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
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