August 25, 2014

Cari Miei,

thanks everyone for all the great pictures and emails! So great to hear from all of you, I am glad you are doing well. Quick heads up before I forget - so next week we will be having zone conference on monday, which means pday will be tuesday. So when you don't hear from me on monday thats why.

Anyway, this week was another great one to be a missionary! The people we are working with are all making great progress, it is such an exciting work to be a part of. We'll start off with Peppe, one of our new converts. So this week we got to have two meal appointments with him and his family, which is HUGE. Peppe is 75 years old and his whole family is catholic and they were very against him being baptized and very against the church. So the fact that they are even letting us into their home now is awesome. Plus we got lots of great food, so I was a happy camper :) great story about peppe. So when we met with him at the beginning of the week we left him with commitment to read about the tree of life. We figured when we went back at the end of the week we could follow up and talk about the meaning of it, how it applies to him, all that stuff. So we go back at the end of the week and he says "listen. what you gave me wasnt enough. I read about the tree of life, but i didnt even know what it meant. I had to keep reading!" he then proceeds to pull out a notebook with a picture he drew of the tree of life, complete with a summary of what he learned. Haha sorella baker and I just looked at each other and said "welp, there goes our lesson plan." Peppe is the best ever.

We also saw some great progress with Rina the less active member we are working with. For the first time in 20 years she started to read the book of mormon! Can you believe it?! She is loving it too. She is such a great lady. She has so much faith and wants so badly to do what is right. We are continuing to work with her on how we can get her back to church. We have a few appointments set up for her to meet some of the members this week so we are really excited to see how that goes.

As for our investigators Amalia is doing well! She couldnt come to church yesterday, which we were bummed about, but we had a great lesson with her about prophets this week. We talked about how God works through prophets so we can know the things that he wants us to do in life and she loved it. The highlight though was when we showed her a mormon message from president monson about prayer. At the end she started tearing up and we asked her to describe what she was feeling. She said she just felt something strong inside of her, something peaceful. We told her that was the spirit testifying to her that the things we had said were true. It was such an incredible moment. Her progress is slow, but it is defintiely moving in the right direction. Which is all that matters :)

Unfortunately we weren't able to meet with Theresa or our other investigator Antonella this week. They were both out of town. But we did have a lesson with an old investigator! So her name is shirley and she has been in Rome for the past two months so that it why whe havent met with her. She is from the Philipeans and she is absolutley fantastic. I have never met a person so happy and just filled with pure joy. I love being around her. When we met with her this week we taught her the plan of salvation, which was great. She was recently diagnosed with cancer so she loved the idea of our resurrected glorified bodies. She goes back to rome this week so we wont be able to see her again for a few weeks, but I am excited to be working with her in the future.

Well I think that is about it from over here! I love you guys all so much, I wish I could thank you enough for all you do for me. Thank you for all the love, support, and prayers. I am such an incredibly blessed missionary. I hope you all have a great week and I will talk to you soon!

Vi voglio un MONDO di bene :)

sorella marsh