November 17, 2015
You are assigned to labor in... South America?
Ah, what a great week
it has been! Transfer day was great. We were at a random stop somewhere and I
got to see my trainer Anziano Borner for a second, just before the train left.
Then when we stopped in Napoli I was pretty stoked to see my MTC friend Anziano
Lancaster and my BYU RA Anziano Friedman! When we finally arrived in Rome, I
met my new companion, Anziano Saffer. After we said hi to each other, he told
me something like "well we could wait a second for the rest of the
missionaries to get off the train so you could say goodbye real quick, but
there's no reason to waste time so after that let's get out of here."
Right from then I knew we were going to get along! Ha. He's a super good guy.
Out of our district of us and four sisters, I am one of just two from
America.
Anyway, referring to
the title of my email: I was a bit surprised to see that tons of people here,
and especially tons of members, are from Latin America. Particularly Peru. We
were in a lesson with our ward mission leader the other day and all of a sudden
he decided to just start talking in Spanish, despite the fact that everyone
present was perfectly good at Italian. Afterwards I was like "OK. Cool. I
understood maybe four words there I guess I'll just bear my testimony now."
There are some great people here though. One of them is our ward pianist, who
wrote several songs for the Italian hymn book. Needless to say, I was not asked
to accompany the music on Sunday. :)
The other day I heard
through the grapevine that Rome 1 hasn't had a baptism in a year. And to be
honest, the work right now is pretty slow. Suddenly I saw an unspoken challenge
from President. Leave two young, hungry missionaries together in a bad area and
see what they do. Well, you had better believe I told my comp the streak is
breaking during our companionship. I don't like how sometimes missionaries say
that areas where there are a lot of investigators have "lots of work"
while other places that aren't seeing success have "not much work".
In my opinion, the latter areas have the most work in the mission, because we
have to catch up to others and GET investigators before we start teaching and
baptizing them. We started doing this last night, where we took the subway to
the Vatican and found our way the four or five mile walk home.
Quick things: P-day was
on Tuesday because we had zone conference yesterday… with my cousin! Didn't
think we'd see each other this soon.
A couple guys from
Salt Lake City came to church to take pictures. I will admit it was pretty cool
to have someone taking a picture of you making a comment in priesthood while
someone else in the back of the room is simultaneously translating what you are
saying (there are a lot of English speakers here so they have to do that).
Well, if yours truly is on the cover of a future Ensign, don't be surprised. ;)
The Italian has
definitely improved. I now say all of my prayers throughout the day in Italian except
my longer evening prayer.
This week I had the
thought that I am literally "walking on water" in a sense. With the
experiences we have every single day, I should be SO exhausted, homesick,
depressed, and frustrated. It is such a miracle and a huge evidence of the
prayers and heavenly support we receive that we can do this work every day and
love it.
Love,
Anziano Cannon
Fratello Mannino. Incredible guy.
African branch president.
English course
Famiglia Saccone, Famiglia Mantegna
(investigators) and Salvatore
Eman and his friend Endurance came
to see me off at the train station.
First P-day. Vatican in back.
This castle we went to was part of
the movie
"Angels and Demons" if you've seen that.
November 23, 2015
So on Saturday my
companion and I had an interesting comp study where he revealed to me certain
things about our ward that I hadn't noticed my first Sunday there.
For example, right now there are so few willing men that only active members have
home teachers. Yes, you read that right - only ACTIVE families have home
teachers. And WE missionaries have home teaching assignments.
I could give 31 reasons why this is
completely inappropriate, but I won't. We scheduled a meeting with our ward
mission leader and kind of vented a tiny bit. He's a good guy. But to be honest
I felt a bad afterwards. So I repented and decided that this would take a ton
of prayer and faith that the Spirit will guide us to know what we can do and
how we can do it to improve this ward, trusting that God knows which situations
are best for a "cleansing of the temple" approach and which situations
are better dealt with in a more positive way.
And I had a potential opportunity to
"break boxes" (Italian slang for calling to repentance) a little in
my testimony yesterday, especially after the less-than-desirable welcome our
investigator Marco had just received, but I let the Spirit guide me and instead
ended up expressing a ton of love I felt and knew that God has for each of
them. And we have been blessed.
That day we befriended an
Argentinian kid, who’s been home from his mission for two years but just came
to Italy and is working on switching his Spanish to Italian right now. Being
the awesome RM he is, he told us how where he used to live he would go with the
missionaries once a week, "if that's ok". "Yes, yes that's fine
with us" I quickly responded. :)
But yea we've seen some good
success. We should have a couple baptismal dates by the end of this week. I
have never worked harder on my mission, or prayed harder for guidance, despite
this being the least numerically successful week of my mission. We talk to SO
MANY people every day. I absolutely would've gotten up on the front of the bus
and started preaching to everyone, instead of wasting time just talking to
individuals, if my companion hadn't been a little worried they might get
annoyed with us! Ha.
I will just quickly say, without
expounding more than necessary, that my health and physical safety have been
pretty miraculously preserved during the past six months (OK, four and a half
months - nothing can happen in the MTC). But it's good that we went to the
Vatican last week, because we missionaries are now no longer to go over
there.
Well I guess my spiritual thought
today will just be that Jesus Christ is the center of all we do. Joseph Smith
said that all we have as members of the church - rain gutter regattas, relief
society activities, cool "I'm a Mormon" videos about Irish runners -
they are all just appendages to the real reason we are here. Jesus Christ and
His Atonement. And I can't wait for one more reason to help people come to him
as we approach the Christmas season!
Love,
Anziano Cannon
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