Sister Piccinelli's Old Friend

The Manti Temple where our family was sealed.

We got to feed the missionaries this evening. That only happens a time or two each year. There were three of them this time. One was from the state of Chihuahua in Mexico. His English is amazingly good. Another has an Italian surname, but he's actually from Argentina. Go figure. The third is a big Samoan boy -- from Hawaii! A story goes with it, of course. His father is retired military and chose that place to retire.

It's always great to have those young guys in your home. They really do bring a good spirit with them. Our mission president told us to use that fact. A couple of months before my mission ended, he instituted The Concentration Visit. He said that, because they have not yet received the Gift of the Holy Ghost, our contacts cannot always have that Spirit of Truth with them as they ponder what they've read and what we've taught them. Therefore, said President Dan Charles Jorgensen, we will start taking the spirit with us into their homes every day, whether we have an appointment or not. We would concentrate on keeping the spirit in their lives and homes as much as possible while they were being taught.

This scared me. I have always been timid about being pushy with people. I'd rather not talk with them at all if my presence is going to annoy them. Besides, the Italians are hyper-conscious of courtesy and notice any breeches of it instantly. It was going to take faith for me to do this thing. But I had never baptized anyone yet and I had only two months left, so I thought I'd give the mission president's idea a try.

Elder Madison Upshaw Sowell and I had just started teaching a young couple named Piccinelli. She was expecting their first child. He was an inlaid floor artisan and did gorgeous work. Sometimes we'd drop by in the evening, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. But we were there in their home at least once in every 24-hour period. At first I couldn't tell how it was affecting them. They didn't seeem annoyed, but they did seem surprised a couple of times.

Then one afternoon Elder Sowell and I rang the doorbell and were met by a smiling, exuberant Sister Piccinelli. She seemed anxious to tell us that she was gaining a testimony of the Book of Mormon. "Every day, after I finish my housework," she said, "I think 'What can I do now?' And then I remember the Book of Mormon lying by my bed. I run to get it and it's like meeting an old friend!"

As delightful as this was, we still worried, because Brother Piccinelli, while a very nice fellow, was much less demonstrative and didn't seem that excited about what we were teaching them. We just kept on going over there every day or evening. Then, when the time came for us to challenge them to be baptized, they both said yes! I hardly knew what to do. I'd been out for 23 months and this had never happened before.

We had only been in the city of Varese for a short time. Not only did we not have a baptismal font, we didn't even have a chapel. We were meeting in a rented room. About 6 to 10 people were coming to church each week. Elder Nielsen was the district leader. I was told that I was the Sunday School president. Apparently a sunday school was an even smaller division of the Church than a branch! I'd never known this before.

We had to take a bus to the city of Como, the same mountainous place with the gorgeous lake where Churchill used to go to paint (and where the honeymoon scenes for Anakin Skywalker and the princess were filmed.) There the tiny branch had a collapsible baptismal font made of tightly woven cloth supported by a metal frame. There we baptized and confirmed the Piccinellis.

I called them once when I got home to Idaho, but it was expensive and, besides, I was soon distracted by other things, most of them female. I wondered for many years about the Piccinelli family. How did their baby's life turn out? Did they remain active in the Church? A couple of years ago I decided to Google Elder Sowell's name and several things came up including his email address. Did he have some news for me!

He had been back to Italy as President Sowell of one of the missions there! There were now lots of Piccinellis in the Church. Apparently, the original couple whom we'd baptized had moved to Australia! I was almost choking as I struggled to take all this in. Elder Sowell even said that he'd said kind things about his old companion in a recent talk over there. As Alma and the Sons of Mosiah might have said, "my joy was full."

Now comes the cherry on top. President Monson announced during conference earlier this month that a temple will be built in Rome! It was that same great man, Elder Monson, who explained to my stake president and his wife that their son and the rest of us in Italy in the early seventies were chiefly sewing missionaries. Most of the reaping would come later. What had we sewed? Well we had passed out lots of pamphlets and given many a discussion or Family Home Evening. But the thing we tried hardest to do, even competing mission-wide to do it more than anyone else, was to "place" copies of the Book of Mormon with as many Italians as we possibly could. We each placed hundreds of them in the course of our two-year missions. Sister Piccinell's "old friend" must have befriended many, many more Italians over the past 35 years.