Hey friends👋🏼 it's been kind of a hard week, but most definitely a week full of innumerable miracles. Kind of like the past 63 weeks lol🤷🏼♀️😂 but really though. This week was an emotional rollercoaster hahaha. We didn't have time to see a ton of people, because we had zone conference x2. We gave our training at the Bologna/Rimini zone conference, and at our own conference, so that shot out two of our days. It was fun though, seeing all the mission buds! And the conference was good! The Allen's and the APs had some amazing stuff for us! I especially loved a special training Presidente gave just for us sorelle. They are seriously the best❤
Of the people we got to see, here were the highlights!
- Less active Elena hadn't shown much interest in the past, but this week she called US wanting to meet. There's a lot about the gospel that she has forgotten or doesn't understand. However, she works with "troubled teens" and loves the heck out of them, so we've been relating principles of the gospel to her work and it's been so so so great!
- Saw our simp Maria and had a super eye-opening lesson with her. Now that it's Summer, she wants us over every week so we can start including her kids in on the lessons! We're so stoked and have been getting a lot of inspiration as to how to best help them progress! God is good❤
- We were preparing a lesson for less active Betty and felt super prompted to teach about the temple. Well, we show up and found out Bishop has been working on temple stuff with her, and so we helped explain some things. It looks like she'll be able to go through the temple this summer! God is just so real lol☀️
Stuff is starting to slow down in some ways. Summer is always rough here in good ole Italia. People go on vacation for, like, a month lol. Also, I'm very much sick of tourists🙄🤦🏼♀️ and heat. And mosquitos. And it's only June. But anyways, we've decided to try and schedule as many appointments as possible, and then be guided by the spirit as for what to do during the empty days. Well, we were guided into some awesome service. We found a soup kitchen run by the Catholic Church that we signed up to volunteer for each week. We just spend like five hours every Monday morning cutting up fruits and vegetables for the free meals given to the homeless and refugee community here in firenze. I love it❤ also our kitchen friends are the coolest! One has an eyepatch #piratesofthecaribbean You best believe I pretended I was chopping up food for Jack Sparrow instead for homeless people. Jk, both are good. Buuuuuut yeah.
It's been a week full of challenges, but we've been noticing so many miracles- even with normal things. Like the fact that it rained yesterday so we got a break from the scorching heat. Or getting tackled by a super happy German shepherd puppy. Or like the new kebab place that opened up next to our apartment. And the fact that we went there. And the guy gave us free Pepsi. Miracles, friends. But our biggest miracle came just yesterday.
I mentioned last week how we'd been working on following the Spirit more. Well, we had a lesson scheduled with our investigator Carolina, my fav person. We'd been feeling the need to set a baptismal date with her, but didn't really know how to go about it. We'd taught the first half of the gospel of Jesus Christ lesson (faith + repentance) so we figured the next step would be to finish that lesson (baptism + Holy Ghost) and then give her the date. Well during personal study, I kept feeling prompted that we needed to talk about repentance a bit more instead. When we got together for comp study, Arndt had felt the same thing! Yay spirit! Buuut then we realized our ideas for how to present the lesson were definitely not lining up. We couldn't reach a good compromise, which was so confusing since we both knew the spirit had confirmed that we needed to teach about repentance. It was so frustrating to me that God would help us with the first half, but not the last half, so to speak. Well, we ended up kind of getting rid of both of our ideas and just creating a really simple explanation of repentance and the blessings we receive.
Well, we showed up for the lesson, and it was by far the best lesson we've ever had with her! The spirit was so strong, and we kept feeling prompted to share the bits and pieces of things we'd found during studies. lol I guess God wasn't holdin out on us- he just needed the lesson to be arranged in His way. And we were very much incapable of doing that on our own, so the Holy Ghost just kinda threw us into the situation. It was so cool though. She really seemed to understand the things we were saying! And then, out of nowhere, we felt prompted to pop the question😉
We asked her if she would be baptized the first week of July.
And after a bit of thought, she said yes!
🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈🎉🎊🎈
And as the icing on the cake, she wants us to start teaching her boyfriend and her sister too! Keep her in her prayers folks! We wanna make this goal a reality for her!! I know it was most definitely not by chance that knocked on her door Easter weekend❤
There's a quote I found by Joseph Smith during studies that I really loved. It says,
This is the principle on which the government of heaven is conducted—by revelation adapted to the circumstances in which the children of the kingdom are placed.
I just love it. Cuz here's the thing- I think it's important to look to examples in our lives. However, I think we sometimes get too focused on what others have done in the past that we close ourselves off to the revelation from the spirit. Maybe we're too set on following the advice from a leader or a missionary or a parenting blog or whatever, when in reality the answers are right there for us. God handles all things through revelation, because He knows that each of His children are different. Hence why each situation is different, and requires different solutions. If we'd done the normal missionary route with Carolina, the lesson would've been fine but I know she wouldn't have felt ready to commit to baptism if we hadn't done things God's way.
Just when you think 15 months has taught you all ya need to know, God is up there lovingly wagging his finger at you the way all the old Italians do🤷🏼♀️
XOXOXOXO
Smeds
1-6 Zone Conf. part 1 & 2 7- Soup Kitchen shenanigans-it’s a nice look for us, yeah? 8-10 Pday fun 11-13 Pday fun ft. a rather large skeleton- Can u spot the Smeds? 14-Pday??
No comments:
Post a Comment