General Conference, and 8 investigators!

Wow - another crazy but wonderful week!  First I'll give an update of the investigators -

Blanchard is one of the Africans (but he speaks French) that has a baptismal date for next weekend (Oct 15).  He is doing wonderful!  He came to conference and absolutely loved it.  And, we were blessed in many ways because we tried (making about 100 phone calls to people all over Firenze and Prato) to make it so that he could watch conference in French.  However, we couldn't arrange it.  But, even though none of the members that speak French in our branch could come, in each session there was someone there that was willing to translate for him!  He had an amazing experience and almost wrote a novel with the notes he took!  ...

Daniel (the guy who is supposed to go back to germany) has been doing well - he's still here, though.  He's going to Rome today to get a passport, and then on Sunday he's taking a bus to get him to Germany.  However, he's still finding new people for us to try to teach and he loves to help us teach the others.  One of his greatest desires is to be baptized and another is to help his family to follow his example!

Godsent has come a long way - he is accepting the truth more and more easily.  He came to conference and he too took a ton of notes. ...

We also have a new investigator - Mike.  He's American!  However, he has been living in Italy for 6 years.  ... We gave him a Book of Mormon yesterday and he's gonna start reading!

We've been working more with a few more Africans - Prince, Joseph, and Raymond.  We had a really cool lesson with them in between sessions of conference.  We taught them the restoration and it went super well.  The spirit really guided the lesson and, after explaining a bunch of stuff about the pattern of apostasy and restoration, we asked what they thought would have happened after the 12 apostles were killed - they got it exactly right!  We asked them what God needed to do - and they got that right too!  We were able to testify a bunch and they seemed to be glowing with understanding that came from the spirit.  We asked them to be baptized and they said that they definitely would after they recieve the confirmation from God that it is all true!  Then, the next session was the one all about the Book of Mormon (Sunday Morning) and the church!

One of the cool miracles this week was General Conference.  We got 8 people there!  The hard part was organizing everything.  We had to get them from Firenze to Prato.  We had to provide food for the Africans that were going to stay with us all day on sunday (it went from 11 until 8).  However, after about a billion phone calls and organization (Anziano Heninger is incredible - he did all of it while we traveled from place to place on the bikes...), everything worked out!  We got all of them there (members gave rides).  We got a bunch of ladies to bring some food for lunch (and it was dang good - a really good pasta dish, fruit, drinks, cake, and other little treats) and we brought a huge "insalata di riso" (a cold rice dish with tomatoes, mozzarella, a bunch of vegetables, and some olive oil - we did about 2 lbs of dry rice... Let's just say we've been having leftovers and we'll be continuing with them as well for a couple days...).  Anyway, all of our investigators loved it!

General Conference inspired me a lot.  It gave me lots of direction for what I want to do for my "personal vision" - what I need to become and how to get there.  There are many things that I need to give up - a bunch of specific things relating to pride and selfishness.  I also want to become a leader who leads by example and influence with lots of love.  General conference is like a 2 day long feast of personal revelation!  I love it!

Being a zone leader is great but really busy.  There aren't ever enough hours in the day to get everything done that we need to.  However, it is great!  We do lots of exchanges (at least one per week), we make a ton of telephone calls (this is one of the most time consuming things - it takes all sunday evening to get the weekly report and numbers- from the end of planning at 9:30 all the way until time for bed, monday morning - about 45 minutes is cut from our morning preparation/studies and another 30 minutes later on; we also do a midweek call session that takes all of wednesday night and we do a ton of other calls all throughout the week).  It's a lot of fun being able to love and serve these other missionaries!  The weird thing is that it doesn't seem like we take all of this time - it really does fly by!

I feel so energized still (I got a huge boost from General conference) and I feel like things are going really well for me personally.  It's been hard and there have been a bunch of trials, but the Lord has strengthened me a ton and I've been able to learn and grow from all of it.

-Anziano Barnes