"We Will Be Inviting Him to Be Baptized Tonight ...."

December 28th e-mail

Happy Christmas everyone!

It was sure great getting to see all of you Sunday! I had a lot of fun talking and hearing from you all. I'm sure the next skype session will come very quickly so non vi preoccupate! The Xbox kinect better still be working by the time I get back because I'm gonna live in front of that thing(when I'm not living at Connor's house, doing possibly the same thing). Alright I kid just a little, but let's hope I don't find myself doing that a lot when I get back. I still have lots of time to grow and increase my ugly Italian skills.

I'm glad the rest of your Christmas went well. After the phone call we were with the Trexler family for awhile eating more food. They made a really good apple strudel and some sweet potato pie that I thought was pumpkin pie. They loved my sugar cookies....what can I say? I'm a good baker? Or maybe that Val has a great recipe for sugar cookies. We watched a Disney movie with their family and then went home(Kung Fu Panda 2). Oh yeah and we got all the leftover food as well as two big brown paper sacks of food from the army base. There was fruity pebbles, white bread, root beer, Dr. Pepper, peanut butter, rolls, chocolate. Coolest family ever! They are so awesome.

Well you asked a little bit about what I learned in Zone Conference this last week. I had a really good experience with the Book of Mormon. I've had many great experiences with it during Zone Conferences and this one just adds to the list. I really realized though how much more I need to use it in my teaching, and preaching of the gospel. We are going to start using it more and more in our teachings so others can receive the numerous blessings within. Yesterday in district meeting we did some practices of using it while doing strada and other finding settings. I'm really hoping though to start reading it with more of a focus on how particular stories and passages can help others.

Pisa is holding together but barely. There is a tower here that is so old that it's actually starting to lean. Pisa is really small and there really isn't a lot of casa to do here. There are some outside the city, but we don't travel too far out of the city. We use mostly bikes but right now they are stuck inside our broken garage. We've been on foot for the last week or so. We don't use the bus much because Pisa is so small. We just stop those in our path on our way to our destinations.

We had the opportunity to do two scambios since Sunday. I did one with an Elder Wilkens on Monday here in Pisa. The kid is in his 6th or 7th transfer and man he speaks good Italian. He made my language skills seems very crappy. When I asked him what he does he said he reads the Book of Mormon in Italian...It helped me realized how terrible I am at doing that and fulfilling the promise it has. One of the prophets said if we read the BoM in our language we will speak fluently the language. Well I'm going to start trying to fulfill that promise more fully because my language is just so so right now.

The work is going alright. We haven't been able to see the Ecuadorian family for about a week. It sucks because we had an awesome lesson with them and now they just haven't answered our calls. It's too bad because they were really cool. Hopefully it was because its the holidays or something.

The others are progressing but slowly. Our main investigator right now is Davide. He's loving church and really wanting to know more about the church. We will be inviting him to be baptized tonight and so we are stoked!

Well thanks so much. It seems like you are all doing fantastic. Talk to you all next year!


Tuck