How are you doing? Weather is starting to warm up here in Italy—at least it did today! Hopefully spring is right around the corner. I think today was the warmest it has been in awhile. It was in the upper 50’s and lower 60’s. There was a landscaping crew all day outside my apartment weed whacking and trimming the hedges. The smell of fresh cut grass is just one of those things that bring the awareness of spring to mind.

I am still not done with my testing process at school. I have one more section of it to go over tomorrow; it’s the speaking part of the test. I have to talk for like 5 minutes straight on a subject of my choosing. I thought about telling my Taiwan swimming trunks story but I am not sure how detailed I can get or if the joke will even come across through my sputtering sentence fragments. Anyway, if you got any recommendations for something I can talk about, let me know. I have already completed the majority of the testing process and it was, to be brutally honest, discouraging. I didn’t do as well as I had hoped, but the same thing can be said when I took English grammar at Ozark—I can speak the lingo, but can’t diagram a sentence to save my life.

I had to get a new cell phone last weekend because my other one had a tragic accident. I thought I would be able to swap my SIM card into the new one and keep all my numbers. Well, that would be nice, but it didn’t happen. I lost all my Italian numbers and I am in the process of getting them back. An important one that I lost was my landlord’s. Good thing the house didn’t blow up or anything, because I couldn’t tell her, if it did. Well, yesterday, the boss of the school just happened to mention that she knew my landlord personally and gave me her number. This is a long story to say that I got reconnected with my landlord gave her my moving notice. My contract says that I have to give at least a 3 month notice before I move out of the apartment. So, this is pretty exciting that Ancona is drawing closer, however I will miss my apartment in Perugia.

Things are moving along and I am going to start to look toward other language learning opportunities because after this month, I will have been at this particular school for around 8 months. Next week, I will bow out of my grammar class and stay only for the conversation part of it. I want to go to the university here in town and sit in a few classes to see how well I can track with the lessons. I will also be trying to connect up with more people for conversation practice. Before I make the ‘big move’ to Ancona, I think I am going to try and go for a few weeks to some other churches in Italy and see if I can follow them around and job-shadow them. I hope this kind of opportunity will give me a language ‘booster-shot’ and further prepare me to start my ministry in Ancona. I really covet your prayers in all of this. I feel I am getting better with the language, but just need some practical, yet social environments to use this stuff I have been learning in class.

Please be in prayer this week for:

  • Our team’s language ability—that we would grow in our ability to use this language to help others see Christ working in their lives
  • Our team’s intimacy with God—that we ourselves would continue to grow in our walk with Jesus
  • Breakthrough—as a team, we feel God is on the verge of doing something with Kingdom-sized ramifications. Pray that we would be oriented to follow the leading and empowerment of the Holy Spirit as the Kingdom is brought near through us and in us.
  • Our team’s financial situations—we as a team are not fully funded and are still seeking churches to partner with this work. Pray that God will continue to provide as he has up until now so that the work may continue here.

I really appreciate you and your prayers!