Who's the Italian

This past week my district has been upping the ante with how often we try to speak in Italian. We've begun to recognize that the fastest way to learn the language is simply to speak it, so we've developed a few strategies to help us with that. One of them includes a game that was recommended to us by a member of our branch presidency. It's called "Who's the Italian?".

Basically, we as a district draw from a hat to decide who will be the Italian, but no one is supposed to know what you draw. The person who draws and becomes the Italian can't use English for the whole day, and everyone is trying to pretend to be the Italian so that they can win. Because at the end we all vote on who we think the Italian was and the winner gets a prize. So this ensures that we all are trying our bests to speak the language and it's pretty effective I might add!

On Sundays everyone in the zone has to write a talk about that week's sacrament meeting topic and on the day of two of us are randomly chosen to speak. I spoke last week on repentance and this week our topic was The Atonement. I was puzzled for a while about what I would say considering the two topics are so closely related, and seeing as I gave my repentance talk the Sunday before, I couldn't just rely on that one. As I studied the Atonement in preparation for this talk, I began to realize that the Atonement is so much more than a solution to spiritual death, so much more than an enabler for repentance (though, if this were all it were we would still have endless reason to rejoice). I found in Preach My Gospel that the Atonement of Jesus Christ has the power to make right "all that is unfair about this life". That's a pretty profound thought. Everything unfair that we experience in this life can be made right by the power of the Atonement, whether in this life or the next. For some blessings come soon, some take years, and others don't come until the resurrection, but if we have faith and endure to the end, then those blessings will most certainly come.

This simple fact has strengthened my testimony of the Atonement a lot. With a power such as this so infinitely available to us throughout our lives, can we really ever say that "life isn't fair"? I believe the only truly unfair life this world has ever seen is the life of Jesus Christ, who suffered everything and was guilty of nothing. We cannot say the same; in comparison we are each guilty of a great many of things, and yet our lives will never be as hard as his was. For he suffered everything that we will ever suffer, everything that anyone ever has suffered, and everything that ever will be suffered. Because his Atonement is sufficient to cover it all. I bare testimony to this in the sacred name of Jesus Christ, amen.

until next time,

Anziano Wilkinson