Italy, Week 3

I officially hit my "2 Months In The Mission" Mark on Monday!! So weird! Even though I've only been in the field for like 3 weeks... It feels like Forever. But it's so great. I'm so grateful for this time I have to serve the Lord and His children full time. Okay, let's see, what happened this week...So this was 21 Lessons week, which is where we have to teach 21 lessons. It's a new missionary thing. And it doesn't sound like much, it's only about 3 lessons a day, but it's a lot. So Thursday we had an appointment with this 13 year old girl named Valentina. We were going to go to the church and bake cookies with her and teach her a quick lesson. She always runs away from the sister missionaries and so we wanted to find a way to try to gain her trust and show her that we're really not that scary. She's not afraid of sister missionaries, she just doesn't like them. Anyway, so we went to the church and we both had a feeling she wasn't going to show up, but we were going to go anyway. We show up and she's not there. We call her a couple times and she doesn't pick up. To sum it up, she bidoni-ed us. Which basically means she stood us up. But it's fine. So we were like, well, we'll just make the cookies anyway since we came all the way (the church isn't very close) and we'll do language study while they bake and we'll bring them to the family we were teaching that night. Sounds like a good plan, right? We thought so too. So we're trying to bake these cookies but the church oven is super sketch. While we were sitting there waiting for them to bake, the power in the kitchen and the whole side of the church with the kitchen turned off. GAH! We panicked. Not going to lie... Anyway, after scrambling, finding the breaker box, switching everything off and back on and it STILL not working, we called someone in our ward to help us. He drove 20 minutes, found the second breaker box behind a door, flipped them off and on and tadaaaa, he fixed the church. We felt pretty bad. But he was really nice about it.

So yes, anyway, I was talking about 21 Lessons week. So most of our scheduled lessons fell through, and in the end we taught 17 lessons on the street. That is a miracle. Street finding lessons are the hardest lessons. But we prayed every hour and after each person we taught we said a prayer of thanks. Two lessons that we taught two separate nights ended at 8:59. God was definitely testing us. We pushed ourselves so hard this past week to make 21 lessons and God blessed us soooo much. We saw so many miracles. One young man we found during this was this 17 year old red headed Italian guy. He actually came up to us and stopped us on his bike to chat with us. Clearly he was just trying to flirt with us and whatnot, but we were able to turn it to the gospel and teach a lesson. He was really funny though. He was asking us if we lived alone, just us two, so we said yes and he goes, " Okay, so it's just you two.... and Jesus." He was totally serious but we just cracked up laughing. It was soooo funny. But I see a lot of potential in him. Apparently his family went to Salt Lake a few years ago and watched a video in the Tab or something and they wrote their names down to have the missionaries sent to them! When the missionaries went no one was home, so they just left some stuff, I'm not totally sure what. Anywho, but it's so cool! This random kid comes up to us and his family totally wanted to know more about the church in the past! But I saw a lot of potential in him. But we're sending the Anziani to teach him if his family isn't interested...

Last but certainly not least, I had my first full scambio! (Exchange). I went to Varese with Sorella Richards. Varese is really super close to Switzerland, so it was pretty chilly. And it rained the whole time, but it was so fun! We had a lot of success calling potential investigators and setting up appointments with them! But Sorella Richards was so awesome.

So  yeah! This week was super stressful and by last night we were pretty much completely out of food! (We both eat when we get stressed...) But it was an amazing week. And we saw that through really pushing ourselves and being out until the very last second, God will bless you. He'll make you wait for those blessings and miracles, but he sends them, always. Sometimes you just have to wait and continue to push yourself and work as hard as you can. We also got about 3 new investigators out of it! At least! We're hoping to call some of those other people we met and set up an appointment to teach them more. It was a great week :) I love you all! Thank you so much for your prayers and support! They mean more to me than you know :) Vi voglio tantissimo bene!

Love,

Sorella Hawks :)