Hello my dear loved ones,
I love being able to email every week and tell you all about the experiences I am having. I feel very lucky.
This week we took a trip to Catania for zone conference. It was really great. It is always so fun seeing all of the missionaries. Our interviews with President Pickerd were pretty early during the day so we had the WHOLE day to do missionary work in Catania. Which is like the biggest city ever. Just kidding, but it's definitely bigger than Taranto, which is about six times the size of Ragusa. And we actually had some great experiences happen to us. (Side note there is an anziano price who is one transfer younger than me (if you don't know what that means ask an ex missionary) and while he was in the Mtc his mom somehow read the story of our first violin playing in Taranto when we found Matteo and she sent him a violin in the for him to bring to Italy and now he is in my zone and we got to play together!!!!)
It was quite a windy/rainy day in Catania and they had planned to do a gesso (where you go to a popular square and draw something on a sheet or have music playing while you talk to people) the whole night and just have missionaries come and go in shifts. I was on the first shift with a Sorella from a city called Siracusa. And so I played three violin with anziano price until it started raining. We decided to take the violins down into the metro and ended up riding it all the way to the end and when we got off, it had stopped raining. So we decided to walk back to the square. On that thirty minute walk back to the square we saw and talked to more people than I have seen people outside in Ragusa for the past week!! We ended up getting a lot more missionaries and we sang and played until it started raining again. With a few failed attempts of trying to covert the violins with umbrellas, we decided to call it quits. Never have I played the violin with such numb of hands, but it was such a fun experience nonetheless.
Our zone conference was all about the Holy Ghost. Every single day I just think about how grateful I am for all of the things I don't know. There is such a great joy in learning new things and in helping others to come to know the things that you already know. It makes it so that we must rely on the spirit and on our faith. One of the most powerful ways we can feel the spirit is through pure and powerful testimony of the things we know to be true. I have found that on my mission it is possible to teach someone something completely perfectly and clearly, yet they don't accept the things that are being taught. I was puzzled about how that could be, but then I realized that if these people do not feel the spirit, they cannot know of the truth. I realized that in some lessons I was just hearing testimony of the things I thought these people would need to hear. hello!!! You don't know what they need to hear!! That is why it is so important to bear SIMPLE and POWERFUL testimony in order for the spirit to touch their hearts.
We had a lesson with Maurizio and Marcella this week and he is one of the most stubborn men I have ever met. I was determined to do everything I could to bring the spirit into the lesson. In previous lessons with them it is hard to have the spirit because Marcella got up and down every two minutes and then he would cut us off and talk for twenty minutes or try to switch into English in the middle of a lesson, but this lesson was special. I don't know if he felt the spirit, but this time, I did. And sometimes that is all we can do. In 2 Nephi 33:1 we read, "the power of the Holy Ghost carrieth it UNTO the hearts of the children of men." Not INTO. And there is a big difference between the two.
In young women's this week we had a lesson about how we can KNOW our Heavenly Father instead of just knowing about Him. In the young women's manual it said to have a dad come in and tell the class how he feels about being a dad, but since we have just one young woman, I asked Lorena's dad to write a little thing about how he feels about being a dad/being her dad. I hoped that it would help her understand a little bit more about how her Father in Heaven feels about her. At the very beginning of class I asked her to read this note I had a father write and she started bawling and told me she never cries haha. I had no idea that the spirit was going to touch her that strongly but I am grateful to be able to have been apart of that experience.
At the very end of Joseph smith history Oliver Cowdery writes about his experiences with helping translate the Book of Mormon and he says, "These were days never to be forgotten." I hope I can always remember and cherish and TREASURE UP these days that I am living because they truly are days never to be forgotten.
I love you all dearly,
Sorella G ❤️🇮🇹
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