Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Over the Past Week Our Zone Has More Than Doubled the Baptismal Dates!

From Tucker's May 2, 2012 E-mail:

Ciao tutti!
 
I am sooooo tired right now haha. We just got done playing a bit of basketball and I really stunk it up. It was fun though and was definitely great exercise. This week seems to have flown by. Hopefully i didn't wear myself out for this next week.

So we aren't too sure yet about what we will be doing for Mother's Day. We need to find a member that will let us come over and use their computer. I'm positive though that we will be using Skype though. We will figure it out over this next week, and the exact time we'll do it. It sure is gonna be fun eh?...time is winding down....crazy huh?

Well this week was pretty good. We did a lot of traveling like I mentioned last week. I drove a little but Anz. Parker did most of the driving. Thursday morning we drove up to Bergamo (Beautiful City), and Trento on Thursday. Unfortunately a lot of our current investigators just don't have much interest or are busy. We still haven't been able to return and see Maria-Rosaria and Cirò. Maria-Rosaria has been starting to read more from the Book of Mormon though! Talking on the phone this last week she expressed her desire to want to be apart of the church again (she's less-active). We will keep praying for them.

We are working our butts off to find new people and we need to if we want to reach our Vision. We are still setting our sights on a family and with the clock ticking down we have to find them in then next week. We thought we had found them this last Monday. I will tell you the story. So Monday morning we went out to Bussolengo (paesino where most of our members live) to teach Giovanni, a 23 year old return missionary. The lesson went really well and after we had planned to do some casa in casa in that city.

Well as we drove we both felt good about this certain area. We parked the car and got out. We immediately stopped this 17 year old boy who was with his little 7 year old brother. They'd just been playing some soccer and were going home. We talked quickly about the Book of Mormon and he expressed some interest in reading it. We will be seeing them this Friday!...Anyways the story gets better.

Immediately after leaving them we entered into the first palazzo we saw. After a few doors we met Sebastiano. We did a quick Book of Mormon explanation with a question or two. We asked him what it would mean if the BoM was true. His answer was perfect for what we'd said up until that point. He said well if there are two proofs on both sides of the world and they say the same thing then they must be true(something like that). We asked to get in and he said yes! We started with a kneeling prayer and started to explain a little better the importance of the BoM. He felt the spirit very strongly and even said at one point that this message really interests him and inspires him to learn more. He told us that he would want to meet again and would talk to his mom about learning more. This time as we kneeled again he agreed to say the prayer. The prayer was amazing! It was probably the best first prayer I've ever heard. We left on a spiritual high and we were pumped the rest of the day.

As I called him the next day though to confirm he told us that his mom had said no. I asked him what he thought and he said that he has to obey what his mom says. I invited him to keep reading and praying about the BoM. It's really hard when other people intervene and take away somebody else's agency. I mean maybe it could of just been Sebastiano not wanting to meet but I felt like it was the influence of the mom.

We are going to keep going forward though. We've been doing some great "power of prayer" lessons with all the members this last week and a half. We are coming to learn that a lot of members have people in mind they want to share the gospel with. I think within a short period of time we are gonna get some good member referrals.

OH yeah! Well the zone is doing great! We had all the district leaders talk about baptismal dates in district meeting last week while we talked about prayer. Over the past week our zone has more than doubled the baptismal dates! We went from having 12 to now having about 25 dates. Our lessons went from about 17.4 lessons a week to 18.7! I know our companionship hasn't been seeing the success we wanted but our Zone is doing fantastic. Can't complain right?

Well I'm really hoping to get these packages sent off soon. I keep procrastinating it but hopefully they will get sent off soon.

Anyways I love you guys a bunch. Thanks for the updates; I hope you have fun on your trip!

How's Connor doing? Zach gets home in about 2 months so that will be good for Connor I think.

I got Franco's address. We tried passing by last week but it was a holiday so nobody was around. We are gonna try again this week.

Love you all

Ciao & Buona Vacanza

No comments:

Post a Comment