Sorella Steph Serving Italian Style: December 1, 2014

Carissimi miei,

Happy (late) Thanksgiving! Im so happy to hear that you all had such a wonderful holiday :) so crazy to think how spread out we were this year! But regardless of the distance I hope you know how thankful I am for each of you. I know I say it everyweek, but I honestly feel like such an incredibly blessed missionary. Thank you all so much for your love and support, and more importantly your examples. I am so grateful to have such incredible role models and examples in my life. I love each of you very very much :) thanksgiving in Italy was a bit different than in America, as i'm sure you can imagine. We celebrated the day by throwing a thanksgiving party for our english course. It was a hit! Everyone brought food, we sang some hymns, and talked about how important it is to have gratitude in our lives. A great way to spend the day :) and don't you fret, the next day we were able to eat our traditional thanksgiving meal. We are so blessed and have the best senior couples here in our ward, and they had us over for lunch so we could all have a thanksgiving meal together. Shout out to mom - i took the lionhouse rolls and they were a HIT. everyone says thank you :) so it was a wonderful holiday! Now we are on to december! WHAT THE DEVIL. Who ever said that could happen. I seriously can't believe it.

The rest of this week was a great one! Our investigators are doing well. We weren't able to get ahold of dyanne, so unfortunately we couldn't see her this week. We are really hoping to meet with her soon, but its looking like we might have to drop her. Which just breaks my heart. She has the greatest desire to be baptized, but until she starts acting on it there's not really much we can do to help her. Please keep her in your prayers this week. We also weren't able to see harrison and mabel because of their work schedules, but we have an appoitment with them tonight. So hopefully all goes well there!

Our other investigators are doing great though! We met with Leonardo this week and taught the gospel of Jesus Christ. The lesson went really well, but his main struggle right now is that he can't recognize the spirit. He wants so badly to recieve a testimony and to be able to say that he knows that the things we are telling him are true. So we have decided that we need to take a step back in our lessons with him and just work on helping him to feel and recognize the spirit. we'll get him there :) he has so much desire to find the truth and i believe that he is acting with real intent. Just a matter of time. We also met with Luca this week! We did a little bit of follow up with the restoration, and watched the film together. It went really well! He has been reading in the book of mormon and says he really enjoys it. It is so incredible to watch his testimony grow.

Great news - we also got 2 new investigators this week! Both are post-flush miracles! The first is Joy. Turn out he met the missionaries like 3 years ago, but somehow just lost contact. We met with him this week and he said he wants to learn more! We will probably pass him off to the anziani because it will be easier for them to meet with him, but we are really excited to see him progress. Our other new investigator is Annarita. So while we were flushing we called someone in our phone named guido. Annarita is guido's girlfriend and she is using his phone. She answered the phone and said she had no idea who we were, but that we were welcome to come over and talk to her about it. Haha so we agreed! She is so great. She has a lot of ideas and opinions about religion, but she also has a ton of faith. We explained a bit to her about who we were as missionaries, then at the end asked if we could leave her with a prayer. I said the prayer, and and the end of it looked up to see her crying. She asked us what she was feeling, and we quickly explained to her that it was the spirit. so incredible. we are really excited to see her again this week!

We have some great potential set up for this week as well. I wanted to share one story really quickly. So when we went to say goodbye to Marivel we met this woman at the train station, her name is francesca. we talked to her for a little bit about who we are and what we are here for, when she asked us how we can be so sure that god exists. we told her we would love to talk to her about it more another day. So we got her phone number and a few days later gave her a call. someone else answered the phone, and said that francesca was at school. I was about to hang up when he said wait wait! are you the sorellas? i said yes we are the sister missionaries. Then he started mumbling and all i could understand was i dont speak italian...only spanish....i dont know how to say...i dont speak italian....so i quickly said my companion speaks spanish! and passed the phone over to her. turns out i was talking to carlos, francesca's boyfriend. He met the missionaries in peru and was taking the lessons, but lost contact with the church when he came to italy. He has been wanting to get in contact with missionaries, but didnt know how to find them. So the lord sent us to him :) can you believe that?! looks like i better start studying up my spanish!

One more story :) So last week rachel sent me a list of people she worked with while she was here in Roma 1. I have been working my way through calling them and trying to see if we can meet with them. Unfortunately a lot of them have moved, but we were able to see one of the less actives she worked with named Rosita. Rosita left the church because she was offended by the way people treated her, but she wants to come back to church so badly. She just needs help having the courage to do it. We read 1 nephi 21:14-16 together and talked about how the lord never forgets us. In that moment I just felt the spirit testifying so strongly that I was here specifically for her. She loved rachel so much, and was thrilled when I told her that I am her cousin. I know that I am here specifically to help her - the Lord has designed it this way. It was such a strong testimony to her, and to me, that the lord knows each of us individually and answers each of our prayers.

I am so grateful to be here as a missionary in this place and at this time. I wouldn't have it any other way! I love you all so much and I am so grateful for this gospel that allows us to be together forever as a family. I hope you all have a great week and I will talk to you soon :)

sorella marsh