Week 85: Feb 20 (Roma)

MIRACLES

Hello everyone! It is good to email y'all, and I hope everyone is doing well. Thank y'all for your support and your emails. I seriously really appreciate them. Today for Pday we are just having a really relaxing day, which has been so nice. We went to "La Porta Di Roma" and it was really cool to walk through a mall. I know that doesn't sound cool, haha, but it was really awesome. We are also planning on having a frisbee game with the anziani in our district and we just got out of a "wedding signing" with some of the members in our ward. It’s been a good Pday. I am also really excited because my companion is a boxer, so he got some gloves while we were at the mall and I have some wrap for my hands; he is going to teach me boxing combinations for workouts in the morning.. sooo sick!! I am so pumped. 

This week was so incredibile. Like I said in my last letter, we have been having so many spiritual experiences and seen so many blessings. All from studying in the mornings for our investigators and feeling impressed to know what to share to feeling like we should walk a certain way and finding someone very interested in the gospel. I want to just kinda make a list from some of the specific experiences I remember from this week...

1. We have been teaching this one investigator who really needs some help and direction in his life. He came to church last week and had a good experience and has been continuing to read the Book of Mormon. He is awesome and is so cool. Sometimes in the morning on our phone we have texts from him like, "Good morning Mormon boy" or "wassup man!" Stuff like that haha. In the morning I was studying in Alma 7 and I specifically felt like we should share verses 10-22 with him while teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. We shared it, and the lesson was a very spiritual experience. He said that these verses were basically talking about his life and that he really needed them. It was so powerful. We were able to give him a blessing at the end of the lesson and it was just a very special experience. The priesthood is real.
2. In the morning we felt like we should go try a contact that we got from the sisters. It was kinda not what we had planned for but we went anyway. We didn’t have any success from it and it was kinda strange because I was stumped why we went. Anyway, that happened in the middle of the week. Yesterday we were having a pranzo [lunch] with our good friend who is a member that we are trying to get to come back to church and prepare for a mission. We were eating with his parents (who are not members) and the father mentioned to us that he saw us visiting that contact that specific morning. It was really cool because you just never know who is watching, and that was a powerful testimony to me.
3. For the past couple of weeks we have been really trying to contact our friends and members to come to the gans center [young adult center] because there was going to be a big party for everyone. We called everyone that we could and invited all of our friends. The party started at 8:00 at night and so we were at the station waiting for our friends and we got bidones [no-shows]. Lame. So we went to the party, hoping our investigators were there, and right when we walk in one of the awesome young adults comes up to me and says, "Anziano Spencer, let’s go out on the streets and bring someone back here to the party.." ummm OKAY!! So sick. So me and this guy named D. (who is a new convert from only a few months) hit the streets with around 10ish minutes to find an interested, in gamba [“with it”], young adult to bring back to the party. We went and ended up finding someone who just moved to Rome. He explained to us how he recently had lost his parents and he is trying to start a new life here on Rome. We asked him what he was doing for the night and he told us he was free. We took him to the party and he ended up staying for the entire time and left with some of the young adults. So cool, we are trying to get back into contact with him to see him again. There ended up being like 45-50 gans [young adults] at the center that night with some of our investigators, so it was a huge success.
4. For the festa [party] we were able to get into contact with one of our friends who has not been to church for a while. He ended up coming to the festa and is planning on coming to Institute this week, which will be awesome!
5. As for the stalker girls from last week... one of them came to church this week! She is actually very interested in the church and it was really interesting to see because when I first saw her, she had a lot of piercings just all over her face but she has started taking the lessons and she has taken them all out. She now has kinda like a light about her, which I think is super cool. This Wednesday she is moving to Germany, so she is going to continue to meet with the missionaries in Dresden. I hope everything goes well for her!

The work is going well here. We are doing our best to find those who are interested and who will help establish the church here! We had a great zone conference this last week and talked about how those who really are willing and ready to accept the gospel is this "golden age" of people from 15-25. It was cool to see that that's who my companion and I are really focusing on. We talked about different finding techniques to talk to people and so I was asked to go up in front of people and do like the, “Hello! Can I say hi to you?" While sticking my hand out in front of them. It works so well and it is so fun. 

I am doing really well. I love being a missionary and I love helping people come unto Christ. I have been studying so much on the gospel of Jesus Christ. This concept fascinates me: that the gospel is all in one and not separated. In other words, while teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, it should be taught with faith, repentance, baptism, the Holy Ghost, and enduing to the end all in one instead of as separate topics. I read a quote in PMG this morning which really touched me. This is what it says,  "Preach the first principles of the Gospel--preach them over again: you will find that day after day new ideas and additional light concerning them will be revealed to you. You can enlarge upon them so as to comprehend them clearly. You will then be able to make them more plainly understood by those [you] teach.”

I love being a missionary and teaching His gospel to bring people unto Him.

Vi voglio un mondo di bene...

I love you so much family!

Anziano Spencer 

With comp, Anziano Kolsen, and friend at the GANS center party.

Zone Conference