The Italy I Never Knew

Right now I’m in the courtyard lying on my sleeping bag. There’s not a cloud in the sky and it’s hot enough I’m in a tanktop (I think it’s 80, but Jana says it’s 56). I suppose this counts as tanning. What I know for sure is it’s super relaxing. Garrett, one sleeping bag over, has something mellow playing from his iphone, which covers up the Justin Beiber coming from the second floor dormitories.

Finally, after a month of classes, and a particularly hard week, I can say

la dolce fa niente

and mean it.

This week was hard. Long, hard, and cold and rainy for the first half. The weather broke Thursday, but the long and hard never did. Also, in all fairness, the wonderfulness never did.

In other words, it was ministry week, the culmination of our classes up to this point. Like all the students who’ve experienced this week before us, it started with a crash course in miming, puppetry, and balloon animal making. The puppets and balloons never made much of an appearance due to the chilly rain. That was sad because I was really looking forward to playing with a bunch of little Italian kids in the park and telling them about Jesus.

On the upside, we still got to do the mimes/skits in Pordenone’s main piazza (it’s a large city, but I’m starting to get a mental map thanks to tract distribution). Every late afternoon we’d head over there, do a dance (like Cupid Shuffle or Footloose) to draw the crowds in close, and follow it up with a mime which we hoped would open doors for us to talk to people and present the gospel.

These particular mimes, the missionaries informed us, are one of the stupidest evangelism methods you can use and you look super dumb doing it. BUT. They actually work. I saw it happen with my own eyes, and it was really encouraging considering it was a bit of a stretch for me. That is, not the mimes themselves, but giving a two minute presentation at the end of each mime was a stretch. Talking out the gospel to a decent sized crowd was a little intimidating, even though Jesse was right next to me calmly interpreting and would smooth over any fumbles I made. Standing up there was a little like standing on the pier at Waculla Springs. Everything in you wants to jump, to fall, to crash through the glassy water and plummet deep into the coolness....but you’re also deathly scared.

You do it anyway. So yeah, I was freaking out for most of it, but there comes a point when the burden, the desire, trumps the fear by just enough that you go for it.

Besides mimes, we spent the mornings walking up and down the streets of Pordenone sticking tracts in mailboxes. For the most part, it went well. I only got shouted at once for trespassing. The fun part was taking coffee breaks at little bars. In the evening after the mimes, we’d take gelato breaks. We always got it from the same little gelataria. The owner liked us so much he took our picture and is hanging it on the wall.

Forever immortalized in an Italian gelato shop...my life is complete.

Actually, I’m starting to think that life isn’t complete unless it includes plenty of stuff in the missions department.

One of the highlights of this week was helping with the ESL classes. It was just two evenings, but it was cool to connect a little with people who live here and aren’t Christians. The most fun thing was playing Apples to Apples with them. I thought it would be a quiet, kind of boring game between the language barrier and the fact that it was the kid’s version. I was wrong. Ha. Ha.

The most interesting thing was having conversations that went a bit deeper, and discovering their discontentment. They appear pretty happy—I mean, they live in Italy, right? But actually...of the six people I talked to, it’s not what it seems. The government is falling apart, the economy is tanking, they feel restricted and they don’t enjoy having to be so fashion forward all the time. There’s pressure. And it’s dark. Beyond the food, beyond the scenery, Italy is a country that is falling apart. Most of the time, we don’t think of Italy, or Europe, as a mission field, but as a vacation destination. Its need isn’t obvious like little African kids with bloated bellies. But the Italians need the gospel just as much. Here, the number of evangelical Christians is decreasing—not increasing like the rest world.

If you stop and stare, dig deeper...you find this place is pretty hopeless. It’s in the cities, in the country; and in between the smiles and photographs and vineyards and Vespas and cappuccinos, all there is is emptiness.  

Good stuff it happening though—it always is, no matter how dark any situation gets. The missionaries are getting a lot of phone calls from the literature we distributed, and Friday night someone met with Jesse and got saved. It started with a tract they read last week. Finding that out was really encouraging, and ended a long hard week on a good note.

Of course, since that was Friday, technically the week hadn’t ended. There was Saturday, and Saturday I turned twenty. I spent the day three hours away (by train) from San Lorenzo in Bologna with Mik, Jana, Garrett, Sophie, and Lexie. Thinking back, it's the cherry on top of this week in which I experienced the realities of Italy.

According to mutual consensus, that’s all I can say. What happened in Bologna (and what didn’t happen there) stays there. But rest assured, Mom, it was a great day.