Dear Friends and Family,
Today I am grateful for the miracles that God has provided, especially for helping me adjust to the life of a mission.
Fun things first. Anziano Draghi is a big fan of this old Italian band called Pooh so for language study, we like to sometimes translate a song into English. It's a lot of fun. Also, I am becoming more of an Italian by learning how to cook like them. I can make about 3 kinds of pasta really well now. Now I just need to learn how to make tiramisu (without coffee obviously). I am also addicted to this peach juice that is made in Italy. It pretty much just tastes like straight peach juice from a jar like when mom cans peaches but it's in a bottle and sold in the supermarket. It's soo good!
After a lot of hard work, searching, and talking with people, we found 4 new people who want to hear our message! This week we made it a goal to search for more people to teach because we weren't able to contact or meet with anyone like Vera or Raffaele. While we have had many small miracles this week, one of the most obvious was meeting Pasquale.
Like in those typical missionary stories, we decided to go visit inactive members in the area around our apartment. While searching for one particular person who didn't answer, we decided to actually see if anyone in the building wanted to hear our message anyway. I didn't know why but we did it anyway. The elevator was broken so we climbed to the fourth floor and I remember thinking "Why are we doing this? No one will listen to us." And no one did for the first 2 doors like normal. Whenever we can't find a person, Anziano Draghi tries to make up for it by knocking on all the doors of the apartment to see if anyone is interested which they almost always aren't interested. But we knocked on this one door on the 3rd piano (floor), and this older man answers the door. He begins to say he is busy but he notices that we are missionaries and he said, "I'm totally open to learning about this." He and his wife were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary which was crazy so we shared a short message on the family since he was busy, but he wants us to come again and share our full message. His wife was calling him to come in and he did his best to shut the door and listen to us talk but he soon had to leave. We still left him with a prayer though!
I am happy here in Italy. Yesterday marked the end of our first transfer and it really struck me: I am on a mission. In Italy!! Italy has become much more like home than I ever expected. I love the metro trains covered in graffiti and just meeting random people, not just from Italy but all over the world! So far, I've met people from Nigeria, Ghana, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India, Romania, France, Germany, England, and more! Overall, I learned this week how everything works on God's time. Sometimes, trials afflictions continue even as we continually pray for them to end. Because they are for our good! I always pray to be able to find one person to teach that is new and normally, nothing has come from it. I've been frustrated with all the work that we do with little results. But God knows us. God knows what we need. And despite my frustration, imagine how joyful I was when we found these people ready to hear the gospel.
I know God performs miracles today, that his words never cease. I know he loves us all and that's why he sent His Son to die for us. I love being a missionary every day! Thank you for your support! I love you all and hope you have a great week. Pray for blessings from the Lord and then have joy in your afflictions.
Vi voglio bene!
Anziano Price
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