Anziano Jonathan Bushman: My Gift to Christ this season! Dec 7, 2011

Buon Natale!

Investigator updates:

We met with Akim (Hakim, we just found out how to actually spell his name) and Kochi (Cucci) on thursday, and had a super great lesson! At first I was kind of worried, because Akim had just woken up, and people don't normally pay attention when they're tired.... BUT we went over the Plan of Salvation and get this- he took notes, and stopped us when he didn't understand something. That never happens!!! He was way into it! The Spirit was very strong, so we invited him to be baptized on the 7th of January, and he accepted! Kochi is still a little nervous because he doesn't understand english or italian very well, but he is still reading the Book of Mormon and coming to church!

Then, the next day we were finally able to meet with Maxwell. And we did the same exact thing with him, and taught him the plan of salvation. And although he didn't take notes, he loved the lesson, and accepted baptism also for the 7th of January! It was super awesome!!!!!

Bianka is still coming to church, but I'm still very concerned about her... she doesn't really seem interested in much of church, and they haven't been able to meet with us nearly as often lately...

Cool experience:

Okay, so mom you mentioned something about how cool it is when we just do what the Lord asks us to do, because then he opens doors for us. Well, Sis Wolfgramm invited us to pick a Christlike attribute for this month, and to make it a "gift to Christ" by doing something everyday to improve on that attribute. Well, mine is patience, and I did not realize how impatient I am hahahaha. SO I kind of forgot about this challenge until the 4th of December, but since then I've been doing a lot better, and part of this challenge is to write down a specific thing that we did each day to improve, and so it's been in my mind now when I'm about to explode at someone "wait, maybe this could be my gift to Christ for today". So that gives me the desire to be patient and what not. SO, story time. We just finished a missionary exchange, and quite often I end up being the one that has to travel up to firenze (90min) to pick up and drop off my companion and then travel back down to Siena. BUT that's only part of it. So we had just gotten to Firenze and we were waiting for the other missionaries to get there, and so we call them and long story short they were more than an hour late (even though the city they were coming from is 10min from Firenze). I can't say I was too surprised, because they are almost always late, but this time, we had lessons to get to, and appointments that could not be moved. So, when I found out how late they were going to be I remembered the gift to Christ deal-io, and started seeing what I could do to rearrange appointments. All in all we got to all of our appointments after some adjusting, but the real miracle is the train ride home. So the train we ended up taking was pretty sweet. We grabbed the first seats we found, and about 5 min later some girl sat down across the aisle from us. So, with very little effort we started talking, and she completely opened up to us about how she's trying to come closer to Christ, and we just had a great 90 min conversation with her! We got her number, gave her a book of Mormon, and she welcomely committed to reading it! And, she wants to bring a friend the next time we meet! Sweet!!!

So yeah. Moral of the story: do what God (and his servants, it is the same) tells you to. You won't regret it.

vi voglio tutti un sacco di bene!!!

-Anziano Bushman

Bahahaha, We found a super old missionary slide reel in our closet, and it's got all kinds of messages, with synchronized cassette tapes as well for the audio! hahahaha! In fact, dad, did you ever use these? Some of them have copyrights around 1976ish, so right before your mission.