Sorella Sobeck in Rome: Promise them blessings!!!

Something that we are trying to do better as a companionship is to do better at promising people blessings. As missionaries, we ask people to do stuff and make commitments ALL THE TIME, and frequently here they don't do the things we ask, but I know that promising blessings is important and is an incentive. Who doesn't want blessings??????

Well, I have very little time today because we're going to Cefalù for Pday again today and we're meeting the Anziani from Palermo and Trapani there. Yeah pday hiking to castelli!!! So I'll just write some quick highlights of what happened this week.

Thursday was an AWESOME day. We finally contacted a referal we've had for awhile from a member, because we've been trying to go with her and unfortunately scheduling wasn't working out well. So we went and had a good lesson with that (I love lessons in teh presence of a member...I didn't appreciate them as much in Bari because it wasn't as hard, but here in Mistretta its really hard to get them...so we had Sorella Battista with us this time and she's so great). And then she fed us lunch. Doesn't get much better than that. Later that night we were doing finding knocking on doors and ringing citofs, and we got a lesson and a new investigator!!! Her name is Cristina, we talked to her and her sister, and at the end we said the prayer together and her 2 daughters who are 10 and 5 came and joined us too. I love families. We had made an appointment to see her again yesterday evening, and sadly she wasn't there (yeah that happens a lot), but we'll return. And then after Cristina, we had a lesson with Giuseppe and found our 100% for sure that he is Jehovah's Witness! He was baptized was he was like 14 or something, because his parents are in this religion. Anyways, it just made me super happy because he is SO INTENTLY studying with us now and he loves our church. It makes my testimony grow that people really are being prepared, no matter what religion they are.

So in Mistretta we have talked to different people who are not from Italy, and we've told them we had a book in their native language that we could give to them. One in Romanian and one in Hungarian. So on Friday we decided to carry these 2 books around with us in MIstretta, hoping we'd see them by some miracle. There are actually several people from Romania here in Mistretta, so we tried contacting a couple of them and none of them could meet us. So we were doing passbacks and we meet this lady who is from Romania and we give her the Book of Mormon. We told her we had no idea why we had that book with us, but we knew she was supposed to have it. It was a super cool experience. And then walking on the main street on our way to another appointment we said the lady from Hungary and gave her the Book of Mormon in Hungarese and got her phone number to meet another day to talk about it. How cool???? We haven't seen these people in weeks, and then the day we carry them around we see them and give both of them away. HEAVENLY FATHER IS SOOO COOL!!!!

I LOVE our Branch President and his family...la famiglia Portera. We had correlation with him on Saturday and he does so much for the branch. We also ate lunch with them on Monday when our Anziani from Palermo came up to Mistretta to have a lesson with Pasquale. They make good food, mamma mia. I love Sicilian cooking...actually Italian cooking in general. And I love that people just give us food. I've talked about how we've gotten fave and all sorts of vegetables and fruit from people (but of course only the fruits and vegetables that are IN SEASON...I love that they only eat the produce thats in season...so much better). Well, this old lady gave us some fresh homemade bread the other night. So cute.

We had church on Sunday and there were lots of people because there was a family from Ragusa visiting. Love full church. And we get to teach President Portera's youngest daughter, Lucrezia, who is 10, because she hasn't been baptized yet and needs teh lessons from missionaries now because she's over 8. She hasn't been baptized yet because of several deaths in their family of grandparents and such, so the opportunity hasn't presented itself. We already teach her in primary every week, so we'll do the lessons there. On Sunday Slla Comollo taught Young Women and I taught Primary, so I got to teach her the 1st lesson and it was so fun :)

We've been going through our ward list (which TOTAL is 1 page in length...active and inactive people...haha), and we've been trying to find the inactives. We found one yesterday who was baptized in Siracusa in 2000 but when he moved here he didn't come anymore because he says its far away. Boo. It was interesting to here his story, and how active in missionary work he was when he was a new member. Hopefully we'll get him to church...he can come with Giuseppe, because they live really close to each other. BLESSINGS!!!

Ok, thats about it for the week. So much happens every week that I have no time to write about, but just know that the work is going and we're trying hard to help bring souls to Christ. I think its so cool that we can be instruments in the hands of the Lord during this time to help people have testimonies. I'm so grateful!!!!

Vi voglio bene!

Sorella Sobeck