The Ricciardi Letter

Happy 4th of July!!!  I'm missing the promised land just a little bit more than usual today.  Ha, earlier, I made my Australian companion sing the national anthem with me for our companionship study. She's a saint:)

This week has been busy. Thursday and Friday we had exhanges with the STL's in Tacloban. Which means I got to go on exhanges with ....drum roll....Sister Folau! My buddy from Calbayog. Wow I love her. I really enjoyed visiting a less active of hers - Sister Thilma. She's this extremely educated 17 year old who lives in this tiny house and has an even tiner room in which she covers with her Picasso paintings. I say Picasso because their style is quite similar. She has these gorgeous paintings covering this tiny room and each picture has a story. I wish I would've taken a picture of it! 

One thing I like about Sister Folau is she gets my brain working. We always end up having the most spiritual deep discussions. She shared with me something that I think may have just changed my life. It's called the Ricciardi Letter. It's about this crazy amazing Italian trainer this American missionary had during his mission in England. I highly recommend you look it up and read the whole thing for a family home evening one night. It's 23 pages long, but gives you a really good insight to missionary work and how this trainer did it so well. Plus the whole thing is hilarious .This missionary, Elder Ricciardi, would wake up each morning, look at himself in the mirror, and say to himself, "I Fear No Man". When this American greenie first saw this, he thought his trainer was freshin' out. Ha, thinking of the look on his face makes me laugh. The thing is though, this Italian missionary wasn't kidding. And he lived it. He was born for missionary work and the whole letter is so inspiring. Read it read it read it!

We also had an activity on Saturday that my companion and I planned. It was a really good turnout, even though we only had one investigator come. The whole branch loved it and during the presentation section, us 4 missionary did our Samoan dance that Sister Matautia taught us. Look at us, becoming so cultured;)

Love you all so much and don't forget what the Lord has done for you. Even after all we can do, we will continually be in His debt. And He's okay with that because He loves us. 

Fear is of Satan. Faith is of God. So choose faith. I promise it's the better of the two. 

Love Sister Russon

"We can say we believe in Christ as we believe in the sun at noon day, not that we can see it, but that by it, we can see everything else" 

 -C.S. Lewis