This week has been one of the busiest and craziest weeks of my mission. Without giving you the day by day run down, I'll try to explain just a little bit of the most memorable moments of the week.
The time we had two meal appointments in one day and they were AMAZING: First, a pasta with our bishop. His wife made these sliced eggplants, soaked in olive oil with little sliced tomatoes on top. They were so good. My opinion of eggplant has completely changed. (Which is saying a lot because the last time I ate eggplants was when my mom made "Eggplant Surprise" because her weird food co-op gave us a whole bunch of eggplants.) Then we ran straight from that appointment to our miracle lesson (more on that later) then to another meal appointment with my probably my favorite family ever. They made us lasagna, and the little son showed me all his legos. Then, after 20 minutes of eating, the mom looked up and said, "I have a bad feeling. I need to check my phone." So she checks her phone, and then informs us that there is a train coming in 5 minutes, or another train coming in an hour. Which would get us home late. Very late. So we ran straight to the train station, and somehow were able to catch our train and give our spiritual thought in the car.
The time we had peppa soop and fried yam: AFRICAN FOOD. It was so much better than I thought it would be. The member explained to us that the only ingredients we needed were "the peppa (be careful though, it will burn your fingers when you cut it), the vegetable, the tomatoes, and [pulls out a whole fresh fish] the fish!" Basically all the meat from the fish boiled off in the soup, leaving just the skull and spine. So the eyeballs were just floating some where around in the soup... It was an adventure.
The time we got caught in a terrible rain storm and a bus strike: The workers of Italy are on strike so much, is basically normal to hear "yeah, the buses aren't running today, there's a strike." I'm pretty sure they don't even strike for anything specific, they just all want to take a break for a day, so that's exactly what they do. Which, by the way, is a beautiful metaphor for Italian culture. We ended up getting stuck on our way to a meal appointment, in the pouring rain, and by the time we finally managed to get to the meal appointment, we were completely soaked. To the point where the mother of the family brought down her hair dryers and started blow drying us in the living room. Not my most noble moment as a missionary.
There are three spiritual thoughts I want to share for this email:
The first comes from our miracle appointment with our cute investigator from Nicaragua. There's a bit of a language barrier with her (she only speaks Spanish, and Spanish just kind of sounds like weird slurred Italian with a lot of s noises [sorry dad]) so we download the restoration video in Spanish. We were running to her house (again in the pouring rain) and when we got there, she showed us an anti mormon video she'd found online. BUT she said that she wanted to go to the source to see if the things that were said about Joseph Smith were true, so BY HERSELF she found the exact restoration video we were planning on showing her and had already started watching it. Heavenly Father truly knows exactly how to work with each individual person. It was so amazing to see how he had prompted and prepared our cute investigator spiritually to know that there was a better source of truth. He was able to help her find and have renewed interest in the restoration. So lesson one, Heavenly Father knows YOU and he knows exactly how to help you overcome the small temptations.
The second is from our Music Night activity. [You all can find it on Facebook if you want to watch.] What I learned from this experience was that there is a reason that Heavenly Father has given us eachbunique talents. We can so easily express our testimonies through our talents, and we should! We are all so blessed with all sorts of unique qualities, and you never know who you can touch through your individuality. So lesson two, we are all unique for a reason, and we're meant to use our individual abilities to touch other people's lives.
The third lesson I learned this week was from stake conference. We had a member of the area seventy speak, and he shared his story of how he found the gospel. Basically, he was an exchange student from Denmark in California with a Mormon family. They tried sharing the gospel with him, but he was 100% uninterested. It was until several years later when he came back to visit that he actually was curious about the religion, and decided to learn more. So lesson three, we don't know who will or won't be open to gospel. Our job is to share it with everyone and give them the opportunity to accept. Maybe they won't then. But maybe. One day they will be open to learning more.
I love you guys so much!!
Sorella Maxfield
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