Firenze adventures - Week 94

This week sure has been a busy one! We've been going at it and it has been really nice. Anziano H., my new companion is a stud. He knows this city well and is really willing to work hard for the people here in Firenze. He welcomed me in with open arms.

We have a simp named S. He is a great man. We have been working with him these last couple of days. He had met with missionaries in the past but he said he had started to feel something different in his life. He started to actually believe God could possibly exist. We invited him to pray out loud and he said it is helping him be more confident that God is real. We are working with him to solidify his testimony and it is going great.

We have another simp we met named J. He is a real nice man with a wife and daughter. We have been working with him on the importance and point of commandments. Commandments are only to protect us, they don't limit what we can do, they are there to free us from losing our rights. They give us promised blessings and constant freedom to choose.

While doing strada one day we met a guy named F. He is from Chile, so I used my dad to try and make a connection with him. (It wasn't a very necessary thing but I thought it was fun to throw that in there) he is a nice man with a family. We talked about how this life is to find joy. We then added how Jesus Christ gives us the ultimate opportunity to be happy. He has given us the ability to start over whenever we want. His atonement gives us an everyday opportunity to be happy. He liked that and said we could possibly meet him again.

Sunday we were able to have a multi-stake conference for the west Europe area. It was broadcasted from Salt Lake. Anziano Christofferson spoke and the focus was on daily repentance and charity. At our church we have a lot of visitors from foreign countries, and I ended up having to translate for 40+ Americans.... But the conference was great and I loved the part about repentance. We should repent everyday because it helps us remind ourselves of the Lord's power of forgiveness and the love he has for us. He wants to bless us, and when we repent daily and rely on him with all we have, he can bring himself even closer to us.

A little scare, at about midnight Tuesday morning we heard an alarm go off five times in our apartment complex. We and our neighbors went to see what it was. It was late so our neighbors were upset, and it turned out to be 2 Islamic ladies with 4 kids in an elevator. The elevator stopped midway during the ascent. The kids were very young, with a couple being newborns. Normally 6 people in an American elevator is not bad, but many elevators (including this one) can maybe fit 3 people in it at a time. So these women were panicking and we helped keep them calm until the firefighters arrived to get them out. It was definitely a strange experience and we were dead tired the next day, but at  least they all were ok. Moral of the story, follow the weight and capacity limits, or, don't use Italian elevators ever. I would follow both.

We have a lot more great work going on too, and it's really exciting. Today was our luxury day, so we took a trip down to Siena (I get to visit Firenze every day, so I thought Siena would be a nice place to visit) it is a just a nice little city. We went with some other missionaries and it was beautiful. We went to the duomo and the main palazzo. They have a special horse race on July 2nd, so we are going to see if we can get a pday moved to go see it. It started down-pouring on us and we had to race to get to the car that the other elders use. It took us 40 minutes to find it and we got soaked, so we took off our ties and blasted the AC to dry them in the car.

Over the week, I have been focused on a thought. When we look at adversity and see all the bad things that always seem to take center stage in the world, it can be easy to get depressed. Bad things seem to be the most common thing that happens. A quote came to mind, "We fail only if we fail to take another faithful step forward. We will not, we cannot, fail if we are faithfully yoked to the Savior--He who has never failed and will never fail us!" We will make mistakes, there will be a lot of bad things that happen. We have moral agency, but when we are faithful we hope and move forward. The prophet Paul said it best, "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." (2 Timothy 1:7) God will lift us up, we just need to use the strength he has given us to take our next step forward.

I know this gospel is true, Christ is the head of his church! Have a great week everyone!

Il finale: Firenze - Week 93

So I'm am starting the last transfer of my mission, and with that, the mission office decided to send me to another city for the last six weeks. For some reason or another, they chose to send me to Firenze, just a little tourist city that some people like to visit when they come visit this country. I'm only just a little excited to be in this city...... The only sad part about leaving Gorizia is saying goodbye to all the people I've been with since the beginning of December.

This week was quite busy saying goodbyes but we were able to see some people. E. is doing great. We met with her, and we had a great conversation about having the desire to believe in a concept we don't necessarily understand.

We were able to go see the C. family again, and we picked strawberries for a good deal of time. Eating strawberries right off the plant/vine/I don't know the correct term, is just sooooo delicious! Well, we were able to teach them one final lesson, and it was on the atonement of Jesus Christ and on miracles. There are miracles, big and small, everywhere. We are the ones who define the miracles. It was a very spiritual lesson.

P. is doing well, I'm gonna miss him. We finished by talking about how we accept God's will even when we don't see any logical sense in the decisions made by him. His thoughts are not our thoughts, neither his ways our ways. When we accept God's will, we accept that it will be for our good.

So, I am really excited to finish hard, and give it my all, so my mind has been focused on diligence. When we set goals, it gives us motivation to work for something. As a missionary, I can set goals to work hard for two years, but sometimes at the end, it gets hard to run to the finish. So these last couple days I have been changing my goals to be for the time that I am in Firenze, and what I want to accomplish. When we set big goals, such as working for two years, we also can set smaller goals for smaller periods of times, and that has been a big help to me especially in these last 5 months or so.

I know Heavenly Father has a plan for me these last little while, and I am excited to see where this journey takes me. I know his gospel is true, and that there is someone waiting to hear it from me.