Incontrare la Stampa

"Meet the Press"

Is it possible that the days are faster in Italy? Maybe it's the fact that I have to catch up on how to speak English again, or learning Italian and confusing it with Spanish, or that I have yet to feel completely set at a steady pace.
Either way, I had a challenge the other night of meeting some of the students. It was, 'come si dice' overwhelming. B-t-dubs, 'come si dice'- "how do you say...?" is my favorite frase right now because it almost solves all problems of describing your willingness to learn a new Italian word every 10 minutes. It was overwhelming because there were quite a bit of new people that I got to meet, and some of them spoke e Inglese poco and some only Italiano, and a minimal amount of Inglese. I wanted to have conversations with all of them, but only got to smile and nod to show that I was friendly and others I had conversations with.
As the night was winding down, 3 children of one of the families that attended got to be my first test subjects for the English flash cards I brought over. It was a hit! Also they are very smart children. They recited back to me the card words in English and I asked them "come si dice para Italiano pig?" and so on and so forth.

I am excited about teaching the base class, but I am really excited to be helping out with the children's ministry. It just seemed to fit. I saw excitement on the kids faces and they were happy with themselves for knowing the words and colors and making phrases with the words. It made me feel like this is something I could really do and be good at. Language barrier or not.
So throughout the week I have been passing out flyers with Jeannette and the kids to spread the word about the classes for next week. I got to me some really interesting people and just really enjoy getting to know Jeannette and her heart a little better. She has such a great heart for the community and understanding the needs of the people here, it's great to walk beside her and help.

We met a French businessman by the name of Marco (spoke Italian and perfect English) who owns a bar (coffee shop) with his wife. We stopped in to see if we could put some flyers on their countertop for patrons and he said yes, and then we got to talking to him about his 8 year old son who wants to learn English, which transitioned into a conversation about religion and his dislike for the Catholic church and their legalism. Jeannette explained her love for the relationship with God, over the legalistic settings of religion. He was open to the conversation and not distant, very friendly in fact. We closed off our conversation with looking to find a way to bring more business in for he and his wife because he said business was slow. We topped off the conversation with a glass of wine provided by Marco and laughs. If you know me, I don't drink alcohol, and I don't care for the smell or taste of it. With that being said that sentence was not a precursor to stating it was the best thing I ever had, but it was more along the lines of feeling grateful for his hospitality to Jeannette and I. Who knows, maybe we will see Marco in a class or get to talk to him more about God, or maybe we won't, but it was nice to get to meet and talk with him.

While the endeavour is to witness to people and bring them to Christ, building relationships is also an important role, and no amount of rushing into wanting them to be a Christian is going to change their mind. There has to be a foundation of trust that is built and established first.

Il resto seguirà presto.
The rest will soon follow.