Week 67 and all is good.

Well hello my friends and peoples alike! Hope you are all doing quite well. Well Pordenone is pretty sweet, I'd say. These first few days have been great. So there are two wards here, an American Military Ward and an Italian Ward, so we've got lots of families to work with.

The past few days, not much as happened because the work is pretty slow here right now, but we are going to change that. But luckily we did visit a few members the past week. We are trying to visit both wards equally so neither feels a lack of love, because we love 'em both. Hearing American English again is really odd. I definitely have to get used to that. Plus the American way of doing church things, it's just different from the way Italians do them. But yeah everything is great here, I'm just having to remember who speaks English and who speaks Italian.

We met our new convert yesterday, who was baptized just a couple of weeks ago. He's a young guy, like 23 years old and very chill, so the lessons go quite smoothly. He's a really cool guy though and
everything is going well for him.

So my new companion is Anz. Vaclaw. He's from Oklahoma and we did a lot of the same stuff before the mission. Various sports, lots of music stuff, too many video games, so we've got a good amount of things to talk about. He's a great guy. He actually finishes his mission at the end of this transfer so we will definitely only do 6 weeks together.

This next week is pretty hectic. Tomorrow, we leave early in the morning to go back to Modena, my last city, for a conference with the new area president, Elder Kearon. Then Thursday night we leave again to go to Milano for mission council with President Dibb and all the other zone leaders and assistants. Then right after that, which is on Friday, we are doing a scambio with the assistants. So yeah we will have had a full 2 days in our proselyting area by Sunday night hahahha. But that's okay, we've got lots of driving and other cool stuff to do.

Driving. That's weird. I don't drive just yet, I still have to do a training, but having a car is so strange. We walked outside yesterday and it was drizzling a little, and I was like oh no I need to go get a rain jacket! And then I realized we had a car. It's nice but it makes me feel bad because we are one of three companionships outside the office that has a car hahaha. But it's extremely useful honestly. We
get everywhere so much quicker and weather is whatever to us.

Also we went today to the Air Force base. We had Taco Bell for lunch which was soooo strange. Then we bought some goldfish and peanut butter and there was so much other stuff that I wanted to buy but couldn't because we are poor at the moment. My goodness, American food rocks.

So I was reading the latest Ensign and I came across this quote from Elder Hallstrom's talk in the April 2014, conference. He said,

"Once any of us conclude, 'That’s just the way I am,' we give up our ability to change. We might as well raise the white flag, put down our weapons, concede the battle, and just surrender--any prospect of winning is lost."

This is so extremely common. We have this little things, little habits that we all do, that maybe aren't the best, but could be better, but we tell ourselves, "that's just the way I am." The first step to fixing any problem is to first recognize the problem. If we continue to tell ourselves that something we do is not a problem, we throw in the towel, we raise up the white flag, we absolutely give up all possibilities of changing, unless we decide to accept the fact that we can change, that there is an Atonement and it does work. We must accept that we can change. We can change.

I hope you all have a great week! Know that you are loved.
Do great things today.
Anziano Benjamin Guthrie