Dear family and Friends!
This week has been a super interesting one. I wouldn't say that it has been bad or good, just... I have no idea. Alessandro our golden new convert had a fit becuase he found out that we couldn't ride in the car with him without another female. I think initially he was mad becuase it made him feel like he was untrustworthy, and then mad becuase we never told him it was a rule. He said that we should have told him ALL of our rules from when we started doing the lessons with him. We are considering giving him a white handbook, just so that he can understand how many we have. Then we found a copy of the restoration in Romanian, which should have been a miracle for Ika (our investigator that speaks only romanian) but when we showed it to her, she had a fit because her mother was a very strong baptist, and she wants to get baptized in the LDS church but she doesn't want to say that the baptist church isn't true because she feels like it would be disrespectful to her mother. Also her employer gave her a ton of anti-mormon literature, and talked to her about polygamy which amazingly didn't phase her but somehow she found out about tithing in all of that, which greatly upset her. So she yelled for about an hour about all of this, and I just said her name softly until she calmed down, and told her that we would be back in a few days. So all of that was really really sad to me, and also meant that we couldn't really meet with any of the people that we regularly, so instead we did a lot a lot of finding. We went finding for 6 hours one day which not suprisingly was super exhausting.
So that was the heaviest part of my week, but it also wasn't terrible. We saw a lot of miracles in finding this week. We have been asking survey questions, and then having people watch the grazie a lui video, to answer it. We have had some really really beautiful experiences while finding, and it's turned out to be a huge blessing for us. It is helping me feel like I'm truly working hard my last few weeks as a missionary, and it's helping sorella winegar lose her fear of finding, and understand how important using your time effectively is. Last night we had a long correlation and we came home to drop some stuff off before going back out and it was 8:15, and we debated going back out, our staying in to do some areabook, pr something like that, and we decided to go back out. We talked to four people in that entire time. A couple who rejected us, and two friends who agreed to meet with us again. It really made us realize how that 45 minutes made a difference. Sometimes we go out and in that 45 minutes no one listens to us, and sometimes we find someone completely prepared to her the gospel. The lesson learned is that it's always important to go out, because you never know if it's going to be the 45 minutes were you are just planting seeds, or the 45 minutes that Heavenly Father has given you the oppertunity to harvest.
I also love my companion so much. She is so funny, we laugh all the time, and she has such a strong testimony. She is also an amazing communicator. she never lets anyone go to bed angry, and she has taught me that you can literally fix anything. She is the best problem solver I have ever met. She resolves everything from investigator problems to a broken house. I am so grateful to have had three transfers with her.
So sometimes when things are tough they are also beautiful, and wonderful, and I guess that is what makes us human.
Also I have gotten some grief for not having shared more stories with you, so I'm going to fill you in on some of the goofier things that happened this week. So the first was our deep cleaning day, so we stayed in all day to make our house sparkle, and i in the process of 24 hours when we were supposed to be making our house pretty and clean we managed to break almost everything in our apartment. So in itlay we have giant patios and Sorella Winegar locks someone out on these patios at least once a week, so new years eve, it started snowing so sorella Tapia and I went outside to see the snow, and sorella Winegar locked us out in our pj's in the freezing cold! So in Italy they have a thivk wooden blind to keep the sun out during pranzo naps which can be lifted up by a gear on the inside or by two small nobs on the outside, so Sorella Tapia and I were trying to get back in by finding a door that was left open, but we had to open the blinds first. So as we were lifting the blinds Sorella Sartena, who was very much tired of our shinanagins opened one of the doors, and instead of gently lowering the blinds like they are designed to be closed we dropped them and ran to the open door before Sorella Winegar could figure out what was happening. Which pulled the blinds out of their gearing (I don't know what the word I was looking for was but probably not this.) so fatality number one-the blinds to our bedroom. Fatality number two- the giant three hundred lb wardrobe where we keep all of our clothing. Sorella Winegar and sorella Tapia decided to do some basic reorganizing to get us rejuvinated (sp?) which ended up being a great idea, it was a huge help, and one of the things that they decided to move was the two largeish but not unmanageable wardrobes in our bedroom. They planned on doing it by themselves in fifteen minutes by themselves while I was on the phone making scambi arrangements. BUT it turns out that the two largeish wardrobes were actually one three hundred lb wardrobe, so I had to promptly get off the phone to keep it from crushing sorella Tapia, and once it was tilted there was no way to get it back up in the room that we were in because there was no room to move it, so all four of us had to move it into our living room where it was kind of stuck, and to get it there we had to take off two doors that lead to our living room fatalaties three and four . Once we finally got it to the living room we had no idea what to do with it, and Sorella Tapia decided that maybe it was time to call the elders, but I was really really embaressed about our destructive natures and I talked them out of it, so we deconstructed it, but we didn't have tools.. of course, so we used forks and butter knives, and carried it piece by piece into the room where Sorella Tapia and Sorella Winegar had originally intended to put it, and then we slowly reconstructed it. Then we went to bed. The next morning we woke up to the general mayhem we created. I was really insistent on following normal schedule (still embarassed probably) and so during prazo we bought a tool set, and then during our luch and evening breaks we slowly put everything back together, and somehow we did it. No one ever knew, we never got a lecture, and no one's family is going to be charged thousands of dollars in repair. the only lasting evidence are the pictures and photos. Otherwise no one will ever know. I love you all have a great week!
ps apologize all typos and spelling errors.
