'Twas the Day before Christmas. . .

Ciao Mama! This week we are e-mailing a little early since everything is shut down for Christmas, I should have warned you, but luckily we will get to talk tomorrow anyways! So that is great. If you are on at 11 (your time) than I should be calling right around then. If you could send me a quick e-mail saying which e-mail you will be using than that would be great! This week has been jam packed full of awesome experiences! It must be a Christmas season type of thing. Well, one minor disappointment about Christmas time is that a lot of our investigators are gone visiting family or other things, so we have only been meeting with a few when we were just last week meeting with a lot. But luckily, that gives more opportunities to do finding work! I am starting to like finding work more and more as it goes on. At first I just looked at it as talking to random people about something that they probably would not either have time for, or would not care too much about. And I think since I thought about it that way it made me not as effective in doing it. So this week I really tried to work on finding a better way to view finding and to start to love it. So I found that if I just try to meet people and share something with them that I love, it makes it better! Both of them are the same thing, I just think of it in a different way. And fortunately, because of this we are having a lot more conversations and success during finding. Now I just need to find out how to get people to commit. I love Italians, but they sure know how to talk their way out of any obligation. One cool success story though is that we did area book, which is basically where you call old contacts that missionaries stopped contacting or lost contact with for awhile. While we were going through the pile, I called one that was contacted just a year ago, and the missionaries said that "he said he was not interested anymore." But I called him anyways of course. So he picks up the phone and says, "Pronto" and of course I make a little mistake right off the bat by saying "Ciao" because that is usually what you say for people you are familiar with, anyways I go on and say "Siamo missionari della chiesa di Gesu Cristo, vorremo conoscere (that is the wrong verb to say when you say you want to meet someone by the way) Lei." And I did not know what to say after that, so after awhile I heard him say, "Quando?" So I said "questa settimana, Lunedi?" The he said, "Si" another akward silence, "dove?" At that point I gave the phone to my companion and he answered the rest of his questions. We met with him and he is a really awesome guy who has a wife and three kids, so I hope that the rest of our lessons go well! He wanted to come to church this Sunday, so yeah, it was a cool little miracle. I am keeping it a little shorter today since it really is not our p-day. I hope that fills your desire to hear from me enough to last you until tomorrow! Ti voglio bene, Anziano Vaclaw