HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Hey everybody! I hope that y'all had a great Christmas celebrating all together the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ! This truly is such a special time of year and I am grateful that I have the opportunity to be serving as a representative of His work here in Napoli. We had a great Christmas here and I will try to do my best to explain all the traditions and things that we were able to do with the Italians. The moment that was the most special was being able to skype call my family. It was so good to see them after 7 months and I love them so much.
Traditions for Christmas- Eating haha
Okay so here in Napoli the festivities are a three-day long event starting on the 24th and ending on the 26th. It’s been pretty cool to experience, especially because each day is a different type of meal that you are supposed to eat. So for example, on Saturday (or Christmas Eve) you are only supposed to eat fish. All different types of fish are mixed in with pastas, salads, first courses, and second courses. [Editor’s note: I remember this from my mission to Italy too—very well. I wasn’t as enthused about it as Tristan is.] The speciality thing here is also eels. All around Napoli there are food markets and during the Christmas season there have been giant tanks set out that have huge eels swimming inside that people come to buy from the market. It is so sweet! Then the next day on Christmas it’s more of a soup kinda meal with rooster broth and then pasta and things like that. After basically feeling super full for two days you still continue to eat and on the 26th you just eat the normal lasagna, pasta, and dolce [sweets] kinda meal. So for today and the past two days people spend time together as a family, eating. It’s awesome!
This is what has been happening the last few days here during Christmas time. On Saturday we went over to a member’s house to eat dinner with them. My companion and I had a great time and I have to say it was probably one of the craziest and super fun nights of my whole mission. I can’t really explain it very well other than saying that during the dinner the kids were chucking basketballs at us to play catch while we were eating clams (the kind that you slurp out of the shells) mixed with pasta. And some other very interesting things occurred haha. I loved it so much; it was such a good time. The family that we were with is so kind and even got us a big Christmas gift of a bunch of different foods for our house like Nutella, tuna, and of course, pasta. They are so great.
On Christmas Eve the other guys here in Napoli slept over at our house (plus two other Anziani that have been stuck in Napoli for a week) and so it was us six all in our home. It was a super fun time and it was cool waking up Christmas morning and all eating pancakes together before we went to church. I was actually able to give a talk in church which I was nervous about because I didn’t really know what the branch president wanted me to do other than talk about Christmas, and so that’s what I did and I think it went well. The spirit was really strong during the meeting and it was special to be with the branch on Christmas day. After that we went to a meal appointment with another one of our members and ate the kind of meal that I described above with broth and pasta and lots of vegetables. There is a special vegetable here that is famous in Napoli that is kinda like a mix between spinach and kale like all boiled together and when I first ate it, it was probably the most disgusting thing that I have ever eaten. It kinda reminds me of when I mowed the lawn back at home and the grass was still wet and I took the grass out to empty it.. Yeah.. that’s the image that I think of as I am trying to eat it with a smile on my face haha. But, now I am beginning to be more used to it and I can eat it, which is good because it’s a common dish here. After the meal appointment we went back to the church to skype our families which was the GREATEST, and then we watched a movies called Zootropolis. It was really cool and I liked it a lot. Unfortunately, the movies we bought were from the street so they cost like 2 euro which was a cool deal until three-fourths into the movie it just stopped working lol. We watched it in Italian, but it was a really good movie and I am grateful I was able to get the main idea of the movie.
That has been our Christmas events for the past few days!! Today we have another meal appointment to go eat with some members which I am really excited about! The eating still continues on haha! As for the rest of the week, though, it has been really interesting. Last Tuesday two Anziani came up from Reggio Calabria to get a permesso, but with the way train times worked and getting their documents they were not able to go back home until this morning, so they ended up staying here for the entire week. I was able to work with Anziano Whitaker for most of the week and it was a really great experience. I learned a lot from him and it was awesome because he is an Elder that I started my mission with in the MTC so we already had a really good relationship and so it was fun to be together after a year and a half on our missions. We were able to do a lot of finding together and we saw so many miracles. We met one guy that was about to be baptized a few years ago and then the church moved locations and so he just got confused and stopped coming. Then we found other investigators who are all young and super cool so I am really excited with all the success we saw. Anziano Whitaker is super good at bringing the spirit into the conversation while talking to people and there is one spiritual experience that I want to share from what he did. We stopped a mother with her daughter and started talking to them and Anziano Whitaker was bearing his testimony of why we were here in Italy. As he was doing so, the spirit literally hit me so hard in my chest; it was incredible. I can’t describe it other than echoing what the prophets and apostles teach about how a testimony is the "strongest arrow in your quiver" and it’s the spirit that’s going to convert people. It was a powerful experience and the two people we were talking to felt it as well. I really enjoyed the time that we had together!
The other experience that was super fun this week was the Christmas caroling!! We had all the missionaries from our zone come into Napoli and we went into the middle of the center to go sing to people and to bring some Christmas cheer. I ended up getting there a little bit later than everyone else because I was bringing some members, so it was cool to walk up and join all the missionaries already singing. The "conductor" was an Anziano that is super good at music and knew what he was doing so well. I just don’t know if he got the whole point how we needed to be like super pumped and excited to get people to watch because we started singing a few sacrament hymns to people on the 23rd. Ummm what…? Don’t get me wrong; I love the sacrament hymns, like they are beautiful, but it wasn't really attracting anyone to stop and so I asked if I could just give it a shot and conduct. I had no clue what I was doing, so I was just kinda dancing while everyone was singing and trying to get really into it haha. It was sooo fun and the missionaries started to get hyped and excited and so we decided to leave our spot where we were and go down into the "heart" of the city where the main metro stop is and sing there. There were 100s's of people passing by and it was SOOO SWEET starting to sing and having people stop. We sang all the Christmas hymns, and then some other Christmas songs and the best one was 12 days of Christmas because after that we had a crowd of like 100 people filming us and watching. During the 12 days of Christmas some old guy walked right next to me while I was "conducting" (dancing) and so I started to dance with him and he started to dance a little too! The best…!! The caroling was a really good time and I think it really gave all the missionaries a boost and some happiness during Christmas to be all together to sing and to talk to people about our church. The next day before church we had a member come up and show us a video that was posted on Facebook and YouTube of us singing.. OHHH YESS. Haha she said she saw the video and started to watch and then realized that those were “her" missionaries!!!
As for the work we are doing really well. We have a lot of good potentials for this week and we have found some really sincere people who want to know if there really is a God and if Jesus Christ is real. I am ready to be back with my companion and keep working. We have transfer calls this week and I am not really sure if I will be leaving or staying. I will let y'all know next week!
I wanted to end with a quote from Elder Bednar that he shares in a talk he wrote about Lighting the World.. He says, "May we increasingly learn and more fully understand that Jesus Christ is the “light which shineth in darkness.” In every season of our lives, in all of the circumstances we may encounter, and in each challenge we may face, the Savior is the light that dispels fear, provides assurance and direction, and engenders enduring peace and joy. May the beautiful lights of every Christmas season remind us of Him who is the source of all light."
I really love this quote because it shows us and just reminds us that Jesus Christ truly is the light. It’s interesting to see that during Christmas there are lights that are set up everywhere. In our homes, on the streets, literally everywhere... And I think there is an interesting correlation between that and the fact that we celebrate the birth of our Savior who is always a constant light in every circumstance that we may encounter. I know that it is true that just like Elder Bednar says, "Jesus Christ is the source of all light."
Vi voglio bene!! [I love you all so much!]
Anziano Spencer
P.S HAVE A GREAT NEW YEAR!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.