Baptism Invites

Dear Family, 

Wow! It sounds like you've been having a wonderful weekend together! I was excited to get on internet today to see how it's been going. 

Our week has been pretty amazing. I think I mentioned last week that Anziano Teschera told us to invite everyone to baptism, even random people on the street. Then for district meeting on Monday, the anziani from Udine gave a training on giving bap invites. At the end they had a do a role play with a preset (where we tell them at the start that we'll be asking them at the end to be baptized, so start thinking about it), a quick restoration lesson, and a baptism invite. A few months ago we President Dibb had us practice giving the restoration in five minutes, so we quickly whipped out our role play in around five minutes. After we finished, the elder we were teaching (who was in the companionship who gave the training) said, 'that was really good. But when we planned this roleplay, we wanted you to be able to do it faster. Try to do it in two minutes.' I was a little flabbergasted. Two minutes for the preset, lesson, and invite?? So we tried. It was a little more choppy and unclear, but I think we were able to do so in about three minutes. 

Then they invited us to try to invite five people to baptism each day this week. Wow! That scared me too. 

 

Yesterday we had three lessons planned where we could invite four people to baptism. So we knew we needed to find atleast one other person on the street to invite. The baptism invite has always terrified me a little. It just seems so big, and maybe they'll be offended or think we're only there to convert them, or never want to see us again, or... the list never ends. I must admit, I wasn't completely on board with the five baptismal invite a day thing. 

So we started a little finding time in the park yesterday and started talking with a man. Sorella Pond was amazing. She immediately went into explaining our purpose as misionaries giving a perfect lead in to a baptism invite, but as always, he got distracted on some little thing and so we established the fact that we were from America, he was from Congo. ect ect. But I knew I had to quickly get back to the invite. So I acted with faith and asked him to be baptized. Without skipping a beat he replied, ''well, I think I should probably know something about your church first. Can we set up an appointment or something?'' 

I think Heavenly Father knew I needed a miracle to go with my first of these baptism invites, but now I'm repented, converted, and will never look at the baptism invite in the same way again. We're still waiting for a yes, but we've yet to have a negative response. I'm impressed. 

I love you all! Have a marvelous week!

Love, 

Sorella Pace