Rome to Bari

We made it to Rome!

       We are finally in Italy! After years of dreaming of serving a mission, 9 months waiting after our call arrived, 2 weeks in the MTC and almost 18 hours of travel time we are finally here! We had a wonderful (and exhausting day) on Wednesday. We met Presidente and Sorella Morris at the mission home (The Villa). The three arriving couples were met at the airport by Anziani Bates and Stolt as well as Sorella Stolt. They took us to drop of our luggage and then straight to the Villa. We had a delicious lunch with the Browns, Denisons and Morris'. After that we ran off to get our Permesso (residency permission?) and then Italian cellphones. They intentionally kept us awake all day to help us get adjusted to local time more quickly. It was a very long day and we were exhausted.  The Weeds hosted us in their home overnight and we enjoyed getting to know another mission couple. 

         On Thursday we were able to do a temple session in the Rome Temple! We have visited the temple under construction twice and were so excited to finally be able to do a session in the beautiful temple. What a blessing to the Italian saints as well as to visitors from all over the world. The temple itself is stunning and perfectly reflects the heritage of this area. Luke was brave and did all his ordinance work in the temple in Italian. After the temple we toured the Visitor Center which is also amazing. After that it was off to Bari.

        The drive to Bari was itself quite the adventure. It is about a four and a half hour drive from Rome to Bari. Much of the drive is on the autostrada (highway) but there were sections that were two lane roads. One of the features of the mission car (Toyota Yarus) is that there is a recording that warns you when you are exceeding the speed limit. Every time the speed limit changed the new speed was updated on the dashboard of the car (no excuses for speeding here). Anyway, the mission has some sort of software program that warns when you are going too fast. Our observation about drivers here is that the speed limits are merely a suggestion. There was one section of the road that the speed limit was 60 Km, cars were zipping past us whenever they could. Finally a big truck came up behind us and he couldn't pass us because of traffic coming at us in the other direction. Anziano Ellsworth is going 70 in a 60 zone and the truck starts blasting his horn. When he speeds up a little the car starts reminding him "check your speed", finally he looks at me and says, what a choice, get yelled at by the car or squashed by the truck! Through it all Luke was unflappable. I on the other hand, have a few new gray hairs! After all the excitement of the drive we arrived safe and sound to Bari and moved into our cute little apartment. 

     We are thrilled to be here and are very excited to get to work! We have our first GANS (Giovane Adulti Non Sposati/ YSA) activity on Saturday. We can't wait to meet the missionaries and our GANS. We hope to be of some service in this part of the Lord's vineyard. More than anything we are looking forward to getting to work!

    

 

Completion of our MTC experience

On Friday, January 27, we finished our training at the MTC--what an amazing experience that was for us.  We made quick friends with our fellow YSA couples in our district and we'll miss them as they head out into different parts of the mission field.  We'll be serving in the Rome mission with Anziano and Sorella Denison, who've been assigned to Palermo for a couple of months before transferring to Napoli.  Elder and Sister Nichols will be serving in Baltimore, with the YSA wards there.  Elder and Sister Matheson are headed to Ottawa, Ontario.  The last YSA couple in our district is Elder and Sister Cottle, who will be just across the Adriatic from us in Tirana, Albania.

Today is our last day in Utah before we fly out tomorrow morning.  We're sad to leave our children, grandchildren, parents and good friends behind, but we're also very excited to go to Italy to serve our fellow brothers and sisters there.  The Lord had been good to us and we've been greatly blessed.  We hope we can be a means for the Lord to bless others through us.

Arrival at the Missionary Training Center

 We arrived at the MTC on Monday morning along with 100 or so other senior missionaries.  Most were assigned to either the "Member and Leader Support" or "Military Relations" categories.  Just five of us missionary couples are assigned as "Young Single Adult" missionaries, and the five of us YSA couples were put together in the same MTC district.  Also in our district is Elder and Sister Denison, who will be serving with us in Rome as YSA missionaries.  Their assignment is to Palermo for four months then they will transfer to Napoli to be the first YSA couple there.

During the lunch break with all the missionaries here at the MTC, we found a group of young Elders and Sisters going to Rome with us.  What a delight to meet them.  We look forward to serving along side them!

As disciples of Christ, Liz and I are ever grateful for this opportunity to serve as full-time missionaries.  We will miss our family and friends, but we're thrilled to serve our dear brothers and sisters in the Puglia  region of Italy.

Mission Call and Assignment

We received our mission call on May 17, to the Italy Rome Mission as stake Young Single Adult specialists!  We were both hoping to be called to Italy as that is where I served as a young man, but after corresponding with the incoming president to the Italy Milan Mission, we were quite sure we would be called to Milan and very pleasantly surprised to get the call to Rome instead.  Several weeks ago, we were able to visit with President Morris and he assigned us to work in the Puglia Stake where we will be living in Bari.  We're thrilled with the assignment and can hardly believe that we're only a few weeks away from starting.  We begin two weeks at the Provo Missionary Training Center on January 16, then fly to Italy on January 31.

Pictured is the missionary board in our dining room, with a map of southern Italy over our world map.  This map covers most of the Rome Mission.

Senior missionary papers submitted

During our 34 years of marriage, Liz and I have often looked forward to the day when we would have the opportunity to serve together as senior missionaries.  Today we finished the final step meeting with our stake president.  Our application has been completed and the paperwork is off to the brethren and now we wait for our missionary assignment.

This has been a sweet time for us as we've contemplated our lives together and looked forward to the day we retire from paid employment and embarked on a mission together.  We've been truly blessed and we look forward to blessing others.

This was an awesome week!! PS I left this out of last weeks email.  WE ARE GETTING SMARTPHONES.  Crazy!  

We had our temple trip today!! That was awesome!  We had our appointment set by the mission for the 8:30 am session.  Which for us is a terrible time to schedule a session an hour away for missionaries that can't drive themselves.  We knew about the trip 3 weeks in advance and even then, we didn't have someone to drive us til Saturday, and he actually forgot all about til we knocked his door!  It was a crazy scenario that almost kept us away from the House of the Lord!!

We had a fairly slow week besides that anyways.  All of our investigators have dropped us except 1, so we have 1 person to teach reliably... and she doesn't want to come to church... or read the Book of Mormon.  In any case we are still working with her and will get a better update this next week hopefully!

Anyways, gotta get going but just wanted to update y'all on my Book of Mormon reading.  I'm currently towards the end of 3rd Nephi.  The part when Christ came and changed game in the Americas.  In my reading this time around, I'm reading about 16 pages a day and I skip the Chapter headings entirely.  For some reason, it reads more like a story book rather than scripture.  Not in a bad way, but I absorb so much more detail reading it like this! Once I'm done with this one I'm gonna do another slow read.

Elder Ellsworth

April 16th


woops!! sorry about last week! I forgot to hit the send button and didn't end up sending anything. This is last weeks email

We had a good week and did a ton of productive work. We doubled down on our tracting efforts and met a less active because of it. It was a tracting Miracle that we found her! We were just out tracting and a door swung open before us and from inside we heard "Elders come on in!". We were just a little apprehensive, a door opened before us and that meant either a member, or a bible basher. Thankfully it was a member! She is not active and hadn't let the ward know she was there and wants to come back to church. We invited her and gave her a blessing before we left. All in all it was a good experience for both of us.  Her name is sis Brown and her son is Danny!  They are both awesome people and are going to come back to Church since we found them!  

Above is last weeks email.  Below is this weeks email.  (Again sorry)

We had a crazy week!!  A lot of weird stuff happened to us.  We had a whole lesson with an atheist, where the entire time he continued to belittle us.  It went on for about 2 hours with us hardly saying anything.  We ended it with giving him a Book of Mormon and our phone number.  Also we had a very interesting conversation with a lady who claimed clairvoyance and being able to speak with spirits.  Interesting, and we were just a little relieved when we found out she was out of our area, because neither of us know much about that.  We also had a lesson with our newest investigator, Lynette, and it was a review of the first lesson.  It went well, and she is awesome!! She actually works at the family history center 3 days a week.  She knows more about genealogy than either of us combined.  Totally out of our depth again!

All in all it was an awesome week!!

Elder Ellsworth