A House of Order

It was a full circle, "waters of Mormon" moment this week when we celebrated our 31st anniversary in Italy.  This country has meant so much to us.  It is where we first met when serving our first missions, returned for our honeymoon, and now get to serve together once again as missionaries. How beautiful is this country to our eyes...where we have been so blessed...and we will surely sing its praises forever.   

We continued our anniversary celebration in the beautiful city of Bergamo a couple days later

Our sweet zone of missionaries created this anniversary e-card for us

We had a wonderful "Pay It Forward" week with delivering and moving a washer and bed to the 4th floor apartment of a fellow senior missionary couple and then shopping, delivering, assembling, and preparing another apartment for a senior couple coming in August. This opportunity helped us feel such love and appreciation for the thoughtfulness and attention to detail from the coppia Miles that had prepared our apartment in anticipation of our arrival. Hopefully this will allow the new couple Low to have a smooth and beautiful transition like us.

We have felt a special spirit in this assignment. We believe that besides the temple, it is in our home where we should feel closest to God. Our goal is to try to create a peaceful sanctuary where the spirit can reside. One of our favorite motivational scripture is: Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing; and establish a house, even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God (D&C 88:119)

Invitation: Declutter a place in your home whether a whole room, or just a drawer. 

Pictures from the senior couple 'scratch and dent' moving crew. You can see Steve takes very seriously the task of mattress quality control

Even in IKEA Steve is willing to go the extra mile and test each and every couch or mattress 

Moving means getting to drive the mission van.  It is probably the size of a mini-van at home, but here it feels like we are trying to navigate these small Italian streets in a semi. 

Although we have a car, the metro is much easier to navigate through Milan

We had a few people ask us what our apartment looks like.  We are on the 3rd floor (called 2nd in Italy). The elevator barely holds 4 people, so claustrophobic Steve usually prefers to take the stairs.  The garage (called a 'box') is so small that the passenger has to get out and pull in the mirrors before we do a 13-point turn to back it in

We live in a 2 bedroom 1 bath little piece of heaven.  Seriously, we love this place.  Who wouldn't love that sweet bathroom tile and being able to play the trash recycle guessing game with 4 different bins each time you want to throw something away

Our Zone Leaders gave us a challenge this week to feed the pigeons from our hand in front of the Milan Duomo. Since we weren't able to get to Milan this week, we settled for Steve trying to feed the grazing mountain goats in Bergamo from his mouth.  Don't worry no goats or senior missionaries were injured while taking this photo

We were blessed to first meet the Rindlisbachers when we flew out to Italy and missed our connection in Paris. They are now forever known as our "Paris Pals." We just made the connection (pun intended) that Laura's mom babysat Blake Rindlisbacher when he was a young child living in Walla Walla, WA. It seriously is a small world!