Week 45 - Merate vs Messina

We started out our week dealing Italian Bureaucracy. We showed up to the government building, where the people waiting had already began making their own list of who arrived first. Then we all headed up into the office, and they gave us a number based on when we wrote our name on this list. Why didn't they just set up the numbers outside for people to take? That would be too simple, that's why. We then waited in line for four hours. I took this time to teach Sorella Muce about the DMV. When we finally were called on, Sorella Muce was allowed about 5 seconds to ecplain what she needed before the woman working said "sorry, we can't help you. NEXT." Sorella Muce wasn't going to let that fly, so she called up the bureaucrats in her home town of Merate, and then passed our phone through the window for the bureaucrats in Messina to talk with. They argued and yelled at each other for a couple of minutes, then decided that they actually could help us out. I'm not quite sure if Merate just has a lot of power, or if maybe they just know a little better how the goverment works, but either way, we're grateful for northern Italy. 

Sorella Muce turned 25 this week! I've learned though that I'm never to mention that to her. Sometimes she'll just stop what she's doing and say "the 20s go by too fast Sorella. Too fast." Anyway, for her birthday her sister came down from Milan, set a surprise party for Sorella Muce in the church, and then left. So when we went to English course that night there were decorations and food all set up for us and our students. I guess that's what happens when your family only lives so many miles away. 

This week, for the first time ever, someone I invited to church on the streets came!We were stopped by a man, who said he had met the elders in the past and then hadn't seen them again. He said he was interested in our English Course, but I thought I'd invited him to church anyway. He showed up! Unfortunately, he was a little confused and thought that English course was also on sundays, but hey, he got a good little intro as to how our meetings run. 

This week in my scripture study I have read a lot about the pride cycle. The people follow God and respect His commandments, He blesses them, they become prideful and ignore God, and then everything goes wrong. There's a verse in Helaman chapter 12 that says "Yea, and we may see at the very time when he doth prosper his people, yea, in the increase of their fields, their flocks and their herds, and in gold, and in silver, and in all manner of precious things of every kind and art; sparing their lives, and delivering them out of the hands of their enemies; softening the hearts of their enemies that they should not declare wars against them; yea, and in fine, doing all things for the welfare and happiness of his people; yea, then is the time that they do harden their hearts, and do forget the Lord their God, and do trample under their feet the Holy One—yea, and this because of their ease, and their exceedingly great prosperity." When I read that, I immediately asked myself "Why in the world does Heavenly Father keep blessing children who in the end "trample" Him under their feet?" The answer I came up with was this: We have a perfect Father in Heaven who loves us with the purest type of love. He loves His children more than we can ever understand and He gives them unlimited chances to recieve His blessings. Because of Jesus Christ's infinite Atonement, we have the chance to start again. and again. and again. Does that mean we can be prideful or sin whenever, and then instantly have a get out of jail free card? No. We have to work for it. But forgivness, healing, and blessings are always available to us if we look for them. I know that there is power in Jesus Christ's Atonement. I know that we have a perfect Heavenly Father who loves us and will care for us if we try to follow Him.

I love you all!!

Sorella Maxfield

Week 44 - "This is an insult to Italian Culture"

Apologies first; this email will be a bit shorter because the app that controls everything on our tablets decided that today we would not be allowed to have any apps. So all the apps on our tablets were deleted, including the notes app where I started typing out my group email. But, I'll try to get the main points across.

This week was the week of Ferragosto. From what I gathered, this is a holiday that could have something to do with the Madonna, but it's really just another excuse to not work. So on this day we had mission wide deep cleaning. Everything was going great; we dusted, swept, disinfected, decluttered, and washed all our sheets and blankets. The only thing left to do was mopping, so I offered to do that while Sorella Muce took a quick shower. I filled the mop bucket up with scalding hot water and soap then put the mop inside, before realizing that we had nothing to ring out the mop with. Then the thought came to me: the colander! So I put that on the bucket, and it worked like a charm! I kept mopping, feeling pretty good about my ingenuity. Then Sorella Muce came to the front room. She looked at the colander on the bucket and immediately said "What are you doing with that?" I explained to her the situation, and rather than praising me for this amazing idea she sat down on her bed and said, "I can't believe you did this. What made you think of this idea? Everything was going so well, but now how am I supposed to make pasta? This is an insult to Italian culture." As of now, Sorella Muce hasn't made pasta in four days even though I've insisted the colander is completely clean.

We had a lot of finding this week, because Italians just say "no" to life in august, and they all leave for the beach. So we couldn't meet with anyone, and the finding was a little sparse. But, the Lord will always send us miracles, and this week it came through someone we're teaching. We hadn't heard from her all week, and we were starting worry that she had dropped us. Then this last night we recieved the following messages from her.

"I'm sorry for how late it is, but I couldn't sleep. I just wanted to tell you that I've missed you guys. I feel the need to see you guys because I feel better when I'm around you. Maybe we establish a day and time to meet each other every week? This morning I thought about coming to church, but when I saw the time I realized that I already missed it. This sunday I will figure out a way for me to come."

Heavenly Father knows how to bless us, and in that moment, I think he knew we needed to recieve some encouragement. I am so grateful for a Father in Heaven who is aware of our personal needs and situations. 

This week I was touched by a verse in Helaman 13. It says "But if you will repent and return unto the Lord your God I will turn away my anger." It made me reflect a lot on how many chances the Lord gives us to change. We ALWAYS have the chance to change, even when we don't deserve it. Especially when we don't deserve it. There's a quote from Elder Holland that says something along the lines of "The first great commandment is to love God with all our heart, might, mind, and strenght. But the first great and eternal truth is that God loves us with all his heart, might, mind, and strength."

I promise each of you that you have a Heavenly Father who loves you, and is doing everything He can to help you return back to Him.

I love you all!
Sorella Maxfield

Week 43: Carrie Underwood Knew What She walk Talking About

This week I truly prayed that Jesus would take the wheel from some of these Sicilian drivers. Without going into too much detail (first because this email would become a novel, and second because I don't want to give my mom any grey hairs), I'll give you some brief outlines of just some of our experiences this week. 

1. The Blue Mini Cooper and the Three not-so-mini suitcases: We'll just say that somehow we landed the job of bringing the Anziani's luggage to the train station for transfers (which, by the way, Maxfield and Muçe are staying in Messina) and we had no means to get them to the station, except for our investigators blue mini Cooper. So just picture one mini Cooper, filled to the brim with luggage and people, with driver who I don't think ever graduated from driving school. In her mind, red meant go, and the other lane of traffic was always the passing lane. 

2. "Seated Comfortably?" : another tiny Italian car moment, where the driver asked us if we were seated comfortably in the back, then said he could help us settle in better. Then he proceeded to swerve quickly back and forth, while on the freeway, driving upwards of 80 miles an hour. 

3. Who invented the Panda : the Panda is this model of car that I would describe as just one step above the go carts they make in Little Rascals. Look it up if you're curious. Once you have that mental image, add six chairs strapped to the roof, five adults squished inside, four boxes of food, two screaming sister missionaries and a partridge in a pear tree, all flying up the twisty, steep mountain roads. The cherry on top of all this, was that we arrived in a "country house" that hadn't been opened in six years, to have a "picnic" on an old table in a dining room covered in cobwebs. And then Sorella Muçe found a maggot in her sausage. Pictures attached.

Direct quote from the man driving this car: "When you have two angels in the car, you can drive however you want, and God will protect you"

PSA: this is not true. (Though I definitely God protected us in this case)

Outside of these crazy experiences, we had some amazing spiritual ones as well. 

A few weeks ago we made a post on our Whatsapp story about our Serata Famigliare in church. An old English course student, Giulia, messaged us about it, and from there we started chatting with her. She's been spending the past couple months in Korea with her finacé. A week later she told us that she went to the house of mission president there for dinner! Apparently she had found the missionaries there in Korea, and on top of that, the Mission President's wife served her mission here in Rome! She sent us pictures of the spaghetti they ate, and we instantly started talking about our church with her. She initially said "I'm Catholic, but I've been going to your church here, and it's interesting." We continued messaging, and I told her to look out for a couple of my friends who are serving in the Seoul mission. On Saturday, we recieved pictures of Giulia making arancini via Whatsapp from the Mission President's Wife! Sorella Taylor told us that Giulia has been taking the lessons in Korea, and asked if we would be willing to do a Skype lesson with them! She said they are planning on giving her a date for baptism next week!

It was so encouraging for me to have experience this sort of team work. Sometimes it seems like the work I'm doing as a missionary is very lonely or that everyone in the world is working against us. But seeing how missionaries around the world are working together to bring people to Christ, gave me such a big boost of energy. The work is moving forward, even if sometimes we can't see the results. I'm so grateful for the missionaries an members serving worldwide. I'm also so grateful for the first members of the church, who were strong in the faith despite all their trials. 

I love you all so much!

Sorella Maxfield

The panda

The country house

African dresses

Maxfield and Muçe 

Week 42 - No hats, no problem

As some of you know, or maybe don't if these emails end up in your trash, it is getting real hot over here. As in a 90 degree, 100% humidity type of heat. I've learned how to eat gelato in record time, because it starts melting the second they put it on your cone. I purposefully walk close to the automatic doors of the stores so they'll open and I can enjoy the AC for .5 seconds. Despite all this, one of the members here in Messina thought we weren't doing enough to beat the heat. What was his suggestion? Hats! So this adorable little man went out and bought us hats, then as a cherry on top, decorated them with fake flowers. So now we have matching companion sun hats, just in case we don't attract enough stares as missionaries. 

This week, Reggio Calabria had a baptism! Reggio Calabria is a part of our district, but also across the ocean, so we took the boat over to Reggio with someone we're teaching. It was amazing. First, because we got there early with the person we're teaching, and we were able to read from the Book of Mormon with her and then watch the Restoration video. Then, the weather for the baptism was incredible. We were able to do the baptism at the beach, and the sunset was to die for. To make things even more amazing, it was supposed to rain that whole day, but thanks to lots of prayers, there wasn't a single rain drop. 

It's been a week of mostly finding, and two of the comments we got this week really hit me; one man said "ahh, I see what you're doing. This is marketing." And then another woman said "yeah, you guys are just doing publicity for your religion." What. I didn't know quite how to respond, but luckily Sorella Muçe responded with exactly what I was thinking. She said something along the lines of "Let me explain it you from our point of view. We are not paid to do this. In fact, we PAID to do this. We chose to come out here not because we get any compensation or promotion. We chose to leave behind our families, our schooling, our work, our normal lives, because we felt something. We've seen this gospel change our lives and the lives of people around us. We have felt a peace from this book that we can't describe, and for that, we're out here, trying to share that message with the people who are looking. If you're not one of them, that's ok. We respect you and your beliefs, and we ask that you respect ours." (Yes, my companion is incredible) After these encounters I thought a lot about how our purpose here is to find the people who are searching for God, the ones that He is preparing. I'm grateful that I'm not out here serving a mission for any motive besides this: I love Heavenly Father and the gospel He has prepared for us through His son, Jesus Christ. Basta. Punto. Stop. 

I love this gospel and I love my Savior, Jesus Christ.