Sorella Steph Serving Italian Style: March 23, 2015

Carissimi Miei,

Hey everyone! So great to hear from you all this week :) talking with you guys is always the highlight of every p-day! It was a pretty incredible week for us over here in Rome, I am so excited to tell you all about it!

So this week we had our mission conference and it was absolutely incredible. Exactly what we needed to give us a push forward with our work. We were blessed enough to have Elder Teixeira and his wife come and train us. He even pulled me aside afterwards and told me that he was Sam Webster's mission president! So that was fun for me :) anyway Elder Teixeira spoke to us about the importance of focusing on our key indicators, specifically finding new investigators. He gave us different methods and techniques of things that we could do to improve our finding, and it has already made such a huge difference! They were the most simple things like how to use the pass along cards to approach people or how to use the Book of Mormon in street contacting, but it seriously has already completely lifted our work. I've been doing it all wrong for the past year! Haha so needless to say I was incredibly grateful for this conference. The revelation we recieved was definitely inspired and I am excited to put it into practice.

So it has only been a few days but we have already started to see such incredible miracles. First off - Anna came to church. Yes, you read that right, Anna our atheist investigator came to church!! But I am getting ahead of myself. We saw a lot of incredible progress with her this week. So in these past few weeks we have been getting a lot of direction from our leaders here to use genealogy more in our work. Elder Allen talked about it when he came a few weeks ago, and also our district leader has been encouraging us to be more involved with family history work. As we were preparing for our lesson with Anna sorella jones and I both felt that family history was something we should share with her I'll be honest, I was a bit aprehensive at first just because up until this point we have had to go pretty slow in our lessons with her. We have to explain just a little doctrine each time and slowly build on it. But we felt like we had received a prompting, so we went for it. And the lesson went so well. Honestly we didn't go into much detail, but it gave us the opportunity to bear testimony about how families are eternal. Anna's family is the most important thing to her, especially her sister who passed away a few years ago. The spirit was so strong during the lesson, it was absolutely beautiful.

At the end of the lesson she agreed to meet with us the next day to do a little tour of the church, and that also went really well. She really enjoyed the simplicity of our building and there was a beautiful spirit there. At the end of the tour she agreed to come to church with us the next day! I think she really enjoyed it.She definitely was overwhelmed at some points, but she absolutely loved gospel principles. She hasn't agreed to come back again yet, but we are really hopeful for what will happen :) please keep her in your prayers. This time is going to be so crucial for her.

Another miracle from this week - we got two new absolutely golden investigators! Their names are Sonia and Stefany and they were a referral from a member in our ward. Sonia was raised a catholic but is very interested in our church and what we believe, and stefany is her daughter. We met them this week when they came to an FHE that our ward members put together. But, incredibly enough, they showed up about 15 minutes early and asked us to show them the church. So we did church tour number two! I can't believe how prepared these two are for the gospel. Sonia told us that she feels like God has called out to her so many times in her life but she just hasnt listened, but she feels like she is ready now. And stefany is so dang cute. She is 14 years old and during the church tour I took her into the young womens room and she just about died when she saw the picture of christ in the americas because they are from peru. Then the next day they both came to church! And they absolutely loved it. We have an appointment with them this week and we are super excited about it.

Last miracle I wanted to tell you about -- remember forever ago when I told you guys about the aquaviva family? Giovanni is a less active member but his wife and two children are all non members. Well they went to peru for the entire months of december and january, but they are finally back! We were able to go meet with them this week and I couldn't be more happy to report that we will be continuing to work with them :) we taught the restoration and his wife became a new investigator! They are such a cute family with so much potential. Giovanni still has a solid testimony, and what better way to help him come back into activity than to bring his family with him? Needless to say we are excited about it.

So we have got a lot of incredible things going on over here. Our work is growing and I just feel so grateful that I got to stay here for another transfer to be a part of it! Thank you for all of your love, support, and prayers. I love you all so much and I will talk to you soon!

sorella marsh

us and the Acquaviva family! They are the cutest ever!