Ciao!
I'm now in Pavia! It's a nice, small town, but which still has lots of people (in fact, there is a pretty famous Italian university here in Pavia, so there are a lot of university students). Our area includes a lot of the tiny little towns all around Pavia. We have bikes, but missionaries in the past broke one of them, and, because it happened in winter, never fixed it and decided to instead just use buses. We fixed the bike (it was actually really easy - we just had to do some adjusting and replace a tube...) and now we're on bikes (today is actually the first day...). It'll be a lot faster using the bikes instead of trying to use buses. Right now, actually, is a really crazy time. When I got here last thursday, I learned that we would be moving. We move on Saturday. We've already started packing some stuff up and getting the apartment ready, but all the rest has to be done today and tomorrow so that we can move everything to the new apartment on Saturday. ... It's been a great way to meet a lot of members really fast (they're the ones that are helping us with everything)!
Anziano Neff is a lot of fun to work with. He's been out one transfer less than me (we were in the MTC at the same time for 3 weeks). He's a really good all-around, humble missionary. One of the things I admire most about Anziano Neff is his desire to always improve and change. One thing he's been helping me with is thoroughly evaluating and critiquing our lessons and figuring out what we need to do better. Our ability to teach (and our unity together as well) has already improved a lot.
Yesterday we had a leadership training meeting with about 60 missionaries (a little over 1/3 of the mission). It was very inspiring and I learned a lot of things that I can do better in! The main theme of the meeting was change. Some of the things that hit me most was about prayer (that our morning and nightly prayers should be linked, and between those prayers should be the actions that fulfill the prayers), goal/vision setting (especially that we need to define our best - and then begin to work towards it - if we want to become our best, otherwise we will never reach our potential), and the importance of personalizing our teaching (both personalizing our testimonies to what/why things are significant for me and personalizing the promised blessings to the individual to whom I'm teaching). We'll have a follow-up/continuation leadership training meeting this next Monday.
As far as work is going here in Pavia, we're pretty much starting from scratch. All the investigators that the missionaries had before ceased having interest. As of right now, we still don't have anyone with whom we're working. However, we've begun working with the members (as we had done in Milano). Already, there's a family that will be bringing another family to church this next week, and our elder's quorum president is bringing one of his friends as well (these actually aren't fruits from our efforts - the members just decided to do it on their own, so that's even better!).
We have a ward here, but it's a lot smaller than the one in Milano. Last Sunday there were probably only about 60 people or so in Sacrament meeting (there are usually more, Anziano Neff said). The vast majority of the members are Italian, and also the majority of the people that live in Pavia are also Italian. So, I'm really excited to be working a lot again with the Italians and building up the kingdom here in Italy with the natives (in Milano there were A LOT more foreigners).
I want to share a cool miracle that happened this past week. We walked up to a bus stop to wait for a bus. There was an 18 year old boy (a lot of times it's a little awkward to try to talk to other guys the same age about the Gospel). However, we began talking to him and we jumped straight into talking about the gospel. He opened up a bit and we got talking. I ended up going and sitting down next to him, and we talked about some things for a while. He is agnostic - he said he has to see in order to believe. Then, his friend pulled up on a scooter. We talked about some similar things with this friend. He was more stubborn than the first. However, I got testifying about how we can know, and how I came to know, even if I never have "seen." Then, a guy a little bit away jumped into the conversation. He seemed really promising and I got thinking that it was a cool miracle to how we got talking to him. So, I turned my attention away from the 2 boys to this man. In the course of this conversation, I felt like I should share Ether 12:6, so I opened up the Book of Mormon and read it. The man with whom I was talking lost interest and stopped talking, but then the friend of the first boy asked to hear the scripture again. He then came over and copied the verse into his phone. He said that it hit him and made him think a lot. This boy and his friend then got up and left (we didn't get his info), but hopefully this scripture and experience will help open this boy up for the gospel in the future! It was cool miracle that took a lot of unexpected twists and an unforeseen finish.
Anyway, that's my week!
Thanks to you all!
-Anziano Barnes
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