October 21, 2009

Hello!

Winter has suddenly fallen upon the island. When I got here it was summer, and one morning we woke up, and it's suddenly winter! We had a great week, though, full of amazing appointments! And some crazy adventurous appointments.
We went to Susan's on Thursday to talk about how she needs to be married. About 5 minutes after we got there, her "husband" got home for lunch, and they got into a HUGE fight right in front of us!It was so akward. We just sat there pretending like we couldn't hear and played with the baby. Unfortunately, we couldn't even leave because Susan has to unlock the door with the keys that were in her pocket. It was really akward. Needless to say, we didn't get to actually teach a lesson. We tried again yesterday, but another fight errupted, so we left right as they were starting to avoid another situation.
Sunday we had an amazing lesson with a new investigator Ilaria. She's 31 and super cute! We taught the Restoration, and she cried during the whole thing because she loved it so much. Right after the lesson, there was a baptism. She came to it and loved it! We have another lesson with her tonight and can't wait to talk to her more about baptism!
Walter is doing well. He comes to district finding activities, english class, and just about everything else we do. He loves participating in missionary work. He has a strong testimony and loves coming to appointments with us. We love Walter. He's hilarious, and between him and my companion, I spend most of my day laughing.
We have another new investigator, Agnese. She took the lessons a few years back. We called up some people in our phone, not knowing who they were, to invite them to the baptism on Sunday, and she came! She had an amazing spiritual experience and asked us if she could start meeting with us again. Yesterday we had a great lesson with her. She has been thinking a lot in the past few months about life and what she wants, and she realized she wanted to meet with us again. We invited her to be baptized last night and she is ready! She's praying about November 15th!
Anyways, I'm running about of time....it's been a great week! Monday at our district meeting, Elder Polelli (who I served with in Prato) told a story about a time in Prato when he was on the bus. He had a strong feeling that he should go talk to a certain man. He went to go talk to him, but was quickly rejected. Elder Polelli gave this man a pass-along card and they parted ways. He wondered why he had that prompting when nothing came of it. About a month later, the elders were on splits with the other companionship of elders, and Elder Noda took Elder Polelli to go see a new investigator that he had. Elder Polelli walked in, and the new investigator was this man he had talked to! This man, Giuseppe, told Elder Polelli that ever since they met, he couldn't stop thinking about the missionaries and what message they had. He kept looking at the picture of Christ on the pass-along card. He felt strongly that he needed to find the missionaries and talk to them. The next week, the other set of elders ran into Giuseppe, and he gladly accepted them. Giuseppe and his wife Lili are now baptized and strong members of the branch in Prato! I've learned a lot about the promptings of the Holy Ghost .A lot of times we don't understand them. Some things just don't make sense to us. At times, we have the opportunity to understand why we had certain promptings, like Elder Polelli did. But a lot of times, we might never understand the reasons behind things. But as we follow those promptings, we are always, always blessed.

Vi voglio tanto bene!
Sorella Hawkey