Cui Si Te Si ban se (My name in Chinese)
Hey guys! I hope y'all are doing great! Today for P-day all the Anziani are getting together again to play football at this big park in the middle of Rome. We are going to do like a 7 on 7 match and I am super pumped; it's going to be so fun. Last week we had a mission-wide broadcast where Elder Oaks (apostle), Elder Bednar (apostle), Elder Anderson (also an apostle), and others of our leaders led a discussion about how we could be more effective as missionaries. They touched on a lot of different things and one of the things was our mission schedule and how we can better use our time to establish the Church wherever we are in our missions. They then announced that as part of this they will be changing our daily mission schedule and even our Pday. We are starting this new schedule today and it’s going to be interesting to get used to. The things that switched are when we plan, study, and we even have two hours extra on Pday!! These changes are all so that we can use our time more effectively during the week.. So sweet. There is a lot more freedom in this schedule where we are the ones that decide when to study and eat during the day, so it's going to be more of a choice now than a mandated schedule, which I really like.
As of this week we saw a lot of different miracles while teaching. I have to say though, my highlight was last Tuesday when we got a call from the missionaries serving on Malta, aka my cousin (!!!), asking us if we needed any help in the GANS center! We took them up on that offer and for the first time on my mission I was able to work with my cousin Anziano Cannon doing some finding around La Sapienza for around an hour. We had a great time together and it was great being able to work with him, speak Italian together, and find some new potentials. It would be such a fun thing to be companions with him. He's a great companion and I learned a lot in that hour and I was inspired by just the happiness that he brought when he was bearing his testimony.
With our investigators we are still trying to find solid investigators that will continue to meet with us. Unfortunately, a lot of the investigators that we have found haven’t been able to meet with us more.. the ones that make me really sad are the group of guys that were the miracle find that we had last week. We have only been able to meet with them once and then they always have work from now on, so we are praying that they will have time and that we can meet with them again! So yes, we have been doing a lot of finding and we will be doing some for a good chunk of time this week too. We have found a new finding method that works though, which is super simple and super fun. What we do is we just walk up to people and say, “Ciao, ti posso salutare?" Which basically means, “Hi, can I say hi to you?" But we do it with a big grin on our faces and stick our hands out right in front of them in kinda like a funny way, so then it makes the people laugh like “What on earth are these guys doing haha.." and then they start to talk to us. It works well and we are hoping to continue to see success from it!! We found probably one of the coolest guys from last week who is 25, has work, is super open to the gospel, and lives right across the street from the church. I really hope things keep going well with him.
We were able to see our good friend from China who is an investigator from a few months ago. It was actually a huge miracle because this guy is really interested and he is growing his faith in God, but he just has no time to meet because of school. We had a lesson planned with another woman in a park and she ended up not showing up... but as we were there in the park we saw our friend from China playing basketball with his friends!! It was Chinese New Year and he didn’t have to go to school that day, so that was a huge miracle! We were able to talk to him and then he had a lesson with us in the GANS center. He is growing his faith so much and we were able to talk about baptism and following Jesus Christ. He wants to come to church and know more but his school is so strict that he has school every day of the week the entire day so he can’t come. He said he could come to church with us in April because that’s when he has a break for three days and he will come. We really need to figure out what to do with how to help him get to church. During the lesson he wrote my name on the board in Chinese which was really cool as well. Another guy that we are working with is from the Philippines and he came to the family night that we had last week! He then came again the very next day to the GANS center to be with some other GANS, so we have some really high hopes for him.
Tonight for the family night in the GANS center we are really hoping that some of our friends will come who haven’t been here in a while. We are starting to work with a really cool member who hasn’t been to church in a while and so we called him on the phone on Friday to talk. He then came to church on Sunday and will be coming tonight to the family night with his friends! I am really excited for him!
This week I was also able to do a scambio with Anziano Houseman. He is such a stud and we had such a good time together. We had a lot of finding to do, but it was so fun and in Rome (I don’t know why it’s like this) in the parks there are green parrots that are flying around. It was cool to be talking to some families, with my bud, having green parrots fly all around where we were.
The other huge miracle that we saw is we had a meeting with the Rome 3 college and they are so excited to have us teach English at their college. They want to give us our own room with like a projector and everything. It’s going to be so sweet and the guy that we are working with is so nice, so it was a really good meeting that turned out so well.
As for my spiritual thought, I wanted to share a scripture that really touched me this week from the Book of Mormon. It had double meaning for me as well because it was in a talk that I was studying and then in another part of my studies, so it was kinda an answer to my prayers: “But this much I can tell you, that if ye do not watch yourselves, and your thoughts, and your words, and your deeds, and observe the commandments of God, and continue in the faith of what ye have heard concerning the coming of our Lord, even unto the end of your lives, ye must perish. And now, O man, remember, and perish not” (Mosiah 4:30).
