Sorella Cherrington's Italy Rome Mission Blog! :D: Ora serve il nostro Signore e Salvatore a Taranto!!

So, I am now in Taranto! And I absolutely love it! My companion is really cool too! Her name is Sister Bradford and she is from CALIFORNIA and goes to UC Berkley. We can already tell that we will see many miracles here in Taranto. The other day, we did a full day of just ricerca because the work here is a bit slow right now, kind of like how it was in Pescara. And I absolutely loved that whole day. Call me crazy, but I LOVE ricerca! :D It is my favorite thing about missionary work because we get to talk to sooo many different people and we get to have meaningful conversations about the gospel when we don't have anything else to do. We saw miracles that day and we just seemed to be running into the right people. At the end of the day, we got 9 PHONE NUMBERS! :D It was literally a miracle! I know that the Lord put me and Sorella Bradford together so that we can start up the work again here and really get it going with new people who have not yet heard of the gospel.

And on Sunday, we met with one of our contacts from the day before the day of miracoli, and it went great! His name is "Babba" and he is from Ghana. He brought his friends with him (Kingsley from Nigeria and Aziz "Bingey" from Ghana). They are all really awesome people and they listened to our first message about the Restoration. One of the men, Kingsley, seems particularly fantastic and willing to listen to our message. It is fantastic! Lol, and Bingey is quite a character and he was cracking us all up with his religion he said he made up ("Madlem") because he wants to resign from Islam and Christianity. It is mostly a joke that he made up, but he truly does not want to identify himself with any established religion that he currently knows of because he has seen corruption in many churches. We explained the answers to all of their questions, and we are very excited to go see them again! Especially because they asked US for the next appointment after we had finished teaching! :D Miracoli!

And I love the Taranto Ward! I don't know what it is, but I feel like I am in a big family there. I love the members and the Missionary couple, The Franceschini. They are the coolest! They live in Arizona normally, but are Italian originally. They are fantastic though, and I know that it will be great to serve with them.

Also, the people here on the streets are, in general, wayyyyy nicer than the people we would try (I say try because they just waved us away at the first glance) to talk to people in Pescara and Chieti. I can't say that everybody there was difficult to reach, because that would not be true, but the people down here in Taranto just seem so... idk loving and open to talk to us. Even the people who reject us have been nice on occasion. Esempio:

Slla Bradford: Ciao! Siamo Rapprisentanti di Gesù Cristo e-

Lady on the Street: N, Grazie, Amore (as she lovingly touches my arm and walks away...)

The weather here is beautiful too! It is still a bit cold, but like California cold, and it is not bad. :) Hmmmmm.... what else can I tell you? So, my last week in Pescara was pretty great! :D Annnd I just remembered a miracle story I can tell you! Soooo...

I was traveling from Pescara Centrale to Bari to change trains to get to Taranto because that is what I was told to do by our DL, Anziano Lewis. POI, I got to Bari and was all on my lonesome with 3 rather large pieces of luggage and a Backpack... I prayed once I left the train in Bari that I would have the strength to be able to carry all of my suitcases all by myself. I then went and asked a man for directions for the train to Taranto. He told me just to enter in the door on the left and go downstairs. And (this is weird) I don't know why, but I decided to walk a little further to the next set of stairs that goes down to the binari and I confirmed that I had to go downstairs by asking some other people which way to go. Then, there was me and 3 bags of luggage that all had to get downstairs... Lots of them. And, I have NO IDEA how I did this, but I was able to carry them down all by myself! (The Lord really helped me at that time.) And then I walked in the tunnel, being terrified of facing the ascending stairs that would bring me back up to the binario for Taranto when I heard people speaking English. I stopped and looked up into Binario 4 and I saw Sorella Foster at the top of the stairs.

I then thought to myself, "I would love to say "hi" but I will probably miss my train! I should just keep going.... No, you know what? I think I will say Hi to her. I don't know when I will see her again, and I miss her turtle stories!" (She has lots of turtles :) POIIII, I called up to her and she did not hear me, but Sorella Stephens did! :D I she ran down to me and so did the tons of other missionaries who were up there. It was great to see all of them. Poi, my companion, Sorella Bradford came down and told me, "We weren't expecting you until 7pm! If you would have gone all the way to Taranto, you would have been all alone for several hours in a sketchy train station!"

Here is where it gets really crazy though.

So, they told me that they were actually at a different staircase until they realized that they had to put Sorella Omer on a train car that was exactly at the staircase where I saw them. Annnd we found later that Sorella Omer wasn't actually supposed to be on that train, but was supposed to go to Roma first. It was this crazy mix up of miracles also because I was able to tell the missionaries here that the Sorelle in Pescara were not expecting Sorella Omer until 10.30pm, and that Anziano Lewis would soon be arriving in Lecce (also several hours before he was supposed to be there). WOW! What would we have done without the miracles of the Lord in that case? The Lord reaaaallly loves His missionaries!

Well, that is all I have for this week. I love you all and I am so excited for this next week in Taranto! :D

Love,

Sorella Corey Cherrington