This week!

Ciao tutti!

For starters...Blessing got baptized!!! It was a pretty dramatic baptism, but it happened. She is a great example and her testimony after the baptism was really strong. She's already quoting from the Book of Mormon. "Now that I am a member of this church I can never go back to my old ways." :) Change...changing for the better is what life is all about and that is what the gospel does!!!! Picture below!!

This week we've unfortunately dropped almost all of our other investigators...mamma mia. We have 2 solid progressing investigators now, Dario and Daniel, both of who want to be baptized and we're trying to set dates with them. It's a really cool story about both of them:

Dario. He has been an ENglish course student for a few years. His dad, Michele, started coming consistently about the time I got here to ROma 3, and he came to all the church activities and even to church. He's a basic student, which the other sorelle teach, so they started teaching him, and me and Sorella Winward wanted to teach Dario who was our student in intermediate. Michele has been making AMAZING progress in the past months and comes to church every week and goes to baptisms at the other wards etc. He set a baptismal date just yesterday for February 3rd :) :) With Dario, he wasn't really moving fast at the beginning, but the past month or so he comes to church every week too and we always talk about baptism with him, his issue is the word of wisdom, but we asked him if he wants to get baptized and he said yes :) So we're working to set a date with him!!!! We love these 2 guys sooo much, and they love all 6 of us missionaries haha. It's like a big group effort really. We had an FHE with them last week with all of us, and another corso student, Giovanni, who also loves us but has no interest in joining the church. It was so great! Picture also below.

Daniel. He's from Sierra Leone in Africa and we love him! We found him on the bus about a month or so ago. We asked him to be baptized with a date his first lesson, and while he didn't say yes to the date and its been a bit rocky since then in some ways, we're a lot closer with him now and he wants to be baptized. He goes to another church and does some missionary efforts there, so he has only been to our church once. It's hard to argue against a good thing with someone. But after the baptism on Sunday I called him becuase he didn't come after he said he would, and he was really sad that he hadn't made it...and he said he had finally decided that he wanted to come to OUR church from now on :) It was a miracle phone call, and I really look forward to seeing his progress now!!! 

YAY FOR MIRACLES!!! We are excited to find lots of new investigators, and also have more time to meet with more members since we haven't had ANY time for that the past 2 months.

Missionary work is incredible!!! It's all about changing yourself and watching other people change too. ANd all for the better. IN Daniel's last lesson he was really worried about offending God because he's already been baptized twice in his life, and he doesn't want to make a mistake or do a bad thing. I told him "Daniel, we would never ask you to do a bad thing." It's all about moving forward in the faith and becoming members of Christ's church!!! Doctrine and Covenants 22 is a really good answer to that question about being rebaptized, which I found this morning. Yay scripture study!!

I love being a missionary! The work is true! I hope you will recognize more miracles in your life this week!!!!

Love, Sorella Sobeck

Andrea - I got your letter and I will be sending one back your way :) 

Finally the long awaited pictures!!!!!!!!! 

We went to Gandolf's castle!

Knocking on the Pope's summer house!

Cleaning the font...we look so tired!

Blessing's baptism!! MIRACLE :) :)

All 6 missionaries in Roma 3 with 3 of our investigators (Michele - red, Dario - back right, Giovanni - left of red) and our ward mission leader (Vincenzo - yellow)