missionaries and pizza

wonderful thing for Wednesday, Jan. 7: The young American couple in Florence, both returned missionaries, who have been teaching the Missionary Preparation lessons, have had some family emergencies lately and are not able to continue teaching the class, so we have been asked to do so. We had our first lesson yesterday, with Peter and Andrea. Agostino and Francesca are also members of the class, but they took a trip to the temple, so we gave them assignments to hand in for next time. So, yes, the Florence Ward has four young people departing soon for missions, one who just left, and one who left a couple of months ago - awesome for any ward, but fantastic for an small Italian ward - one that has only been a ward for six months. Peter and Andrea ("Andrea" is a boy's name in Italy, btw) are very humble and very earnest, and hence will become great missionaries. We talked about the importance of meaningful daily scripture study in order to obtain the Spirit to be able to teach, and about how important it is to be fully engaged in that endeavor before (and during and after) one goes into the mission field; also, how to build a lesson about a principle of the Gospel, based on one's scripture study. Not long ago, Francesca was inactive, with a boyfriend named Agostino. From what I've heard, he became interested in the Church, brought her back into activity, was baptized almost a year ago -- and now they're both preparing to serve missions! I LOVE that! fun thing: We took Annie Romano home after the marathon goal setting Florence Ward Council meeting last night, which didn't finish until after 10:00. By the time we dropped her off in that enchanting Florence suburb of Fiesole, it was close to 11:00. We stopped at a pizzeria to get something to eat, knowing how late it would be when we made it home to Prato. The guy there told us it's very common for pizzerie (plural of pizzaria) to be open past midnight. I got a salad and Blaine got a super yummy sausage/onion pizza (of course I had to sample it, but I have had waaay too much in the way of refined carbs over the holidays). We drove back down the winding mountain road, surveying the twinkling lights of Florence below us, munching away, happy as missionaries can be, I suspect.