NOVEMBER 5. 2014

BUONGIORNO FROM ALESSANDRIA!
Well I sure hope everyone is having a wonderful week; I sure
am! Being a missionary is such a blessing! These past few
days (and it is looking from what we have planned, the next
six weeks), have been and will be the busiest days of my life!
We have so much to do for the zone and the mission, and I
am just so thankful for the wonderful opportunities we have
to teach and serve and testify to the many missionaries we
are called to serve. In our zone are the Gennova, Imperia,
Savona, and Varaze districts. Each has some amazing
missionaries, and we are looking forward to doing
companionship exchanges in each of those areas!
--We had a wonderful opportunity this past Monday to go to
mission council down in Milano, with the other zone and
sister training leaders, as well as the assisstants and the
mission president and his wife. It was an amazing
experience! Let me just tell you one of the highlights! So we
were about halfway through the training, and the assistants
were talking about how we need to inspire our zones to
ALWAYS open their mouths and talk to people, even on the
buses and trains and other public trasportation. So we were
all pumped up about talking to everyone, and feeling the
Spirit, when the assistants were just like "Alright, we are
going to all go out. right now. for one hour. And talk to
EVERYONE! Get on the metro and talk with everyone!" And
then they start handing us all a ticket for the metro, and we
all just rushed out ina huge wave of motivated missionaries.
They caught us completely off-guard.

wonderful! Those people had no chance! Everyone between
the church and the station got stopped two or three times,
and so many people on the metros! We saw SO many
miracles! There were so many people that were ready to
hear the gospel, and I personally handed out multiple
pamphlets and talked to so many wonderful people. Many of
them said they had wondered for a long time who we were
and when we were going to talk with them! The Lord
prepares hearts! And the best part!!!...The best part is that
President Dibb and his wife paired up with missionaries and
went out to contact people as well!! It was so wonderful to
be sitting on the metro speaking with someone, and then see
five feet away, my mission president walk up to and strike up
a conversation with someone else on the tram. It was such a
testimony builder for me. As we all returned, we were all
sharing the miracles that had happened, and the Spirit we
had felt. And it was FUN! It was just, fun!
--Since then we have been to Genova twice, once for a
baptismal interview that we conducted, and once to give the
training in district meeting. After that district meeting, we did
the same thing! We caught everyone in the district off guard
by mixing everyone up and telling them to go out for 45
minutes (with us!) and see miracles! And we saw so many
miracles! I was with one of the elders from Genova, and we
saw a man on the street, talked with him, told him where the
church was, and invited him on a tour of it! He walked in and
was like "This is your church!? I work in the floor just above
this! (Because the church in Genova is in a skyscraper, on
one of the floors.) And he gave us his number, was so kind
and wonderful, and told us he would come down one of these
days to see what the meetings are like! What a blessing!
--Whew! I Have a lot to write and not a lot of time! My
fingers are already tired! But this week is going so
wonderfully. My companion is so great! He is the most
spiritual missionary I have ever met, and he is helping me
reach new heights as I pursue my goals to truly become the
missionary and man that the Lord needs me to be.
--The computer I am using sounds like it is going to blow
up....good old internet points here in Italy.
--Oh, yeah! By the way, on the bike ride here to the internet
point, one of the other missionaries got hit by a car! He is
perfectly okay though, but the car had some damage. That
doesn't surprise me because Anziano Pixton is 6'10" and 280
pounds. He is a HUGE man! Size 17 shoes!..i think that's
what he told me.. All the Italians go crazy when they see
him. He came up to us the other day "This is awesome! All
the members want us over for lunch! They take it as a
challenge...to see if the can make enough food to fill me up. I
mean, I can even compete with the sister missionaries in
getting lunch appointments!" haha! Sisters. They get so
many lunch appointments.
--Miracle: This week we have been seeing some wonderful
miracles! One of the greatest happened this last Sunday
evening. We had about 2 hours of space, and were excited
for the chance to do some street contacting. We set goals for
the session, and started with a prayer, and went to work. It
was amazing how the Lord had prepared so many people to
be set in our path. We didn't even make it around the block
once; everywhere we turned there were people to talk to, and
we had some really wonderful gospel conversations! We
ended four of them with prayers, and are excited to follow up
with two of them, whose contact information we obtained.
We paused for a moment as we finished those few hours and
went to unlock the bikes, and just realized how much the
Lord does for His missionaries, and in preparing the hearts of
the people we meet. What a blessing it is to be a missionary,
and to be able to go out on the street and share the good
news with so many of our brothers and sisters, who need it!
--Fast: I was so thankful for that opportunity to participate in
a mission-wide fast we had this past Sunday. We were asked
to fast to become more in-tune with the spirit, and to rise to a
new sense of love for the people and commitment to the Lord
and His work. As I have arrived here in Alessandria, and
been blessed with a wonderful ward and companion, I have
been noticing something inside myself growing. I find myself
thinking about our investigators almost all the time, and often
spontaneously bursting into singing a hymn, without even
thinking about it. This fast has helped me so much to follow-up on the goals I have set and the effort I have been making
to truly become a disciple of Jesus Christ, in my heart as well
as in my mind. It was a great experience!
Everything is going really well here in Alessandria. Anziano
Taylor is a special missionary, and I feel very blessed to be
with him. The ward here is wonderful (The bishop is from
Sicily, and he is a TOTAL stud! He is a convert of eight years,
and just so fired up to do missionary work and to work with
the young people. And the second counselor in the
bishopric, Fratello Zito, is amazing! He is one of the greatest
people I have ever met. He served his mission is England,
and just has such a vision of what things need to be like.),
and though we have been so busy and hardly had a chance
to take a breath, the Lord has helped and blessed us so
much, and we are seeing miracles! I feel blessed and
humbled for the opportunity and blessing that is mine to
testify to and serve and see first hand the changes that are
occuring in the lives of the missionaries in our zone.
I love you all so very much, and am thankful for your love
and support in all that I do. Thank you so much for your
letters and emails, and for your prayers. I rememeber you all
each day! I hope you have a wonderful week!
Love,
Anziano Wilson