Anziano Ruiz in the Italy Rome Mission: Spiritual, mental or even physical growth that comes through persevering or enduring through a life difficulty, is a miracle.

October 3, 2017

This week has felt so long! We have had some awesome experiences. Our zone conference was supposed to be on Friday but it got moved to yesterday; that actually turned out to be a really sweet miracle! I'll explain that later, though.

So some of you might have noticed that I've been on Facebook again. That is because it is now a new tool for missionary work. We talked a lot about that yesterday during the conference. So it will be very interesting to use. I know we are going to see jumps in the work! Conference was great I always love going to Rome.

We stopped some guys about a week ago because they had a basketball and they told us that we needed to go to a certain part of town to play some ball so last Tuesday we went to check it out and made some good friends. They told us to come back Friday for 3 on 3 and losers buy pizza so we were super down for that (totally forgetting about zone conference.) So then we realized that we had conference and were so bummed! The next day we got word that it was moved to Monday so we were just really pumped. Friday comes rolling around, we go to the court and played some ball for a while. We beat them a good amount so we got free pizza. Then as we are sitting there eating pizza one of the guys asks us "so why are you guys here other than the fact that you want to be" in regards to the mission. So we taught all about 8 of them the restoration! It was super sweet, they were super into it! After that we kinda split into groups and I was talking to some kids about the plan of salvation and Anziano Wagstaff was talking to a guy about something else. It was awesome! We told them that when we come back we can share a message with them and they were excited about that. That night was pretty awesome, too, haha. We went finding and it was sweet. We ended up pushing some random guy's car like 200 meters and we were just cracking up.

General conference was awesome! It was cool having other missionaries in the city that morning. We had a giant breakfast together and it was really good. I really liked Elder Hallstrom's talk on miracles. It's just a testimony that there are still miracles today but also a great reminder that indvidual faith does not overrule the plan of God. Often times, miracles are not manifested in "great healings" or "rising from the dead". We need to remember and recognize that the spiritual, mental or even physical growth that comes through persevering or enduring through a life difficulty, is a miracle. And that is made possible through the Atonement of our loving Savior, Jesus Christ! I know that Jesus Christ is our Savior and that He lives. I know that not only did He suffer for the sins of the world, but suffered for our pain, our afflictions and temptations of any kind! We are so lucky to have a loving Heavenly Father that not only sent his son to die for us, but also revealed a perfect plan to living prophets and apostles in these latter days, of how to receive the power of his son Jesus Christ and overcome all things!

Vi voglio bene!!

Anziano Ruiz

Zone Conference