More than learning the language…

Ciao tutti! Sorry for the looong delay in posts. I hope you’re all doing well and had incredible Christmas and New Years’ celebrations! As always, when it’s been awhile since I posted last, I have a hard time getting started because there is just SO much to talk about! So, in order to avoid the overwhelmed, chest-tightening feeling, I’ll tell you all about Christmas time/post pictures soon… but for right now, we’ll just start with Alessandro, our language tutor.

Living in Italy, it soon becomes imperative to be able to speak some Italian. This is a pretty constant tension, since I often want to talk to the cute elderly woman on the bus or the little kid walking down the street, but just can’t since they only speak Italian. Not to mention the time that our shower was “raining” on the apartment below us. THAT would have been a helpful moment to understand what our Italian neighbor was saying…

So, in an attempt to be able to communicate with the sweet people around us, we’re studying Italian! Kerry, Jimmy, Sam, and I met with our tutor, Alessandro, 2/3 days a week from September to December, before we paused for Christmas. During those 3 months, we’ve had the opportunity to build a fun relationship with Alessandro… he probably thinks we’re crazy somedays, but we’ve had a lot of fun moments of laughing together about ridiculous stories or funny linguistic moments. It helps that my 3 language buddies are really fun, too!

Alessandro often asks us questions about our lives, to make us practice speaking the language. And, honestly, that’s the hardest part of learning Italian. I can understand it fairly well, and I can read most sentences and get the gist of them… but SPEAKING Italian?? That’s a whole other ballgame… so, Alessandro will ask us about our childhood, about our favorite vacations, or about important moments in our lives. 

By the grace of God, through these different conversations, all four of us have had the chance to share something about Jesus… just because it makes sense when we’re talking about our life decisions and our job. During the first two months of our language lessons, Alessandro would ask some questions about what we’re doing here, and our conversations have been casually drifting to Jesus!!

One Monday after Thanksgiving, the four of us were talking about how we’re thankful for our relationships with God… and Alessandro insistently asked, “What do you MEAN, your “relationship with God??” In what sense are you talking about??” This question gave us the SWEETEST opportunity to share, in broken Italian, the Gospel message about Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins on the cross that makes it possible for us to live our lives in fellowship with God! We talked about Jesus for about an hour and a half… it was AMAZING!!! And really challenging, in Italian… but SWEET!!

Would you PRAY for Alessandro? We start taking Italian lessons again this Monday, the 5th… would you pray for his heart, that he would continue asking questions, that we would continually have opportunities (and take advantage of them!) to share about our LIVES in Christ? Pray that Alessandro would have the desire to claim Jesus’ sacrifice for his sin, so that he can have that personal relationship with his Creator, too

Oh, and that same week we also had a really fun cooking lesson with Alessandro, following our last lesson before Christmas. He taught us how to make delicious meatballs! Here are some photos from that:

(From L to R) Sam, Jimmy, Alessandro, and the back of my head... Learning how to cook!

The master chef, Alessandro... also known as our favorite Italian tutor!

The Finished Product -- Delicious Meatballs!!

(From L to R) Alessandro (in his normal seat ), Sam, Chris, me, and Jimmy with our lunch.

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