Week 4 in Busto

Cara Famiglia,

 

This week is going great! We are continuing to work with our progressing investigators and trying to find even more. Rafael is super solid, we are contacting him daily to make sure he's reading and praying and feeling the spirit every day. We are teaching him Tithing on Saturday, and assuming he accepts it he should be good to go for the baptismal interview the next Saturday and ready for baptism on August 13th. I don't know if I mentioned this last week, but he's already even payed to go on the temple trip with the ward in September! And his wife is becoming re-activated as a part of his conversion. I love eternal families! Filippo is up and down. Right now he is kind of in the middle of an upswing(we hope). He is good about reading when we leave him assignments, he just doesn't recognize that he knows the Book of Mormon is true! We are trying to help him recognize the spirit (thanks Preach My Gospel Chapter 4, you rock!). Akil is a stud. He is one of the coolest guys I've ever taught. Totally homeless and jobless but still has a strong faith in God. The only problem is he smokes, and because he doesn't have a job he doesn't know if he's going to stay here in Legnano much longer. But he really likes our lessons and gets a lot out of them. Keep praying for him! Alex is another baptismal date set for August 13th. He is also struggling but we are doing our best to help him along. We also set a baptismal date for August 20th with an investigator named Wilson, who is from Brazil! He is the man, really humble and sincere and all his answers to our questions are about 100% doctrinally correct! We are actually going to start trying to include his 12 year old son in the lessons too and help them both be baptized at the same time!

 

So basically all these people are awesome. We are working with them towards baptism and we are optimistic about all of them. We had a great training from the zone leaders yesterday in District Meeting about following up as a major way of helping people progress and sifting through to find the elect people, and it's helping out a lot. Life is good, and I love being a missionary here.

 

This week I've been trying to imagine myself a lot more as a non-member trying to imagine how I would get by without the knowledge I have of Christ, the Plan of Salvation, and everything the Gospel really entails. It kind of strikes me as how badly I've taken it for granted, this knowledge is the greatest thing in the world! So basically my spiritual thought of the week is to be grateful for everything that the Gospel gives, it's not something to be taken for granted. It also helps prayers a lot to be grateful for blessings. It reminds me of a cool Neal A. Maxwell quote I read either today or yesterday where he compares the dunes of adversity through life being dwarfed by the Himalayas of blessings that the Lord has given us. I'm so grateful for everything in my life! And I love you all!

 

-Anziano Benjamin Smith