It was a lovely morning at church today. Fast and Testimony meeting had a bunch of wonderful testimonies, and the spirit was wonderful. Attendance seems to be a bit higher recently, which also makes it enjoyable.
Blake came to our ward; he hasn't been to church much in years, but he seemed to really enjoy meeting everyone and hanging with the other GANS. He got two offers for lunch from members! The Hubers sat right in front of us during Sacrament meeting, and afterwards I felt inspired to ask Sister Huber if they would be willing to take care of Blake after his wisdom teeth got pulled. After her initial stunned response to the fact that he is doing it in Italy and not in the US, she said they would be happy to help out. She even volunteered to drive him to/from the dentist, even though she had just met him. We have wonderful people in our ward!
My Sunday School lesson, on Moses 5-7 (Cain and Enoch), went quite well. I started with my cognate story about "divertire gli occhi"
which brought out a huge round of laughter, then I thanked them for putting up
with our poor American-style Italian. We had a good discussion on a
number of topics as we went through the scriptures, with perhaps ten
different people sharing comments and thoughts. Sister Magnanti
afterwards told me how much she enjoyed the lesson, that I always gave
her something to really think about. That's my goal.
There was one particularly fun part of my Sunday School lesson. At one point,
in discussing Enoch's extremely reluctant response to being called as a
prophet ("I'm young; nobody likes me; I can't speak well"), we talked
about how we often feel inadequate for callings. I mentioned that
President Monson was called as a bishop at age 23, and how strange
that must have seemed to him, not to mention everyone in his
congregation. One the spur of the moment, I asked "who in the class is
23?" One of our GANS, Bryan, raised his hand. He is just coming back
into activity in the church, a real nice kid, the son of some faithful
ward members. So I asked, "what if Bryan here was called as the next
bishop -- how would we all feel?" We had a nice discussion about it, but
Bryan was smiling ear-to-ear, very tickled to be considered as a
leader, even if in a rather playful way. It was fun to see.
After church we hung around quite a while visiting with ward members. This is truly becoming home. It's a small struggling ward, but it's ours now. We also cleaned up in terms of US items: Ugo gave me a twelve pack of cans of A&W Rootbeer for the Institute, and the Hubers gave us huge bag of items they bought at our request this week at the commissary in Naples. For example, at this point, we have a stash of lotion kleenex enough to last through several colds. Dee also got a bunch of cooking supplies for the Institute, such as Hershey kisses, ranch dressing mix, chow mein noodles and rice vinegar.
Sister Knies, the mission nurse who lives in our complex, flew to Salt Lake Sunday morning to accompany one of the men who is here working on the temple construction. He has had a couple of heart attack-like episodes in the past few weeks. The Italian cardiologist couldn't find any problems, but his doctor in the US said he should come home right away. She will be back within a week, and she offered to get us a couple of things at Costco. Nice. Saturday evening, she had called me and asked "Is this 1-800-TechSupport?" I was able to help her with an iPhone tech support issue, resolving her problem in a satisfactory (and rather clever :-) way. She was very grateful.
My wife tried to call Anziano Knies Sunday afternoon to offer to help with some stuff while his wife is gone. Every time she tries to call him, she gets a message in Italian saying "this phone number is either no longer in service or is busy". Those are two very different things: it's like saying "this person is either dead or at the beach"! I was able to call him just fine from my mission SIM card (with TIM as the provider), while my Vodafone SIM card gets the same error message as my wife's phone (also Vodafone). So it's as if his phone, with its TIM SIM card, is set up to receive calls only from other TIM SIM cards, which is what all the missionaries use. Very strange. He now knows the issue and will look into it.
I forgot to mention that on Saturday evening we finally got around to leveling out our new fridge. That required putting a small, old breadboard behind the rear left leg and raising the front left leg to match. The result should be pretty stable, and it's very close to being level and doesn't bug me so much.
After church, we
spent the rest of the afternoon/evening at home, which was welcome
and much needed. I caught up on a bunch of things, called my sister
Marilyn, and feel ready for the week to come. I also worked some on
Jomar's laptop, running some tests and making a little bit of progress, but the keyboard is
either defective, or the motherboard has real problems. Monday I will start on my two lessons for Friday, but it has been good to have a day to relax a bit.