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
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