Buon Giorno!

This last week was pretty exciting. Due to various reasons we only had THREE members in church....and SEVEN investigators!!! hahaha. It was pretty awesome. I taught the gospel principles lesson about Fasting. My companion gave a talk in sacrament meeting. Speaking of which, I think I forgot to tell you, but I've started giving talks more regularly.

You would all be amazed how much I talk about you when I meet and teach people. I've realized that people really like when you get personal, and so I try to always be as real, sincere, and personal as possible. For example, the other day I was teaching a lesson and I used a quote from President Spencer W Kimball, and when I was explaining who he was I mentioned that he is actually the prophet from when my dad served a mission.

The other cool thing we did this week was we sent on splits with the missionaries from Agrigento. That was pretty fun. I went with Anziano Mikesell (he was companions with Anziano Rowland in Crotone). He also served with Grant Barlow (from Pine View High School). We had a good time. We had an awesome lesson with Christian and Antonella. They're both incredible. On Sunday during Gospel Principles class, we had an investigator that we hadn't really explained the Book of Mormon to yet (okay, so we had really only talked to him once and so we hadn't talked about that yet), and anyway, Antonella started responding to his questions and SHE bore testimony about the Book of Mormon! It was totally sweet.
Elisa wants to get baptized so bad, but she needs to get married first, and so we're waiting for Ishan's family to send some papers up from Egypt. Hopefully there won't be any problems with that because I've heard some crazy things about Egypt lately.

I guess that's about all the news for this week. On Saturday is when we'll receive transfer calls. I think it's about 50-50 for whether I'll stay here or go. I'm down either way. We're having tons of success here in Gela, but I think that for the rest of my mission things are going to keep going really well.

A principle I’ve been working on teaching lately is that the Gospel Blesses Families. It's also true that the family is the best place to put the gospel of Jesus Christ into practice. In our family I've seen that when we did family prayers together, we were more unified. Besides just the act of praying together, we also had a chance to talk about different things while we waited for everyone to get there. haha (even if there are only four of us). Anziano Destefanis loved to do an example like this, if you take one page of the book of mormon, how long would it take to tear in half? But if you take the whole book, how long would it take? When we're all unified in the gospel of Jesus Christ, we become a lot stronger. It's like the old commercial with the chopsticks! If you have one chopstick, it breaks right in two. If you have a fat wad of chopsticks, you can't break them!! Unity is Strength!!

Anyway, I'm really greatful that we're all members of the church and that we can help each other. We really are crazy blessed. Just look at how sweet our lives are!
I hope that I can continue to help other people have more faith and unity in their families because I know that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only real way to have lasting happiness, and that thanks we know that families can be sealed together forever to live in a state of happiness in the presence of God for all eternity.

It's totally incredible.
Thank you for being such a great family. Have a fantastic week!

Love,
Anziano Banks