Giorno di Ringraziamento
Hey family and friends!! I hope that you all had a great week and have a great upcoming Thanksgiving! For Thanksgiving this year, our district will be meeting at the church to have a lunch that will be made by our beast senior couple who is serving here named the Hydes. I am so grateful for them because they support us so much --and they want to make us Thanksgiving food. We are hoping that we can bring some investigators so hopefully that works out! I also have my new companion with me!! His name is Anziano Berger and he was actually trained by Anziano Trejo (who will always be like a legendary missionary in my eyes). He is an awesome missionary and works really hard, so we are really excited to see what happens this transfer!! We are totally finding our MOJO so fast and so it has been awesome.
This week was really interesting with not having a companion for about 3 days but I am grateful for how it worked out. I was able to have probably one of the best experiences of my mission on Wednesday when I was able to do an exchange with Genni. What I had been doing was on Monday and Tuesday I was working with Anziano Ridd and Anziano Youngblood in a trio. But, on Wednesday Genni came to the church and I was able to go to work with him. Before this exchange, though, I had just been praying that things would go well because he is preparing to go on his mission next year and I wanted to get him really excited and have lessons. What we had planned is we were going to go and teach a less-active, and then teach two lessons to some other people, and afterward, finish at his house with a family night. Well, when we got to the less-active’s house the mother said that her daughter wasn’t there, so unfortunately we couldn’t teach.. Dang.. strike 1...So I was walking along with Genni and as we were heading to our next appointments we ran into this guy who wanted to know where our church was and so we showed him and then taught him there on the street. It was super sick because Genni normally wears a baseball hat, but as we started teaching, he pulled it off and waited for his turn to bear his testimony and share his experiences. I was super impressed. Then we had a lesson with our investigator who is really struggling with a lot of things in her life just because of past involvement with gangs and things like that. As we were there we were able to teach the restoration and then she accepted to be baptized!! HALLELUJAH!! We walked out of the lesson and Genni was soo pumped! We then headed over and were able to teach another two women in their store about the Book of Mormon and at the end they gave us a free Powerade.. Sweet! It was really cool, and everything ended up going really well. As we headed over to Genni's house we were both so excited and so happy; it was great. He is probably the strongest youth I have ever met here in Italy! That night we had a great family night Genni’s family and his mom asked us if we can come back this week and just keep meeting with her sons to help them!! I am sooo happy to keep working with Genni and his brother. They are beasts.
Transfers went really well as well! And my babe Anziano Morlock is in Battipaglia. I am super excited to see him and be able to work with him. We are planning on doing a scambio this week and it will be just like old times back in Brindisi. He actually ended up getting a little lost during transfers because his train was late, so he missed his other one.. Ohh boy.. But he’s a stud and figured out what do do himself and was able to make it to Battipaglia. Man, I cant wait to work with him!
Other really exciting news is F. wants to serve a mission!!! He is progressing so fast that it is incredible to see. He literally reads out of the Gospel Library any free time he has and has already read through all of Preach My Gospel. A few days ago he was like, "Anziano Spencer, I love Alma 42.. that is like my favorite chapter in the Book of Mormon.." Wow. And last night we invited him to hit the streets with us and teach some lessons and he was so excited. He taught two lessons with us and then afterward we had a gesso planned for two hours in this massive piazza area. There was a ton of people there and he stayed for the entire two hours talking to people and would come up and bear his testimony to people as we would be teaching them!! It’s so cool to just watch him and see how much he wants to learn and grow.
A huge miracle that we saw this week was a member referral that we contacted on Saturday. Referrals are the best way for missionary work!! We went to the family’s house and they were so excited to talk to us and we are meeting with them tonight. We are praying that it goes well because they are so awesome. There are 4 kids who are all around 25ish and the parents are also really great. They have a lot of questions for us, so we are really hoping for a miracle tonight!! Our work is going really well here; we have a lot of good potentials for this week and one of the little girls (who I was skipping with a few weeks ago) accepted to be baptized yesterday! I love that little family so much; they are my favorite. It’s always so fun going over there because they are always dancing and singing, but when we teach they are really serious and we always pray in a tight circle together. It’s super special. I love being here.
Well, I love you all! Know that I am loving the mission so much! I love being a representative of Jesus Christ!
I am so GRATEFUL for you all!!
For my spiritual thought I just wanted to share a little spiritual insight that I had while I was studying on humility. As I was reading in the Book of Mormon, I was reading in Ether and a prophet is asking God to help him help his people by touching these stones he had made to light them. It is interesting to see in the chapter the humility that you can see in this prophet. What I was able to see and learn is humility is completely aligning our will with God's and having trust and confidence in ourselves as we do so. I always thought humility was just kinda like putting ourselves down like saying “yeah, I am not good at that" and "I am just not good at anything.” But, humility is recognizing our weaknesses and knowing that they can become our strengths, ONLY through the power of God. I think it is a really interesting concept to think about and I want to do better at being more humble for God.
Later on in the chapters it says this in Chapter 12:
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