Ciao!: Week 80: Jan 16 (Roma)

ABOKIAN [This means “Welcome!” in a Nigerian dialect.]

Hey everyone! Thanks again for all of the birthday wishes! I really appreciated them and I love you all. This week has been a great week and we are working our hardest here at the Rome institute for the GANS. I understand now a lot of what my companion and I have to do and so things are going really well. Today for Pday my companion and I are planning to go to the center to check out some sweet stores and take advantage of the saldi [sale] time. And then tonight we have a few lessons planned, and also family night with the young adults, so it's going to be great.

On my birthday it was a pretty normal day. We actually had basically the whole day open to be able to do finding, which at first I thought was kinda lame because I instead wanted to be teaching. But as we started, I really felt the love from God that even though I am finding and not teaching right now, he still accepts my efforts. On that day for about 3 hours no one was really listening to us until we finally found someone who was interested. She is about 23 and is the chillest girl ever. We went up and started talking to her while she was on a park bench and she was really interested. She had a massive dog that would bark at us when we would talk, so my companion distracted the dog by playing fetch with a rock while I taught her the Restoration. She accepted a Book of Mormon right there and started to read. She even agreed to be baptized if she receives an answer. We are meeting with her tomorrow and I have such high hopes for her that she is really interested. It was a good reminder to me that God always watches out for us when we do out part. Our district here was really nice and even the sisters made me brownies, so that was great. My favorite thing about the day, though, is Ex-Anziano Calvagna came to the center so I was able to see him!! I have not seen him in about a year and a half and it was the greatest thing. I love that guy so much and we just picked things back up right where we left off. That was a really good birthday gift! Other than that it was just a good normal day on the mission.

As for the other work, we are still trying to find new people. A lot of the people from the past have been giving us bidone's.. (basically not showing up to a confirmed lesson). We are averaging around 30 of those a week so we are trying hard to find fixed investigators who really do want to learn about the gospel. We have been working with two really great guys that we found last week. One of them is actually from the USSR and grew up his whole life not believing in God. He told us that he has made a lot of mistakes in the past and that he wants to change. He is looking for peace and he said that he will be baptized if he knows that this is true. We are praying that he will get an answer. He came to church last week and really liked it. Unfortunately, he was not able to come yesterday but hopefully he will come this next week. There is also a really powerful member that helps us out with missionary work here in Rome. He brought one of his freinds last week to church and we are working with him to be baptized on the 28th! He is really cool and will hopefully come to the family night tonight. We also are working hard to re-activate a lot of the young adults here in our area. We are in contact with one guy who came to the family night last week and wants to come to more activities. Another guy that we met with last week came to church which was a huge miracle. I love the young adults in this area and I hope to be able to meet more that haven't been to church in a while!

We were also able to have Zone Conference this week which was awesome. I also got to see Anziano Olsen which was super cool after a really long time since Trapani. I learned a lot at this last Zone Conference though, and I really enjoyed the addestramento [training] from our AP’s [assistants to the president]. They are beasts, and both really cool guys. They talked about what more we can do while teaching and how we can EXHORT others to come unto Christ. I thought it was pretty sweet because that has been my transfer goal anyway, so I feel like it was truly inspired. I also love being around President and Sister Pickerd. I was able to have my interview with them in the villa and it was weird being back there because I hadn’t been in the President’s Office for about a year and 6 months, so it brought back a lot of memories. We had a great interview and talked about more things we can do for the institute center. Sister Pickerd also gave me a letter that the members from Napoli wrote me for my birthday. It was so nice and I seriously love those guys so much. It was really nice of them and it really touched me that they would do that. We, unfortunately, are still waiting to hear back from Rome 3, but La Sapienza college has been pumping with life. It is so much nicer to do finding there because there are actually a bunch of people and it makes it so much easier. I am excited to see the people we can meet this week.

As for my spiritual thought, I wanted to share something that we talked about in the GANS correlation that we do every week. The director here that we work with (the bishop in the Rome 3 area) is a really powerful guy. He made a correlation to how Satan works with a pack of lions going for its prey. He talked about how when lions first attack, they actually don't know which gazelle or animal they are going to go for. They go to scatter, and after that, they hunt down the one that is not "with the numbers”--the one that is alone and has no protection. Satan works this same way with us as we are "by ourselves" and don’t have the support and strength in numbers. He then related the center to how it bring YSA's together to where they have strength and to where Satan does not have as much power over the YSA's. I thought it was a really interesting application to life and just the importance to be with others who share our beliefs and can help lift us, because there is strength in numbers.

I love you all so much!!