Gesù & Gelato: Buona Pasqua!🐰

Happy Easter!

Hope everyone had a beautiful Sabbath remembering the resurrection of our Savior Jesus Christ!

Okay so starting with last Monday night..... we drove clear out to Laterza (like an hour drive) to visit a family of investigators, the Scarati family. I'd never met them before just because they're hard to coordinate with and always busy! The usual for a family of 5! But we decided to just buy them a couple loaves of bread and some chocolate eggs and deliver it to them. The whole family was home and we got to share the Easter video, Always There (Ci Sara Sempre). The mom was reading the words off the screen for everyone, but about 10 seconds in she gave up because she was in complete tears. It's amazing to see how quickly that video has brought the spirit to the people we've been in contact with! They loved the video, and once it was over, the 19 year old daughter turned to me and said "How has He been there for you??" I got to bear my testimony of the power of prayer and how we can always feel Christ near when we pray! She too was brought to tears. It was definitely a beautiful experience. They are really excited to start coming to church once they can afford to get their broken car repaired!

This week I got to go on a scambio to Taranto and be with Sorella Tenney for 24 hours oh wow she is an amazing missionary. It was humbling to learn from her. We had a great time and I learned a lot! Plus we saw some major miracles:

We went to lungomare to do some finding and stopped to talk to these really cute ragazze! One was 16, the other, Nuri, was 15 and they were really interested in english course, then we asked to show them the Ci Sara Sempre video and they loved it!! Then for some reason Sorella Tenney asked Nuri, "but you're not Italian are you?" She didn't look very italian. Nuri responded "I'm half Korean!" Mamma mia I about cried. Her mom is from.....SEOUL!!!!!! And Nuri speaks Korean! I told her my brother is in Seoul right now as a missionary like me and she couldn't believe it!!!! We were both flipping out and then we took a picture together (picture on right). So special. It's the little miracles and the cool people like that that God just drops in your path to remind you of His love. It's funny because just a couple weeks I told Chase I'd probably spend my whole mission looking for a Korean person because all the asians here are Chinese. And then what do you know... on a scambio not even in my own city. Too good to be coincidental.

Then it started raining, I'll state the obvious by saying it's really hard to do finding in the rain so we resorted to handing out all our english course cards and hoping we could start some conversations in that way. Well, we handed out all our english cards, I had 1 left which always creates this pressure of "I have to give this 1 card to the right person". After walking a ways, we stopped another pair of cute ragazze and they were both 18 and religious, kind of rare here, but it was cool hearing their testimonies and sharing ours along with the Ci Sara Sempre video! They were also really interested in learning english and have a friend living in California (a city in Maryland) hahahaha we had a good laugh about that one. That friend has all her italian friends fooled!

All in all, great scambio.

Carmella and Sara

Saturday morning started out with our normal trip out to Martina Franca to visit Carmella! (She called us during the week out of the blue to tell us she'd read 5 chapters of the Book of Mormon and wanted to know when were coming to read more together!) So we read together, and then her daughter Sara got there so we watched the Ci Sara Sempre video and talked about how Christ has been there for each of us!

Sorella Geertsen and I got home very hangry and ready to eat....so we made lunch and were about to start eating when our doorbell rang. It was Ida (our neighbor) wanting us to help her hang a picture real quick. So, like always when we go to her house, we left our door ajar and walked across the hall. (Side note: it was EXTREMELY windy on Saturday). Right as Sorella Geertsen was hammering in the nail, a big gust of wind hit our apartment building and we look across the hall to see our door slam closed. We didn't bring the keys. All 3 sets of keys were inside our house. Ida called her brother, the proprietor, and for some odd reason he doesn't have keys to our apartment either.?. Meno male I had our phone in my pocket to call the Taranto anziani (they have keys to our house but just live really far away). So they arrived after like an hour and a half, after Ida had given us a very thorough tour of her house, closet, and trinkets (giving us some to take home). We were so relieved when the anziani showed up with our keys.... oh wait--- the locks had been changed!!! The keys they had didn't work. Mamma mia. So one of the aniziani kicked, and he kicked, and he knocked in our front door. It made for a great video, I'll tell ya that much. It was literally like something you'd see in a movie. Sorella Geertsen and I were ready to pay for a new door, but lucky for us, nothing broke.

As for an update on our people!

Anna: Still working with her and visiting her frequently trying to help her progess towards baptism :)

Antonella: We dropped her as an investigator this week. It was probably the saddest thing of my mission and really hard to do. She stopped progressing and completely tuned us out when we went for lessons, kind of awkward. We will try again in a few months and maybe then it will be her time!

Giuseppe: Done smoking cigarettes. Still smoking cigars but hey it's progress! He has been reading the Book of Mormon and we got to read some together this week too! And we spent Easter Sunday with he and his family, our Italian family :)

Easter with Giuseppe and Elvira

In other news...

Transfer calls are tonight, stay tuned. Praying to stay in this piccola citta I love so much.

The group of sisters I came into the mission with are going home, so that's really weird and sad for me. I'm going to miss them tons, but I'm excited to hear from them. And I'm excited to remain in Italy to see the progress of....

The Rome temple!! Officially has an open house and dedication date, as I'm sure you've all heard. March 10, 2019! Wow and to think that temple was announced in 2008. It's been a long time coming, but it's beautiful to see how excited all the members are about it!!!!!! We are really excited too and pumped to find people to fill it. Let's go.

General conference was nothing short of amazing! We watched both of the morning sessions live at 6pm! The other 2 sessions we've got to find time to watch this week! We got to watch them in english with the 1 african member, Sorella Moses, she's so cute :)))) And the best surprise was last night when our investigator Nunzia, her less-active husband, and 2 little sons came to watch conference! Loving all the miracles. And wow the power and spirit that was felt while we sustained President Nelson as the new prophet as a worlwide church membership. I am so thankful for him and that we have living prophets to guide us! I know that he is a prophet called of God.

As for Easter in Italy, it's a lot like you'd expect: very Catholic, lots of processions in the streets, lots of dwelling on the death of Christ. I am so thankful that we concentrate ourselves on the fact that He LIVES! He's here today and will be here forever!! That's something that's brought me so much happiness every day. And that through Him and his atoning sacrifice we have the chance to return to live with Him again. I love my Savior and I know He lives and loves each of us.

Love yall!

Buona settimana a tutti!

XOXO