Letter #56 - 10/7/14

Ciao Famiglia!

Come state?! :) This week was so good. We had General Conference! Whooo! So great. Because of the time difference we didn’t get to watch Sunday afternoon and majority of the women’s conference because of technical difficulties at the church but everything that I saw was so so good.

So last week we had been praying all week to have someone put in our path that was ready to hear the gospel and then one night we were out doing some finding work by centro (town center) and we stopped this lady who spoke English and she was super funny and talked to us for a little bit and then when she left this guy came up to us and was like, "hi! do you speak English?!" and we were like "yeah!" And then we just started talking to him and he’s soooo legit. He’s from Barcelona and is here in Ravenna for work for a few months at least and doesn’t know Italian yet and doesn’t know anyone. He even has friends who are members of the church back in Spain and had so many good questions about the church. AND he came to conference with us! How cool is that?! it was so awesome. Definitely an answer to prayer.

Then last night we had a dinner with this cute little Italian couple and had homemade pizza with them and guess what else....fried pig skin. It was so gross, as we were eating it (and initially had no idea what it was) they were explaining to us how they make it and it was so disgusting. Sorella Nilsen asked me what it was and I told her I wouldn’t explain it to her until after we were done eating, haha so gross. Oh my gosh, also at the end of the meal they gave us a pomegranate from their tree in their yard and I went to open it and....the berries flew out EVERYWHERE. Haha we were all laughing for like 5 minutes straight. we were finding pomegranate berries everywhere the rest of the night. They kept calling it "the pioga". haha so funny and so embarrassing, haha oh well.

I thought it was really cool in conference how they talked a lot about being personally responsible for our personal testimonies, so powerful. And actually yesterday Sorella Nilsen and I really had our testimonies tested at one of our appointments. It was with this woman who was super sweet that we met on the street way back when Sorella Carter was still here. And we were finally able to set a return appointment with her and so yesterday we got to her house and her husband was home too. It was a really tough lesson. He just kept questioning everything we said, pointing his finger at us and diminishing us and what we 'thought' we knew – he kept telling us we were just convinced and that we didn’t really know, we weren’t old enough or experienced enough to really know. It was so hard, he didn’t really give us a chance to speak or defend ourselves. But I will never forget the moment where I just looked him in the eye and said "IO SO, con tutto il mio cuore che Joseph Smith era un profeta (I KNOW, with all my heart that Joseph Smith was a prophet)." The spirit was so strong and we know he felt it too. We just both bore our testimonies and left them with that. It was one of the hardest but coolest experiences. Sorella Nilsen and I both were tearing up as we left the palazzo (building), having your faith questioned is not a fun experience, but if we have that rock foundation like in Helaman 5:12 we will never falter.

Vi voglio bene (I love you)! I hope you all have a great week! talk to you soon! :)

Sorella Yost