Anziano McConkie, who is a performing arts major, sang a solo "Credo in te, Gesù" ("I Believe in Christ"). He has an amazing tenor voice with tremendous range; it was absolutely beautiful. The Anziani had three different investigators at church, including a young man from Egypt who is a Christian -- a rather threatened group there from what I understand. We invited him to join us at the Institute, and Anziano McConkie was quite excited at the thought of eating a taco if they came with him there on Tuesday!
After church, our plan had been to have two home teaching visits, but Sergio didn't make it, and the Hubers had a conflict with a stake meeting. Thus, we ended up just coming home and staying here the rest of the day. It was quite nice to have some down time, after a busy week.
It was my wife's week to give the lesson in Relief Society, again on the Sabbath. She told the group to just call her "Sorella Domenica" ("Sister Sunday"), because that's her assigned topic for several month in a row. According to her, the lesson went ok, but not her best -- teaching can be like that. She had stayed up late the night before after the baptism to finish preparing her lesson, so she took a well-deserved nap in the afternoon.
Dee writes:
I really loved the preparation for this lesson. I got some new insights into how to understand the Sacrament, which really increased my relationship with Christ. The room was too warm and some people got sleepy--I should have said something about it. I would have liked more participation, so I have to learn to ask better questions that draw people out. Doug is really good at this, and I'm going to pick his brain. One of the things I presented was Covey's Important/Urgent matrix. No one had seen it before, so it made an impact. It's important for so many aspects of our life.
We spoke with our daughter Wendy on the phone, including some computer tech support from me. In the evening we also called our friend Chod in Carlsbad, who has leukemia and is going through some cancer treatments right now. Being a senior missionary is so much different from the restrictions on young missionaries. It's a rare day when we don't have a least one phone call with the US, compared to the young missionaries who get two calls per year. And of course we constantly use the internet, whereas they get limited access once or twice a week. We have so many different ways to communicate that it often gets confusing: calls/texts using our Italian numbers, email, WhatsApp, Facebook, Google Voice for calls/texts using our US numbers, Skype, and MagicJack. Often we have to pause a bit to determine the best way to contact somebody.
Before going to bed, we checked the weather for Monday, by asking Amazon Alexa and Google Home, of course. They each predicted that the low temperature would be minus 7 degrees Celsius or lower, which is about 19F, about ten degrees (F) lower than anything we have seen. Yikes! We have more or less converted to using Celsius (and the metric system) here by now, and it feels fairly natural, but sometimes we have to convert numbers to US equivalents as a reality check.