wouldn't do it! Anyways, we invited her and her mom to pray together that night and she said she would pray the next time. Mamma mia, it's like pulling teeth here!

Anyways, things are awesome and I love this work.

Love ya,

Sorella Boynton