Vicenza - Week 16

Bridge built by Paladio, the creator of Vicenza

Hey everyone!

Hope you all had a great week. This week seemed really short, due to us having our P-day back to normal now. Nevertheless, it was still a pretty eventful week. We started this week by deciding to focus on gratitude, because Thanksgiving is this week in America. We would write down just a few things we were grateful for each day, and would write down different types of gratitude too, such as; why we are grateful for Italy, our companion, our ward, our investigators, random, etc.. And then we decided to go off of what President Utchdorf said in a Conference a few days back about being grateful in our circumstances and FOR our circumstances, So each day we would write down why we were grateful for a circumstance we were in and also why we were grateful for a circumstance we went through. It brought a whole new change to our thought process and helped be a lot more happy throughout our week.

We had a lot of investigators show up to church on Sunday, the most I have ever seen, so we are hoping to get some good things accomplished this week with them. We are continuously blessed by the members here in Italy. We went out with Ringo and an investigator again this week, but instead of going to all you can eat BBQ, we went to all you can eat sushi. I have to workout twice as hard right now to not gain too much weight, but i have gotten so many food blessings that it is pretty dang hard haha.

We took a bike ride to go do a passby of a potential investigator and while we were riding we decided to stop by lago di Fimon. We were a little dissapointed that we didnt get a real good view of the lake, but it was still nice to be able to go look at the natural landmarks in Italy. You can never go wrong with a good long bike ride around Italy. We also saw a huge pork for sale at the store. It was just a little bit out of our price range though as missionaries.

Hope you all have a great Thanksgiving, and try to look at the hard times you may have had, or are having, and look for ways to be grateful about it. The Lord never gives us a trial that we cannot handle, which should also give us a greater reason to be grateful for the growth we receive from it.

Anziano Chase

This is a really nice family in the Vicenza Ward. The Matteazzi Family. 

Vicenza - Week 15

Buona Giornata Tutti!

This Wednesday we had a mission tour done by Elder Fingerly of the Quorum of the Seventy. We went down to Verona for the tour. All the missionaries thought we were getting IPads but it ended up that we might not being getting any at all in Italy. Elder Fingerly talked a lot about how we can use technology though to improve finding people to teach. He talked about how we should encourage members to use social sites to invite others to church events that missionaries will be at. He also talked about how we can improve results in our lives by looking to improve little things by just one percent. If we do that, all the little areas that improved by one percent with make a huge difference on the overall scale and will bring so much more to the work.

The week was pretty slow again, but we had some good lessons with Aurora, still prepping her for baptism in the future. We also went with a member in the Italian ward named Ringo to eat at an all you can eat Brazilian bbq place with a friend he wanted us to teach. It was such a blessing to not only get fed like crazy, but to have people trust us enough to teach their friends. To me, gaining that member relationship is huge because it helps us to create bonds and help them. It is so much better than going to a member’s house asking for someone to teach.  If they want us to teach someone, then they will ask us also. It really helps that relationship because we aren’t using them to find people to teach. We taught a lot more lessons and had some good times.

No favorite italian food yet, but there are plenty of interesting meals I’ve had like Bankoo, an African dish with fermented corn mashed into a ball with a spicy soup to dip the ball into.

Side note, I got to hang with Elder M. at the conference all day so it was pretty cool to be able to hang with him and some other cool bros.

Hope everyone has a good week and I get to email you all back Wednesday again!!

Vicenza - Week 14

First off next week we have P-Day on Thursday due to a mission conference being on Wednesday next week.

We had a really good week here in Vicenza. We have been visiting a lot of part member families and less actives. There is a Peruvian Lady named Charo we visit a lot.  She served a mission, but married a non-member and doesn’t go to church. But the thing is she still has a huge testimony of the gospel. We visit her a lot and started to befriend her husband, who ended up giving us a Russian beaver skin hat that is worn in the snow. Pretty dang cool!

It has been rainy or wet every day this week. Not my favorite weather but it will do. The river got really high one day, and it got a lot of mud and stuff in it because of the rain. 

We have also been teaching a lot of people English, and they are just a good group of people. We have so much fun teaching them English, and they help me with my Italian as well!

We had a good miracle with a part member family on Monday. I had been praying about a specific family for quite a while, but I didn’t know why. The wife was a recent inactive convert, who is divorced with 3 children. We were able to see her and we spent a majority of the time teaching her oldest daughter, Aurora, who is 14. She has such a huge testimony, and asked us if she could be baptized. We were so excited and are starting to teach her and prep her for baptism now. It really helped boost our efforts in teaching less actives and part member families; because there are so many people we can help without even recognizing it.

Anyways it was a really good week and here are some pictures of the week that include my English class, my Russian hat, the river, and a small city called Marostica, which I thought had a pretty cool castle

Anziano Chase

Vicenza - Week 13

Well we started another transfer, and that means I am no longer one of the newest missionaries in my mission! But I am only in transfer 2 haha. This week went by quick, but it was a pretty standard week. We had Halloween with the American Ward and were able to do a trunk or treat. Most of Italy does not do Halloween, but they are starting to do little things like parties and such. We all dressed up too because we got permission. I was a soccer player in a warmup suit with Elder C.. Elder S. was a fat pizza maker and Elder D. was Superman. It was a lot of fun to be able to experience a Halloween in Italy, even though it really was just like in the States since we went to the base for the trunk or treat.

We have a new member in the Italian branch named Ishmael who is getting ready to go back home to his country in Africa (it is some French speaking one) so he asked us to teach him as much as we can because the church is not set up in his country and he wants to have as much knowledge as he can. We have been teaching him a lot. It is nice because it is about so much and I get to study stuff for myself. It helps us practice our teaching skills, too.

Also, we were able to talk to Robson about what we do as missionaries and we had a great discussion with him about it. He was like "you guys being missionaries, must get the power of God to be able to talk with people. If I had that I would just walk up to people and say 'Do you want to talk'. " We thought a lot about that and we think it is a lot easier to sit down and just talk with someone and get to know them before you introduce the gospel, because how can we teach someone when we don't know who they are? It was pretty powerful to me to think about that.

We were walking down Giro (Downtown Centro) and we saw this beggar who had a guitar. Elder S. has wanted a guitar so we asked her if it was hers. We asked if she stole it, she said no, so we asked to buy it, and we got it for 10 Euro! We had her sign a paper in case she did steal it that way we would have verification that we bought it from her.

It has been raining a lot lately, so it is getting a little harder to find people to teach, but we are going strong.

A Little spiritual thought: "Without the spirit, you will never succeed, regardless of your talent and ability" - Ezra Taft Benson.

I don’t even really need to explain how this applies to missionary work. The spirit leads us to do good, and if we don’t have that spirit with us, then our intent is not to help others.

Also I like how in John 5:39 it talks about searching the scriptures, and if you take the time to really read and ponder upon them you will find the answers you are searching for.

Anyway, have a great week everyone!

Anziano Chase