The Work is Picking up!

The last two emails I got from Mady were not for the blog, but she has been doing really well. I did get something for the blog today with a couple of pictures. Isn't she beautiful?!?!?!

The work has really picked up here. We have three main investigators. One is a long term inactive member and his daughter. His name is Fratello Sciacca and he is a huge talker. Teaching lessons with him is kind of playing a game of monopoly that you lose in the first five minutes, and you spend the rest of the game just wanting to flip the board over. He can completely derail the lesson, and I literally spend the rest of the lesson imagining which of his things I can throw out the window, but his daughter is making huge progress, so we keep going, and they always end the lesson with gelato, so at least they are good winners. Then we have an investigator named Vanessa who looked us up on mormon.org, and she says that she feels like she has heard everything we are teaching her before, and we are picking a baptism date this next week.

Then we met a man in the park the other day named Silvio who wants to be baptized on July 5th. We are really worried though because we think he might be homeless. He carries a backpack around and everything inside of it is wrapped in plastic bags, and every time we call him you can hear cars passing outside, even at 8 or 9 at night.

Sorry I just skimmed that, and it's super boring. Sorella Marquis and I are just really pumped, because this is Italy, the heart of Catholisim and that never happens. I added two pictures that made me laugh. The one of the mattress was a tender mercy of the Lord. We were dead tired and talking about how badly we wanted to lay down and we found a mattress on the side of the road. We didn't sleep on it, but I feel like the Lord has a good sense of humor sometimes. The other one is a picture of graffiti that translates to "Burn the Bible". It's a really unflattering angle of me, but I thought it was really funny.

I have really gained a testimony about working in unity. The spirit literally cannot exist in contention and so that is the first line that Satan attacks. All of my mission I have felt this need to be respected by other people, and to make sure things get done in the most efficient ways, and all of those things are important, but this transfer I have just really focused on making sure that my companion knows that I love her, and that I think she is a good missionary, and all of a sudden we are seeing all sorts of miracles. Miracles that don't happen in Sicilia. I really think it might be because Heavenly Father feels like he can trust us. Also maybe I have leprosy... I just will let you think about that.