Adventures in Milan: Walking Miles Spreading Smiles

hello to all the people that i love.

we walked a lot this week. there is just something beautiful about walking for miles and miles in the scorching heat, having not a clue where you are going but just feeling really happy to be alive. these are the moments i will cherish. the sweat just drippin and the smiles wide, grabbing gelato on the corner because it is literally your saving grace and the only thing that keeps you sane in the heat. man the mission is just too goooooooood.

Here's me by a cute little Vespa in my favorite color

i just had a really great week this week and i will tell you why. A lot of it is thanks to my beautiful, incredible companion, sorella roper! She is incredible and i just love what we have in our companionship. i want to tell you all why i love her. this week i learned a lot about love and i will tell you what, i love her so very much. i love her because she knows why she came out here on a mission and her purpose shows in everything that she does. she is concentrated and she has a vision for her mission, for her life, and for everyday. I love her because she loves me for my quirks, weirdness, insecurities, and flaws. she helps me when i am down and makes me laugh through it all. i could go on and on, but i just wanted you all to know, that she is a special person. i know that our companionship was an inspired one and i truly learn so much from her every day.

so many little moments this week that i just felt so much love from others, for others...all from my Heavenly Father.

One night we were on a hot bus trying to do some pass by's to some less active members and we ran into one of our cute Ecuadorian members. we got off at her stop and she insisted on buying us gelato at the local bar of the little baby town. That member and that gelato was the exact thing we needed to lift our spirits that night. We were doing some finding one morning before our weekly planning session and i felt impressed to stop a certain woman. her name was E., and she was a beautiful daughter of God searching for the truth and open to our message. i felt so much love for her after knowing her for only 5 minutes. it is amazing to me how that works in this work. We were teaching our investigator, F., who is absolutely wonderful but has some very difficult questions that are hard to answer. we felt impressed to talk to her about how much our Father in Heaven loves her and as we did so and testified of is immense and incomprehensible love for her, the spirit touched her heart and there were tears in her eyes. I love her and i know that He loves her an will help her and comfort her and answer all questions and take away all doubt. he loves us that much. We met with a member family to discuss missionary work only to learn that the husband is a missionary maniac. he hands out Books of Mormon like fliers...and has a goal to place at least one book of mormon every month. He gave us three referrals of people he has shared this incredible, life changing book with and i could just feel his incredible love and desire to flood the earth with this book. he is an amazing example to me and i felt so much love for him and his passion for the work.

One of the most important lessons about love i gained this week came at our district meeting. we talked about how if we truly want to obey the second great commandment...to love our neighbor as we love ourselves...we need to start at the end. love ourselves. I have struggled with this throughout my whole mission, truly loving myself. Loving my weaknesses for who they help me become. loving myself for who God created me to be. I learned and am still learning that when we truly take a step back and acknowledge the good in ourselves and truly LOVE ourselves, we have a greater capacity to love those around us, to love our neighbor. I am grateful for who i am for the person i am becoming. when you loose yourself in the work you TRULY do find who you really are!

Today we went to the World Expo...i don't really have time to explain it all but it was just a really neat experience, that i am pretty sure was once in a lifetime! If you don't know what it is, look it up online. It is pretty much just a bunch of reallllllly cool museums about like all the countries in the world. you just walk around and learn about what they are doing to help the environment and can just really get a cool feel for all the different countires and cultures. i really enjoyed just learning so much about different cultures and just felt so much gratitude and love for this amazing world that we live in.

I LOVE you all very much. The Love of our Heavenly Father is incredible and infinite. Discover it.
have a wonderful week!
love,
Sorella Burt