*despairingly* "My resurrected body is gonna have mayo blood!"
Lol so so much happened this week! We saw:
Investigator Carolina from Venezuela
Investigator Elizabeth from Peru
Member/less active/less active's chef boyfriend/inactive family Larrain
A mad classical music concert that had our stress levels going through the roof (more on this later)
A whole sad day of bidone's that ended with eating the best lasagna of my life with Bishop's family and watching the new Star Wars trailer as well as a bunch of their home videos
A gelato festival with our inactive girl friend :)
So, what should I elaborate on?? Let's talk about mayo blood and stressful concerts! So, this all happened on Sunday! We have church from 9:30-12:30 and it was wayy good! There's this less-active who literally - literally one Sunday she raised her hand in relief society and admitted that she avoids the missionaries' calls sometimes and me and Sorella Garcia just looked at each other like, "awesome." Anyways, we had a meeting with our RS Pres and she told us she's worried about this sister and to try to contact her. Well, she wasn't joking! She literally just ignores our calls. Fortunately, we have members who don't have their heads buried in the sand dunes of missionary work and sometimes see things in ways we don't. So I remembered one time a member told me to just send a little scripture to this different inactive and not ask to see her or anything. So we tried that, and she responded!! A few days later for Easter we sent out a Happy Easter text and she responded to that, too!! Then, she came to church this week!! She said we could see her next week!! She said she would pick up the phone when I pushed her on that point! Church miracles!
Our investigator Norca from Peru also came to sacrament meeting!! Such a good church service. But it was afterwards that the concert and mayo come in.
So, there is approximately one trained opera singer in every ward I've served in because this is Italy. And the music director for the stake had some connections at a conservatory close to Florence, so he got some non-member musicians to agree to come play piano, guitar, flute, and sing for a concert in our church! As part of this concert, the missionaries were to sing a round of hymns with our ward's token ex-opera singer. He's this super old guy, just like, super old, the sort of old guy who's just nice and buys all the missionaries a bunch of packaged sandwiches so they can eat lunch in church instead of going home and then coming back.
...packaged mayo sandwiches!
The ratio was like, 3 parts mayo to every 1 part meat option. And that was it. Bless his heart he is such a good man. And we were all starving bc church is exhausting but I seriously could only handle one sandwich. Lol. And my companion absolutely hates mayo and so as we were walking home after the stressful concert, she said, "My resurrected body is gonna have mayo blood!" So, so funny.
The concert itself was great. It was stressful because one of our members brought three small children?? Why?? So, obviously we want to make a good impression to our non-member guests, right? Because a lot of their friends came, too, to watch them play. But instead this is what happened. Just imagine all this during what would have been an otherwise riveting and breath-taking concert:
Constant flow of whispering on the front row
Constant flow of one little boy punching the other in the stomach
Little toddler girl constantly wandering around and adults having to get up and bring her back
Little toddler girl rolling around on the floor as far as touching the piano that was being played in that very moment
Box of colored pencils falling loudly on the floor
Box of colored pencils falling loudly on the floor a second time
Little toddler girl running very energetically from the front of the room back out multiple times
All of this followed by an explanation of baptism for the dead as part of the closing comments of the concert. All of us missionaries afterwards had to like, therapy each other and talk about the large array of emotions we felt during those two hours. Everything from "I want to die" to "haha" to " is this actually happening right now?" Amazingly, these non-members took it all in stride. We chatted with the pianist's roommate after, asked about if he's religious (non-practicing catholic, we are not surprised folks). We told him he should go to church again and he was like, "I know, I know! I want to but I just don't haha." We got to talking about the Book of Mormon and he even accepted a copy and then also accepted an invitation to come to our church! Then the Anziani had been talking to the pianist himself and he agreed to help them with a musical number next week during church so that's looking like two new college-age, super dope investigators for our Anziani! The other companionship also got a couples' number so all-in-all it was a really big success.
Lots of other good things happened this week like discussing how to have more unity when we teach, finding people on buses who would listen to our message, and we have a packed week ahead of us! The mission is great, I love it and I love the Lord for telling me I need to go. I also love my family and anyone else who is taking time out of their life to read about a sister missionary's missionary experiences in Italy. Life is good.
Transfer calls come this Saturday, will I stay or will I go?? I think I will stay. Have a good week, all!
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