Monday, May 30, 2016

Bow-bows...bow wows?

This week...

 Well transfer calls! Sorella Jarnagin and I are staying together. No
surprise there :) and coming up to our zone will be Sorella McPheters
and she will be companions with Sorella Workman again and we're the
only four sisters in our zone and so it's like the Palermo house all
over again!! But instead of living in the same house we are 2 and a
half hours apart but exchanges are going to be so awesome this
transfer! I'm so excited to be reunited to them again.

The work is going good, you know the usual, heartbreaks miracles and
joy. Supermarket lady is doing awesome!! Friday we went to another
member from Brasils house and she made, "bowbows" don't know how to
spell that but its basically Brasilian hotdogs. Haha, also really
funny to hear people speaking in Italian/Portuguese and then say
"hotdoggies" haha English words are just funnier in other languages.

Today we're in Rome for pday because Sorella Battezzato dies this
transfer! Also Sorella Rossi! Two of my old companions. I'll miss them
for sure.

A theme of this week seemed to be opposition in all things. I feel
like it came up in almost every lesson we taught this week! I feel
like we've exhausted the subject, but in case you didn't know, trials
are good. Hard things make you better! There's a hymn in the LDS hymn
book called, "come come ye saints" and there's one verse that says:

Why should we think to earn a great reward
If we now shun the fight?
Gird up your loins; fresh courage take.
Our God will never us forsake;
And soon we’ll have this tale to tell--
All is well! All is well!

Everything worth having, takes a little fight, it takes a little work
in our part. But just like a baby learning how to walk, they fall down
and it's kind of a painful experience to watch, but you you've got to
let them do it, just keep cheering them on, and eventually they will
know how to walk! I know that God is our loving Heavenly Father, He
has a plan for us. He doesn't like to see us fall, but He knows how
much better we will be once we are able to pick ourselves back up. A
little opposition does ya good. If you don't know sadness, you could
never understand joy!


Love y'all! Also, enjoy this next album cover: we've found our
favorite morning run-


 The cross run. Here's a little portion of our vineyard.

 The cross view


 The way up

 From when I hit my half way mark. We celebrated with half of a pizza (but totally ate the whole thing)


 Arrosticini Party

 Arrosticini. This is a Pescara specialty,

 We ate a ton!

Brasilian hot dogs

 cooking them up

 Making chocolate sausage

Forget allergies! This one member had the cutest little kittens!

Monday, May 23, 2016

Summer's Coming!

Hey fam This week was great and I learned a lot. This week, I realized
in my greenie's footsteps and keep a gratitude journal. Henceforth, I
bought a notebook made of wood and will from here on out keep many
thoughts of gratitude. Church is true, book is blue.

Just kidding. Okay this week was one for the books. Sorella Jarnagin

Yeaaaa so we tried writing each other's emails this week. I just asked
Sorella Jarnagin to include something about gratitude. But yea this
week was great! So I am feeling really grateful. Tuesday we had an
appointment so that we can get my companion legal in the country, and
while we were waiting for the building to open there was this other
family outside and this little girl made a funny face at me and I made
a funny face back, and then she started hugging me and basically we're
best friends now. Other highlights: there was a baptism on Saturday,
for this 19 year old couple from Venezuela. They are the most
beautiful, amazing, John Green story waiting to happen.

Supermarket lady came to church yesterday! She's doing great. And
remember that best two years moment we had after zone conference in
Rome? Yea, we found out this week that that guy is getting baptized
June 11th! June 11th is the day for another one of our investigators!
I'm so excited for this woman. You know, like, I feel like I was
always meant to serve a mission, and that I would have always
regardless, come here, to this mission. And this woman who is getting
baptized June 11th is one of the people I feel like I was supposed to
meet.

June is soon baby!

Sorry mom, I have a lot of pictures that are really cool to send you next week, but they're all on my camera. But here is a picture that shows how much Heavenly Father loves His children. Because when the heat hits, and you're walking around all day and realize that you should have brought water or else you're going to die, but then you run into one of these bad boys! Tender mercies.

Love,
Sorella Holiday


Monday, May 16, 2016

Faith to move clouds

This week the weather could not make up its mind! We thought it would
be sunny, it would pour. We thought it would be be rainy, and then it
would be super hot. So that was the pattern with the weather this
week, and also with about everything else!
Wednesday we had lined up about the most epic day of my whole mission.
4 lessons with four different investigators, and a Pranzo tacos party.
Then each lesson that day, right before the lesson they called and
cancelled last second. Each one! So that left us with a lot of time to
do some good old finding. While at a park we found this girl, and she
invited us to come back the next day, and then Thursday we saw her,
the lesson went great, she accepted to be baptized and wow. We were so
happy to see a little ray of sunshine in that day. Then yesterday we
got a call from her sister yelling at us because her sister loves
reading the Book of Mormon and how she didn't want us to tear their
family apart because "when you're born a religion that is who you are"
huh, so... Then that night we had an another investigator text us
saying she's doing a 40 day fast from everyone and that she needs to
listen to only Jesus right now, but if I get transferred we can see
her, haha.
But then Thursday also we had a lesson with an investigator we hadn't
seen in a while, and we had just planned a normal "Gospel of Jesus
Christ" lesson and then before we even started she was like, so...what
do I need to do to be baptized? And we were like well! That lesson
didn't go as planned, but it was great.
Then today we were praying really hard for sunny weather so we could
play beach volleyball, and this morning there were super dark gray
clouds, so it didn't look hopeful but we kept praying and by the time
we finished comp study, it was blue skies! So we were like hey!
Mountains I don't know about, but we have faith to move clouds! Then
while we were doing our groceries we got last second ditched on pday
plans from our whole district, but after I got off the phone this lady
in the supermarket came up to me and was like "are you American?"
Because she heard me speaking English, and then she asked us if we
were the ones from the Mormon church, and we were like, yea! And she
took a step back and was like, "no way! I've been looking for you
guys! My friend told me about your church, and said to look for the
boys with the white shirts and ties. And I stopped a couple a while
ago but they were of a different church, not of your church. But I've
been looking for you guys and I thought maybe you didn't go out
walking during the winter, (that's how long she's been waiting) but
now here you are!" She told us about how she's been searching for
more, she's from Brasil but has been in Italy for a while. Asked for
the address of the church and we told her how we also meet with people
to help them learn more about the church. And she was like "here's, my
number like you can come over anytime, but like only if you want"
haha, uhm lady, we would LOVE to!





Taco party


 Moby Dick bench
Almost a miracle bench, but yea at this park there are cute story book
benches :)
 Hipster genealogy finding

One of our investigators lives near here

Friday night pizza and daily planning on our balcony



After one of those last second cancelled appointments
This picture accurately describes this day haha

 Ward party 70's 80's theme



Monday, May 9, 2016

Buona Festa della Mamma!

Hey Family!

I got to talk to my parents yesterday! So that was awesome. This week was good, we were all over the place. We had to go to Rome twice this week, once for Zone Conference and once yesterday for Stake Conference. Both were great and super edifying. I love Zone conference it gets me so pumped it's like a pep rally for missionaries every six weeks! After zone conference my greenie had her "Best 2 Years moment" you could say. If you've never seen the movie, it's about this missionary who gets sent to Holland, and about his mission experiences and the first person he gets to teach on his mission ends up being an American, which was great because he couldnt really speak Dutch yet.

And so it happened like this, Zone Conference finished, but we didn't have interviews for another 2 hours, and we don't actually serve in the city of Rome, so we didn't have anything else in particular to do, so I was like let's hit the streets! So we leave the church and start walking, don't really know where we're going, but eventually we happened upon a park. So we were like okay who are we going to go  sit by, and it was like almost only old men, but then I saw the back of this one head and it seemed like a woman so we went to got sit by her. It turns out it was a woman but she was suuuuuper drunk, like completely incomprehensible and there was a big carton of emptied out wine dividing us on the bench so we were like, okay! Let's try someone else. So we kept walking around the park and then we found this one guy sitting on a bench, and he seemed pretty nice so we decided to talk to him. We went right to it and asked him if he believed in God, turns out he spoke English and he was from the Philippines he said he was waiting for someone but we said we would only take a couple minutes so we started and then we ended up talking about a half hour but it was great! (That just hit an all time high on run-on sentences). Anyways, it was a really great experience and he wants to read the Book of Mormon, and it turns out the people he was waiting for were missionaries for another church, because he is someone sincerely searching the truth. So that was cool!

At zone conference one thing we talked about is how a big part of our whole purpose as missionaries is just to invite people. And it made me think of the morning I was picking Sorella Jarnagin up from Rome, and on the bus ride back to Pescara there was this woman who was talking on the phone for about the first half hour of the ride yelling at a family member because she didn't receive a formal invitation to someone's communion. She was so livid that they would have forgotten about her! In the culture here, someone's communion is a pretty big deal, so not inviting a member of the family was just unheard of. And it just kind of made me think, THESE ARE ALL OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS. How would they feel, if they found out after the fact that we could have invited me to them party, but in the end we were just too lazy to do it? That would be the saddest thing ever. So we've got to do our best to invite these children of God, and maybe some of them will use their agency and choose not to come to the party anyways, but at least we've invited them!

I love this gospel so much, and I love sharing it with strangers and everyone everyday! I know that Thomas S. Monson is a living prophet of God, and how amazing is that? The Book of Mormon is true, and an awesome gift. Yesterday at stake conference the area seventy from Spain did a super in depth analysis of the Book of Mormon and it blew everyone's mind. Anyways, I know Christ lives! And I know this is His church.


Alma 5:49
49 And now I say unto you that this is the order after which I am called, yea, to preach unto my beloved brethren, yea, and every one that dwelleth in Italy; yea, to preach unto all, both old and young, both bond and free; yea, I say unto you the aged, and also the middle aged, and the rising generation; yea, to cry unto them that they must repent and be born again.





 'Merica

The American restaurant...haha, but with olive oil and balsamic in the middle of the table. I love this country. :)

 For our pday activity today we went to this American food place and I literally almost shed a tear. There were license plates of almost every state on the wall. It was beautiful and it tasted good.

When people throw out your brownies so you buy a flower



Zone conference



Mission Hymn


Monday, May 2, 2016

Last week was crazy long and fun!

Hey!
So last week was crazy and long and fun. The first half of the week,
Sorella Anderson did all of her goodbyes, and then we went to Rome
Wednesday night because she had to catch a plane early morning to
Sardegna and I had to be at the station at 6:30 a.m. to get my
greenie. Which means waking up at 4:30 and leaving the sisters
apartment at 5, blaahhh. On the mission you are to bed at 10:30 and up
at 6:30 everyday, and like any change of that schedule is killer, let
me tell ya. Anyways then we got to the station, waited a little bit,
and then finally they arrived yay! My little new ball of sunshine is
name Sorella Jarnagin, she is from Utah, and she likes so sing.
It's really weird having a companion so fresh on the field, because
I've kind of forgotten what it was like at first adjusting to a new
country and not understanding people at first. I remember getting
headache after my first few Sunday's of church because it was so hard
to understand everything, 3 straight hours of Italian was a mental
work out for sure. Crazy how I can kind of understand people now!
Haha, but now I've got to work hard on really perfecting the language,
so I at least look like I know what I'm doing with my new companion.

Saturday night the primary did the CUTEST activity I have ever seen in
my entire life! They all dressed up as princesses and princes and then
they had chairs for the parents, and crowns because they were the
kings and queens. And then they had rows of chairs for the rest of the
ward to watch, we invited some investigators and it was just awesome.
They talked about eternal families and how grateful for they are for
families, and being children of God, and Gods plan. It was the cutest
thing ever. And then they tied it in with some Disney stories. One in
particular, they talked about the part of The Lion King when Simba is
out doing his own thing and then he's visited by the monkey Rafiki and
he kind of reminds him of who he is and then Simba has a vision of his
father and his father is like "ricordati! ricordati chi sei!" And like
Simba every now and then we all need to be reminded of who we are.
We're children of a King! Everyone has so much potential and so much
greatness to achieve.
Sorella Jarnagin and Sorella Holiday

 Our first gelato together

 Comp item-shades

 Last pday in Rome

 Last pday with Sorella Anderson

 Selfie :)

 From our hike a few weeks ago


 My greenies first time doing porta e porta

This house is so sick!