July 3, 2013

My beloved brothers and sisters

Fantabulous week. Faith precedes miracles. Clichè, but true. And there's a separate button on this keyboard with the letter è, so that's cool so I can write the word clichè fast. Which doesn't end up being fast at all since I'm explaining this all out. Anyways, super cool bigger than normal miracle happened this week. Remember the guy who phones us up and says he want to come to church? (Week Two Update,the life and times of Anziano Berg, 26/06/13, paragraph ix) Well, we go to his house and he has a Liahona [Church's international magazine] lying on the table, the same thing as the Ensign there. We ask him where he got it and he tells us he came home from work one day, and out of the 300 apartment mailboxes, his is the only one with this Liahona in it. And so he thumbs through it, and it turns out there's our number stamped on the back, which we have in our apartment and stamp the passalong cards we give away so that they can get ahold of us. So he phones up his girlfriend and asks if she's even heard of this Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and it turns out shes been an active member for 20 years. And she encourages him to phone us up and that's when he phoned Saturday morning. But we have absolutely no idea how that got in his mailbox, but definitely huge miracle there. Then the lesson went amazing and he's got a baptism date the first lesson, which is fantastic, so happy for him. Then we taught him the Plan of Salvation yesterday, and he said it just makes perfect sense now where he came from and where we are going after we die. And he confirms his own appointments and texts us good morning. Just an overall super cool and prepared guy.

And on June 27, the martyrdom of Joseph Smith was also the last day President Wolfgramm [mission president] was here in Italy. And he promised us if we worked hard we would place a Book of Mormon that day. And we placed it with an 78 year old Italian guy, which Anziano [Elder] Locklear was telling me is unheard of in all of Italy. So that was neat. Whoever reads this, be obedient. It brings so many blessings.

Last miracle. We go to 2 Peruvians house with a Peruvian member with us, and we're talking about baptism and the spirit is really strong and they say straight up they know they need to be baptized and are ready, but there's some Peruvian custom festival thing that they need to organize or that somehow breaks covenants or something like that (I still have difficuly understanding gospel Italian, let alone this-actually, I didn't understand any of this at the time and my companion had to explain it to me afterwards, but he didn't get it either) Anyways, the Peruvian answered it so perfectly and could entirely relate with them and resolved their concerns and they are going to choose a baptism date.

In answer to your questions:  We mostly walk, but we bike when we're late for an appointment or we need to get somewhere really far away. When we walk from place to place we try to talk to everyone, so we do lots of strada [street contacting].

The vines are all over, just really cool

We have an investigator, no idea how she was found, who lives in Cornate, so it's still in our area and we biked out twice to visit her, but it takes half an hour at a good clip to get there, and then another half hour back. But we try and focus our finding efforts arount Merate and the cities along the railway track so that we can visit them easier and they can come to church a lot easier if they don't have a car.

And then we alternate making lunch, and we don't eat an actual dinner. sometimes at a house they'll make a little snack for us (they don't put icing on cake here either) and only once have we eaten spaghetti before a lesson with a part-member family. But then we'll come home and if we're hungry throw a pizza in the oven before we go to bed.

Out of time, God speed

Anziano Berg