Works = Diligence

Happy Monday! This week was filled with tons of appointments. We got to see so many people which was a miracle in and of itself. 

Our miracle this week was yesterday when Precious (a 19 year old African refugee that we have been teaching) called us and told us that she is back in Crotone. She left last week to move to Holland, but yesterday she said that she decided to come back and is staying. She has already been to church probably over 8 times (she comes every week) and has had all of the major lessons and expressed her desire to be baptized. So if all goes well, she'll be baptized in a few weeks! 

This week I was able to further my studies and pondering to truly understand the concept of faith without works being dead (James 2:17-18.) I have come to understand and know that miracles are given, not earned. But if we work diligently in every moment, we become more converted, we earn the Lord's trust in us as his servants, and the miracles that we do see become so much sweeter. In the end I have come to recognize that the Lord's work will go forward with or without us, but we never want to be the ones who impede miracles because of our lack of diligence.  

Because our district is the entire district of Calabria now, we have started switching off cities to travel to each week. This week we were in Catanzaro. As we were riding the pulic transpertation through the city afterwards it was full of young people getting out of school. We were all squeezed up right next to them. As missionaries around the world, our leaders have charged us to specifically search out these young people, whose minds' are more open to recieve our message, and who will be the future of the church. So it was really fun to be there as a district of 8 missionaries and have the opportunity to talk to tons of young people about why we're here without even having to go and seek them out, because we were standing inches away from them for a good amount of time. 

We taught a 9 year old new convert about the Gospel of Jesus Christ this week which was fun because we got to play a game where we wrote "celestial kingdom" on the whiteboard and told her that the ground was lava. Then as we taught the principles of the gospel we set down pieces of papers with those words written on them like stepping stones to get her there. I love teaching children, it defintiely helps us think outside the box as well as helping us remember to always keep things simple. 

Our queen Silvana told us that she would get baptized if she recieves an answer so we'll see where that goes. Now we just need to get her to start reading the best book in the world!

Thursday we set up an appointment with a really sweet potential. We went out to her little city and walked around trying to find her house. She told us which street it was and then said that she'd be stading outside of her gate to watch for us. While on the street we saw a really old lady standing by her gate and no one else was out so we figured it was her. We walked back to her and she started speaking gibrish. When we tried to ask her name she just laughed. After having about a 3 minute conversation where neither of us understood each other we figured it wasn't her haha. Then we ended up finding the real Maria (our potential) and everything was too good to be true. She lived in a nice house, had her life together, and was interested to hear our message. We explained the entire restoration lesson to her but at the end, she just kind of gave us the "well that's nice" response. When we invited her to read the Book of Mormon she said that she doesn't have time and wasn't even going to accept it. We bore testimony of the book and she said that she would keep it just as a remebrance of us, and she said, "who knows, when I'm 80 and have nothing else to do, maybe I'll pick it up and read." It was kind of heart breaking for us because it all seemed so perfect. We asked if she would like to hear what else we had to offer and she said, "no, I was interested to know what you guys beileved, but now I understand so I'm good, but thanks." It was just so sad! I felt like the situation was perfect and we had so much to offer her but she just decided that she didn't want to accept it. But hey, maybe one day someone will find the Book that we left her and something will happen from that! You never know! Everyone has thier own time and way to come into the fold, and the Lord's time to harvest each soul is definitely different than our own. 

We had a great lesson with Rina on Saturday about faith and action. She has had a lot of particular questions lately regarding our Heavenly Mother and the pre-mortal existence and has asked where she can find these things written in the Bible. We did a lot of studying for her, but in the end, we told her that in this life we will never be able to have a full understanding of things, and that is why we have to live by faith. We also talked about truths and knowledge that we have thanks to the restoration of Christ's church. In the end, we talked about acting on the faith that we have, in order to obtain more knowledge just like the prophet Joseph Smith did. We promised her that she will be able to gain more understand of the truths that we have taught her as she comes to church and learns from other Italian members. She told us that it's not that she doesn't feel ready, she basically just doesn't want to promise us anything. She said, "it could be that I come tomorrow or the next week, who knows?" It's a little frustrating for us because we know that she is stuck right now, and will not progress further until she comes to church, but we cannot figure out how to get her there. She wouldn't commit to anything when it came to church. She did commit though, to reading from the Book of Mormon every day. We are hoping that this will help the spirit to work in her and give her more desire to attend on Sunday. 

Last week I learned a lot about faith. I learned how to set goals for this area and to have the faith that miracles will happen because in the end, miracles are always brought to pass by faith. 

Diligence is one of those things that's a lot easier said than done. Like President Kearon said, "we have to work at this, but we're not afraid of work." I have been striving every day to be more diligent in all of my efforts as a missionary and I hope that each of you will strive to be more diligent in your efforts as members (and of course missionaries as well.) 

I love you guys, my prayers are with you.

-Sorella Bonzo

Xixy dressed up for carnevale 

Crotone is a medieval city that held the olympics at some point 

Our potential lived on a street called "United States"

We always find the cutest parts of town Tracking down inactive members

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