Arrivederci to a Good Friend...& Please Send Chips & Salsa - 3/31/16

Anziano Ridd is saying "Arrivederci" to his good friend, Cectra Middleton.
She flew out to Yekaterinburg, Russia on Easter Sunday to begin her
missionary work.

Hey Family!!

This week was pretty good. I feel like it went by quickly as I write this, but in the moment it seemed like a century. We are so busy all the time that it’s hard to tell. 

On Easter, Elder Ballard came and gave us an awesome devotional on Christ and shared a story of his grandfather, Melvin Ballard, seeing a vision of Jesus Christ in the temple. He gave the missionaries an awesome blessing as well.

Easter Sunday was also the departure date of Cectra Middleton from the MTC to Russia. She was so ready to go out and serve. I know she is gonna do amazing work out there and just love the people. It was kinda cool, ‘cause I got the opportunity to see her before she left to go there.\

So here is how Church works here in the MTC. (LOOK MAMA, I’M ANSWERING Q's). We have a branch presidency, which is like a bishopric. They lead and preside, and then the "members" are my zone. We have my district, and also the other district of Milan sisters. Of course 2 talks are picked randomly from the missionaries so that’s always super exciting. Together we have 15 missionaries total in the "ward" - a small but pretty awesome group of people. I’m super excited for General Conference here though. 

(Click here to watch & listen to inspirational messages from this weekend’s semi-annual General Conference, starting Saturday morning, April 2nd at 10am MDT - 11am Houston/CDT - through Sunday afternoon.

Well, it sounds like yall had a fun week! A trip over to Waco and all that jazz. 

Ok, I’m gonna do this once for Mutter's sake. Here is the MTC schedule pretty much. We have two 3-hour blocks of classes where we are taught by teachers every day; then we have about 3 hours of meals, 1½-ish hours of personal study, 1 hour of companion study, 1 1/2 hours of language study, and 1 hour of exercise time each day. It’s kind of lame being on the same schedule. But I make it fun by just...idk by just being myself and it’s fun... 

Last Tuesday we had a nice devotional from Elder Vinson of the 70. He talked on Christ and faith. He used a lot of Old Testament scriptures...and I realize I probably ought to study those more.

Okay, so Anziano Boscan and I have been flying in our Italian knowledge...that is - till about Monday. We decided yesterday that we need to do something so that we keep progressing. So this week we are going to step up our game. We plan to do a day of only Italian next Friday, and then speak our language 2x more. We also are going to start learning Italian grammar on our own so we can speak better....grammar is so important.

Okay, so funny stuff this week. On Monday we started to teach our new investigator, Gennaro. We were giving a commitment to read the Book of Mormon. I was telling him that to understand what it can do for him and what it is about, starting with the intro is the best thing to do. I mixed up the word “start” with “cook,” and I pretty much told him the Book of Mormon is a great cookbook. YAY. 

Yesterday we hosted new missionaries and that was super cool! 

I’ll end with my spiritual note for the week...

I had an impression while I was chatting with Elder Hanson one night before sleeping. Pretty much these words just popped in my head, "Who am I to get in the way of the Lord's Work?" I thought about this for a bit and realized...WOW, this is true. All the Lord wants me to do is give my 100% to Him. Not more. If I give Him that, He will do all the rest. The only thing I can do to stop the work for now would be not giving my all to Him. Being discouraged is kinda a problem with some of the members of my district, so this was super amazing that I could share this with them.

Anyways, I love yall!

Love,

Anziano Ridd

Nel bocca al lupo

BTW - if you wanna send me a package the best thing to send is chips and salsa or queso. <3 

Studies & selfies in the classroom!  :)