Pday in Orbetello

I am sorry, we dont have much time today!! We are running off to Orbetello for Pday, its in our prostelyting zone but we decided we have to go there because it is in Tuscany and Tuscany is a dream :)

I recorded something about our musical number on Sunday, haha. We got applause from the congregation. I dont think they are used to having musical numbers.
Tiziana and Lucio came to church!! It was wonderful!! I am so excited for Tiziana especially, she is so kind and warm and open and bright. They are a beautiful family. Wow. So much more to say about them and no time to say it!

I cant tell you how excited I am for general conference. I have never been more excited.
Found some neat people this week, some nice Jehovah's Witnesses (good thing they were nice, because I had some not nice encounters with them earlier in the week. Sometimes they can be really mean!), and a unversity student who I am convinced I was supposed to meet. It is a cool story, there were a series of promptings that led us to find her and talk to her. I have been feeling like I needed to write out a few quotes on notecards to carry around. One of them was about the universe and the greatness of our God and His purpose. I met someone else a month ago and wished I had this quote with me. I felt like I should write it out again but I forgot. But then we ran into him again and I still hadn't written it out. And then a few days later we ran into him and I thought to myself "Wow, I really need to follow this prompting now!". So I wrote it out finally along with another quote about adversity and the influence of Satan in the world. Then, the day before, we picked out the type of person we wanted to find. Someone in her twenties, Italian, with brown hair and glasses. Thursday morning we were finding on the street and we decided to run and catch a bus. We were running to catch it and we passed this girl who matched the description. I though, darn it, we should really stop and talk to her but I dont want to because if we do, we will miss our bus! So we kept running until I finally decided we had to follow through on this prompting and we stopped and turned around and talked to her instead of catching the bus.
She started off very skeptical. She was atheist. She was studying astrophysics. The universe quote was absolutely perfect for her. She talked about the ugliness of the world and all the suffering. The other quote was great for her as well. We talked for a long time about suffering and the purpose of God and the message of the Restoration and how the Book of Mormon was tangible proof for skeptics like her and me. I was so grateful for the experiences I had had in my life that led to me to understand why she thought the way she did ("maybe you only believe because you want to believe" I understand that point of view very well). She completely changed from the beginning of our conversation to the end of it. She went from skeptical to curious and accepting. She said she would come to church and look at the internet site and maybe read some of the book of mormon online. It was really neat to see how following a series of promptings (writing out the two quotes, one of which Heavenly Father made sure I wrote out by having me run into the other guy several times, running to catch the bus, stopping to talk to the girl we were looking for that day) led us to a great girl who listened.

I love you all! I am so grateful for the Atonement that allows me to wake up every day and decided who I want to be and what I want to accomplish, regardless of past choices or not living up to my potential in the past.

Sorella Askew