It hardly seems possible that we've now been here in Italy for over three months. I remember our boys describing the passing of time during their missions where the days seem like weeks, and the weeks seem like days.
Yesterday, Liz and I headed down to Lecce, a city of 100,000 people located in the heel of Italy. Our Taranto missionary district had their weekly district council at the branch meeting house so we headed down to join them. The drive from Bari is very beautiful and one of our favorites, as it follows the coastline down with the Adriatic Sea to our left and miles and miles of olive groves to our right. On the way down, we decided on diversion and left the main road to pass through Ostuni, know as the white city. It is built on a hill overlooking the valleys of olive groves and the sea to the west. The church has been working on producing the Book of Mormon videos, and they recently filmed the video for the allegory of the tame and wild olive trees, found in Jacob 5, at an olive grove in Ostuni. The video segment is still in post production, but when you're finally able to view it, you can catch a glimpse of the beauty all around us here in the Puglia Region.
After our district council, we had made arrangements to take the sister missionaries in Lecce out with our car to find and meet less active members in the area. In our efforts, we had a curious encounter with a black cat. We stopped to look for a family in a several story apartment building. Thinking that the family lived on the fifth floor, we took the elevator up and all got out. When it turned out to be the wrong floor, Liz and I headed up and the sisters headed down looking for the right door. On our way up, we passed a black cat, siting on the staircase. On our way back down the the fifth floor, we startled the cat and he jumped on to the window sill as though he were trying to get out. Good thing the window was closed as we were very high up. One floor down, we met a woman who described the cat as a stray that had wandered in and couldn't find it's way out again. As the sisters were equally unsuccessful in finding the family, we decided to head every further up the staircase. As we again passed the now very agitated cat, it gave each of us a menacing and threatening hiss and snarly as we passed. I passed last, and as I did, it ran and jumped up behind me and over the opening in the staircase, barely catching the opposite stairs heading up and ran up to the floor above us. A miss and that cat would have dropped several stores to certain death below.
Now we were all a bit jumpy and decided to take the elevator up to the top floor bypassing the menacing cat on the floor between us. However, once we reached the top floor, we discovered the cat guarding our exit from the elevator. I managed to shoo it away but it gave us all a start to find it there hissing at us as we got out of the elevator. Unfortunately, we weren't successful in finding the family we were looking for, but we did find a couple of people yesterday.
We love serving as missionaries in this beautiful land among this amazing people. We miss our children and grandchildren, parents, siblings and friends, but we truly love being here. We'll try harder to keep this blog more up to date and relevant.
Love, Luke & Liz
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