Sorella Steph Serving Italian Style: June 9, 2014

Hey everyone!

I'm so sorry but we are running short on time today so it is going to have to be a short one. The senior couple who is serving here had some family in town so we took them up to Mt. Pelligrino today but we had some bad luck with the busses and it took us a bit longer than we thought that it would. So I don't have much time but I'll do my best to get everything in here!

This week was SUCH a great one! It was zone conference and stake conference for us, so we got a double spiritual boost. We'll start first with zone conference. This week for zone conference we talked again about finding. Our zone leaders gave us the challenge of always keeping our purpose in mind, and being forever finding missionaries. Sorella Mitsvotai also spoke for a little while because she is the STL of our zone, and she did a follow up on "being the message" that elder kerin talked about at mission conference a few months ago. Then President Waddoups spoke to us about family history and using it as a finding tool. All in all it was a great conference. It is always the perfect motivation to get us out and back to work. There was one down side though - unfortunately, I didn't get my package. I think they have it at the office, there just wasn't room to bring it down. So hopefully I'll be getting that soon! I'm sure I will love it :) But more importantly I learned a lot from the conference and got some new ideas of how Sorella Mitsvotai and I can get to work here in Palermo!

On to stake conference! So our stake is the entire island of sicily, so for the saturday session of stake conference everyone just meets in the middle, which is Enna. So we got to take a little missionary field trip! For stake conference there was a womens meeting and a general meeting. I'll be honest, for the general meeting we were sitting in the back and it was really hard to hear, so I didn't understand much. But I absolutely loved the womens conference. The stake primary, young womens, and relief society presidents all spoke and their messages all involved member missionary work in some way or another. But what really hit me was that they all also emphasized the importance of raising righteous youth. It just made me so grateful for the home and the circumstances that I grew up in. If there is one thing I have learned being out here on my mission it is that I have been so incredibly blessed. There are so many people here who have to work so hard to have so many of the things that I took for granted my whole life. Thank you all so much for your righteous examples and influence in my life. I seriously could not be more grateful. For the sunday sesson of stake conference we watched the broadcast from Switzerland, where President Uchtdorf and Elder Andersen were speaking. But little did I know I also got to see two other familiar faces - Brenda and Dick! That was a great surprise for me :) all and all the conference was a great success.

Okay one more other quick story from this week. So this week was a little bit of a downer for Sorella Mitsvotai and I. We weren't able to see any of our investigators and we were just getting cancelled appointments left and right. One of those days we were supposed to have an apointment with Pasqualino. So we headed to the church and waited for him to come. After about 15 minutes we were started to lose hope. Haha we called him a few times but never got a response, so we just decided to go out and do finding. Right as we were about to walk down the stairs a woman comes in the church, asking about information for english course. We started talking to her about it, then offered to give her a tour of the church. Next thing you know we were talking about the Book of Mormon, when she agreed to sit down and read a little bit with us. We read the introduction and she agreed to continue reading and talk about it with us again this week! Her name is Lili and she is incredible. We have only met her one time but you can already tell that she had an amazing amount of faith. The whole experience was just such a tender mercy from the Lord, and such a testimony to me that He is aware of us in each and every moment. In our moment of trial He literally placed a new investigator in our hands. The Lord works in mysterious ways, but I am so grateful for that. In the end His ways and His ideas are always better than ours.

Thanks everyone for all the love and support. Sorry I didn't have time to respond individually to everyone this week, but I am so grateful for all of the pictures, videos and e-mails. You guys are the best.

Until next week!

Sorella Marsh

These pictures were from the Zone Conference and were taken by Steph's mission president/wife. (Yes, I am that kind of mom that took them off their blog.)