Verona, Italy - September 22, 2010

I was a little bummed yesterday because our investigator won't admit to the truth. We had as part of our training last time about asking good and inspired questions, and Sorella Mullen and I felt that that would really help our investigator family, whom we have invited to baptism but they do not want to because they have already been baptized catholic and feel that it would be an insult to God to be baptized twice. We respect that, because it is a valid concern, so we explained the concept of authority to them and how a baptism without authority is really just getting wet and not a real baptism. They understand the concept, but still are not moving forward. We asked the investigator questions and she told us she believes that Joseph Smith is a prophet, so we asked her what that would mean for who has the authority to baptize today, and she sort of laughed and just refused to answer the question. So I felt sad because she has had so many very strong spiritual witnesses of the truth of this message, and she knows what it means, and just doesn't seem quite willing to accept it. We also found out that they really haven't been reading, so I think that we will focus on helping them to read the Book of Mormon, because there is great power in that. We'll see.

Then we had this fun lesson with some of our Nigerian investigators (3 of them) about the plan of salvation. We taught about the plan of salvation, which they really needed to hear, and you could tell investigator #1 really felt the spirit. But then they backed out of coming to church on Sunday and we scolded #1 because she promised she would come, and she said she would really really come the next week, but that they have program this week (a big thing the Nigerian churches do kind of frequently). So then we used all our recently learned training skills to invite them to start reading the Book of Mormon from the beginning, and it was going great, so I said, 'will you read the Book of Mormon?' and there was a momentary pause while they thought about it. Then #2 said, 'I want to ask you a question first. In America, are there marine spirits?' Which is a totally beffuddling question, especially when we couldn't tell what all the words were at first. So finally we said, 'um, not that we know of...' but we didn't even really know what marine spirits were, but whatever they were they walk around and live in Nigeria, so we asked what they are, and she said they are half man half fish, so we said, 'mermaids?' and she said, “yes! Are they in America among the whites?” We said “no, we've only heard of them in stories.” She said, “no, not in stories, are they in America?” so we said no (because I have certainly never seen one). but it was such a weird random question, so next I said, “do you mind if I ask why you asked that all of a sudden?” and when I said that #2 just burst out laughing tremendously loudly because apparently it was very funny, and #2 said, “no, I just wanted to know!” like she was defending herself to #1, and then she starts telling us about the flying witches that go around strangling people in their sleep if someone is mad at them that exist in Nigeria too, and wanted to know if we knew about them in America too, so we told her that there weren't any in America...and that is where all our training on great invites last week led to. (They did in the end let us get back to the invite and said they would, so that's good.) But what is the deal with that? Anyone out there know about the mermaids and witches in Nigeria or what the deal is? Because that's the first time I've gotten that question, and it really threw us off...

We had another thought we wanted to open the table to for responses from some experiences we had yesterday. Yesterday morning our appointments all cancelled on us, so we were doing casa in a neighborhood called Borgo Venezia and we had about two hours to do it. And I was dreading every minute of it, and felt like two hours might as well be two years it felt so long and I really really didn't want to do it. Then Sorella Mullen mentioned feeling the same way, and it occurred to me that it was a little strange that we both felt that way when normally it would be just fine and fun and stuff, so I asked her if she thought we were doing the right thing, and she said, “no, we're not.” So we sat down and pulled out the map and said a prayer to know where we should go to do casa, and both felt really good about going to a neighborhood called Valdonega. The thing is that Valdonega has been on both our minds all transfer long, and as soon as we decided to go there we both felt great and were super energized and suddenly two hours didn't even feel like enough. So we hopped on our bikes and went as fast as we possibly could to get there, and even felt unanimously really good about a particular street. We started knocking doors like crazy, because we needed to find whoever it was we were led there to find. We did two hours of casa and never once got in a door. And we both still felt really really like we did the right thing, even though there are absolutely zero visible results that that was actually a prompting to go out to Valdonega. And then that evening we got a bidone from a family we have been teaching, which was really sad, so we were going to get started doing our back up plan, but we really didn't feel like it was quite right either. So we prayed again, and the only thing either of us felt good about was sitting on the steps of their palazzo and waiting. And I have never felt like the right thing to do on the mission was sit. It was so weird, but we decided to do it anyway. We waited for half an hour until it was time to go home, and they never came home. Right as we were leaving this woman comes out and starts asking us who we are and what we are doing, and we both thought instantly that maybe she was why we were supposed to sit there, but then she flatly refused to hear our message and said she was perfectly fine with her own religion. So we hopped on our bikes, and in the underpass by the train station both of us independently felt very strongly to not leave this woman with a bunch of bags we saw by herself, but to go and offer to help her. So we turned back around to go find her, and turns out she couldn't speak Italian at all, did not want help, and that of all of the twenty languages I had in my bag she didn't speak a single one of them and we couldn't even give her a pamphlet or sit with her or help her with her bags. So we went on our way and came home. It was so weird, because we felt like we were trying hard to follow promptings but none of them made sense or yielded any results. So we were wondering what y'all make of that? Thoughts? Comments?