hbd america 🇺🇸

So! Good morning! And happy Fourth of July to each of you! All of you

in America...PLEASE celebrate a ton for me. I promise I'll be there

next year👍🏼☺

"Anziano Friedman!"

Anyways, the email today is going to be pretty short. We've got a lot

of stuff going on! We're meeting up with all the other missionaries in

the zone to have a barbecue at the senior couples house, and it's

going to be so fun haha. I feel bad though for my Australian companion

who doesn't yet understand the beauty of the Fourth of July. Poor kid.

He'll learn quickly haha.

"The elders in the district waiting for the tram this morning"

"I just thought it was a pretty day:)"

Besides being busy today, there's not much that happened this past

week. It was actually pretty hard...one of the harder weeks of my

mission. But there's light at the end of the tunnel, and it's best

summed up in a quote I was reminded of that my sister sent me at the

beginning of the mission.

Your mindset is a definition of your faith in Christ.

"Anziano Vance!"

And that changed everything. I admit, I was having a hard time being

positive. A lot of things fell through and we definitely didn't use

our time as best we could've. That just got us even more down. But I

started studying a little bit about positive attitudes as well as the

atonement, and one of the greatest things I learned is that if we

really want it, Christ can not only help us to become clean, but he

can help us be stronger and create within us the desires we need to

get ourselves out of the slums. And what a blessing that is!

"Anziano Young!"

If we're really talking about freedom and liberty today, we can't

really talk about it without also mentioning Christ, who liberated and

freed us all. How grateful I am for him and his life and for the time

I have to represent him!

"Anziano Battaglia!"

Other small highlights from the week include

- playing soccer last night with some Italian teenagers in the parking

lot of the church for finding haha. We got one of the kids numbers

awhile ago and we invited him to come play last night, and he did!

That was fun :)

- zone conference and alllll the homies! We had a combined zone

conference with the Catania zone and I saw so many friends haha. I've

been in southern Italy a long time now, and the majority of the

missionaries I know are down here. It was so fun!

- trying to jump a fence and completely landing on my side on the

pavement hahaha. Luckily, no one saw it.

- doing a district blitz in Bagheria this past Monday

"Anziano Alexander!"

And that's about it! In closing, here's one last quote:

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that [we] can change [our]

circumstances by changing [our] attitudes of mind”

It's not our adversities or our challenges that define us, but how we

respond to them. And we can always choose to respond with positivity

and hope and faith!

"Anziano Peterson!"

Have a great week everyone :) and happy Fourth of July again!

VVB

May the glory ever be to God

Anziano Hansen