Ciao!: Week 76: Dec 19 (Napoli)

BUON NATALE!!

I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas this upcoming Sunday! It is special to celebrate the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ. I want to wish you all a Buon Natale and I hope that everyone has a great time together for these next few holidays. For Christmas we are planning on going to a member family's house, which will be really fun. They are a super fun family that are extremely crazy, which I am excited about. After eating with them we are going to come back to the church and Skype my family--which is going to be my most favorite part--and then eat tacos with our new convert Fabio. It’s going to be a great day and I am really excited! Today for P-day we were able to go to the American Base which was so sick but also so weird. I was able to load up on ramen (sooo good mom, haha) peanut butter, those lemon-tortilla chips that I love, and most importantly... Protein Powder! Ohhh yess.

This week we are pumped for a lot of different things that are coming up. We are planning on going to Rome, but the assistants might have to work with some other missionaries so we are still not sure. But on Friday we are planning the Christmas caroling in the city center which will be really interesting haha. I hope it goes well! We are planning on inviting all the members and people that we are working with so hopefully things will go well with this activity.

Okay, so there were two really huge highlights about this week that I want focus my email on. The first thing is L. (the older sister) and J. got baptized!! It was such a special experience. I want to explain a couple things so that y'all get the background of the baptism. So here in Napoli we don’t have a baptismal font and so normally we would have to go to a different city, or go to the ocean. Both of those options were open but we wanted to do our best to have the baptism here in Napoli so that there would be more member support for the girls. We coordinated with some Anziani in Castellammare and they gave us their portable font from their church. Before the mission I didn’t even know these things existed. Basically what it is is a giant blue bag that we build and structure out of pipes. Then we fill it up with water and pray that it doesn’t tip over. Hahaha just kidding--it’s pretty stable, but filling it up with water was pretty difficult because in the church there is no hot, flowing water and the tubes that we had to connect from the sinks to the font didn’t work. We tried all sorts of things to fill it up... My favorite was filling up the sink with water, plugging it, and then putting one end of the tube in the sink and then the other in the baptismal font. I then sucked on the end in the baptismal font to try to create a suction.. It worked a little bit but didn’t have the effect we wanted. Eventually we figured it out by using a lot of tape and the sink. It took around 2 hours to fill up and then after that we put a conductor inside the water to heat it up... After the water was sitting for around 26 hours, it was hot enough and nice for the baptism. It was a process I never thought I would have to learn to do before the mission.

On Saturday we went and picked the girls up at their house and brought them to the church. They were both so excited and so was the mother. I am just so grateful for how everything turned out. We had a lot of members that came to support them, and afterwards there were some refreshments set out for everyone to help them feel welcomed and loved (which I was grateful about!). L. asked me to baptize her and so it was a really special experience. I wish I could explain better other than saying that the church is true and it was a moment that I will never forget in my life. The next day we were able to do the confirmations which was actually a huge miracle because we ended up being late to church by around 40 minutes. Every Sunday we go to pick up the girls in the morning to help them get to church.Unfortunately, this Sunday there was no train that came for 30 minutes. And so it was kinda awkward walking into church 40 minutes late because the train didn’t come but our Branch president gave us permission to have the confirmations at the end of sacrament instead of at the beginning. I was able to confirm L. and again it was a special experience to confirm her a member of the church. The spirit is always really strong standing in the circle of the ordinance.

Another special thing that we did this week was a scambio with the Anziani down in Castellemmare. I was able to work with Anziano Bellini (who was in my same group when we entered here in Italy). We had a great time together and saw so many awesome things from the scambio. Basically he and I had a lot of finding that we were going to be doing in their area which went really well. The first people that we talked to out the door of the elevator were putting up Christmas decorations in the apartment and the mother mentioned to us how she was actually almost baptized into our church a few years ago... Ummmm what?! That doesn't happen very often. We were able to help them and now the Anziani are going to be meeting with her twice a week to help her get back to church! It was a good scambio and I LOVED being in Castellemmare because it reminded me a lot of Trapani. It was small and right alongside the ocean and so it brought back so many memories. I loved it!

We had another lesson with one of our investigators that we are working with. It was pretty interesting because her grandson was there and he was making so much noise that it was hard to talk. But it eventually got better as I called him over and told him that I had a "mission" for him. He was wearing a batman shirt and so I told him that he would become batman if he fought the imaginary monsters around the room in silence... It worked great and eventually by the end of the lesson he came and sat down and prayed with us. My companion afterward was just like, “You're like the Kid Whisperer-- like what on earth?!” Hahaha! I love working with kids and I feel like my swimming-instructor job really helped me learn how to work with them before the mission. A miracle from this lesson though was the grandmother literally was thinking about how she needs to read the Book of Mormon and "where those missionaries went" that she met with a while ago and then we knocked on her door. It was a cool experience when she told us her thoughts, and said how she feels "light" when we talk to her. So awesome.

Last night we had a great time as we went to a main piazza in the city center to do a gesso [chalkboard discussion with people on the street]. As we did so, we found a giant group because there was a giant dancing competition (OHHHH MAMMA MIA) and we saw some of the members there because the daughter of one of the members is like the top latino dancer in Italy in her age group category. Are you kidding me right now?! So we were able to see her and then while we were with the members I started talking to this guy next to us and we talked about the church and eventually it turned into my companion and I with three other members talking to him and sharing their conversions, as Rihanna is blasting in the background. Ohhhh yes. It was an interesting setting, that’s for sure. I was trying my hardest to focus while at the same time not start dancing hahaha.

Well, I hope you all have a very good Christmas!!! For my spiritual thought I wanted to quote a scripture from Luke 2 talking about Jesus Christ's birth,

"10 And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord."

I am grateful that during this Christmas season we can remember more about our Savior Jesus Christ and his brith. In Italian we say "e nato un Salvatore" which I love so much. Christ was born and because of that and his mission that he did for us we can all be saved. We can all have a new life and we can all make it back to our Father in Heaven. We need not fear. E NATO UN SALVATORE! [A Savior is born!]

I love you all!!

Anziano Spencer