Sunday, February 9, 2014

February 5, 2014

Missionary work is really big here. I guess it's really big all over the world!! In church, it's coming down like a hammer! Hey, and guess what is cool?! In March, it's super possible that they might split the ward in Brescia!! How cool is that?! So, then, there would be one ward and then one branch...I thought it was cool :)

I completely forgot it's the winter olympics already! That's crazy!! Ya, back in 2006 or something, it was held in Italy. In Torino. (I'll coach you guys on how to say the cities in Italian...because the english doesn't do it justice!!) On a seperate note, I always find it strange that the Italians just love english. Especially the ragazzi. They LOVE American teenage/pop culture. It's weird because their language sounds so much better than our language.

We still haven't met with Briseda! She keeps on cancelling our meetings with us! We have another one set up for tomorrow morning, I think, but we'll see. But also, I just learned some new things about faith!! Because last week, my collega and I had a blast doing missionary work. And also this week too!! So, we had all of these potential calls we were doing and then tons of people to meet with but some of them didn't work out, but we kept trying to meet with people and stuff. Anyway, during our weekly planning, we wanted to shoot for the standard of excellence that our mission has, which is 15+ lessons. So we set our goal to 17 and that's the highest that I've ever done so I was kinda excited but also thinking, "I hope we can do this much". But the coolest thing happend throughout the week!! We started keeping track of how many lessons we've had everyday and both of us were constantly thinking about it. Always!! When someone didn't show up to a lesson, we usually go, "Okay, what are we supposed to do now? Collega, what's our back-up plan... great, it's strada. Love it." But during this past week we started saying, "Okay, where can we go find another lesson? Collega, make sure you smile SO BIG that your eyes just disappear!!" (a little inside joke that we have :) And then we found lessons and we almost reached our goal!! We got 16 instead of 17 but we felt so good!! Anyway, my point is that we started to LOOK for opportunites to teach rather than just going through the motions! And so many cool things just happen! When you do everything that you can and you feel like nothing else can happen- That's when miracles start to happen!! We also started handing out bap dates like candy! We got 5 bap dates now too! Yesterday, I asked this old guy out on the street while we were passing by this bar (bars are different in Italia rather than America...so, no worries) if he had faith in Jesus Christ and he said yes. Then I asked him if he would like to be baptized in the church of Jesus Christ. He said that he kinda believed and he didn't believe (which makes no sense) but he didn't say no! :) It's fun inviting people to baptism out on the street!! It's makes you feel really good inside!! I'm pretty sure that old guy will probably accept his baptism in the spirit world because I invited him to do it! Next time, I'll probably make the question a yes or no question and see what people say! :) (Old people are hard to talk to because they think they're the wisest people on the planet and that they're too old to change...so, I was happy to invite an old guy to baptism!) So, this week, we're shooting for 20 lessons and we already have 8 as of yesterday! :) I think we can do it!!

Our budhist friend is doing awesome!! In fact, he's one of our bap dates now :) It's kind of difficult to communicate with him because he doesn't speak Italian very well and he gets confused when he use the formal form of "you" so we had to think and dumb down our Italian which was fine. It made me realize how far I've come in my Italian. I still don't know a lot and I can barely speak but I just felt good when I thought of how much I spoke when I first came to Italia. He's reading the Book of Mormon in Hindi and he says that he's really loving it, so we'll see how it goes!

That's so cool that mom's physical therapist went to Italia for his mission!! Mom said he served in the south so that means he probably learned almost a different language. They speak differently down there! That's for sure! Maybe I can talk to him when I get back! That would be fun!

Tell Jacob hi for me! And good luck! He's going to have a lot of fun! He's serving in Virgina, right? When does Austin get his call?

And mom, I teach people from all different kinds of religions all the time. You name the religion and it's probably here!

I also got a recipe for pesto from an investigator!!! We're going to make some when I get back!!

Love you guys!!

Anziano West

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