Ok so I was thinking about it and figured I'd send some pictures home. I didn't want too, because I wanted to show up in 2 years and have people go "HOLY SMOKES HE CHANGED" but now I guess you'll get to watch any physical transformations that occur. Hey, people have stopped asking me if this is my first week out, so something must be happening.
So we've had a couple cool teaching experiences these past couple weeks in Parker, so i'll let you in on a few of them. We've actually been doing a lot of service for people this week as well, so that is good too. But it's brought down our tracting hours, and to be honest, I love tracting. Tracting is effective. Missionaries can complain all they want that tracting isn't effective, and people hurt my feelings, and blah blah blah. I stick to it, that you CAN and DO find people off tracting. And it keeps you humble, and shows the members you are
serious about missionary work.
Alright, so we were at dinner with this family, and they have a chinese exhange student living with them. He speaks ok english, but when it comes to the complicated language of the gospel, he can get kind of lost. So we ate dinner and I asked him lots of questions about China. Fascinating. Things are waay different over there. But then after dinner we decided that we would teach him about prayer. Mainly because as we were sitting down for dinner, he bowed his head and folded his arms without being asked too. And keep in mind he is athiest (because it's what he's been taught all his life). So we taught him a little bit about prayer, and you could tell that he felt the spirit because he had tears coming to his eyes, and really understood it, and it definetely left a mark on him. Now it was cool because then yesterday, we were talking to the member at church, and apparently he's been saying things like "Why am I here? What is my purpose in life?" So she found a mandarin preach my gospel online and he's been reading it. We don't want to give him a BOM, because I don't really feel like starting an international incident. But he really likes to travel, so I can guarantee he will travel to France or something when he turns 18, and meet some missionaries on the Bus, and get baptized. He will be baptized some day. It's just super sad that China won't open up.
Also we taught a less active guy that's coming back to church, and his non-member girlfriend. We gave her a baptismal date for the 6th of February, but they didn't make it to church on Sunday so that will get pushed back.
Also, we were talking to one of our bishops about getting missionary work moving in the ward. We taught 7 lessons last week, and all 7 of them were in Dove Valley ward. And we feel really bad because Stonegate is trying super hard to get us people to teach. So we talked about it and decided that we would give a 5-10 minute presentation in combined priesthood/relief society next week on how to invite people to hear the gospel. Which is going to be pretty scary, but hopefully we do a good job. It's pretty scary though.
Also, there is kind of a frustrating rule in Parker. If the sister missionaries find someone in our ward, they get to keep them rather than turning them over to us. It can be difficult because there wasn't a lot of correlation so we didn't know what was going on with them. But I talked to president about it in interviews (yes. Interviews were
this week.) And now they have to come to our missionary correlation meetings, and church if they have an investigator there. So hopefully this helps so that people don't get lost in the transition. And we actually went and gave one of their investigators a blessing. So we are seeing the sisters a lot more. In fact, we got signed up for
dinner at a members house, and then were informed that the sisters would be there as well. So we ate dinner with the sisters as well. Good thing my heart is locked.
And finally, had an interesting experience this week. On Saturday, I really felt like something good was going to happen, in the morning and afternoon. So in the morning we tracted into a former that agreed to hear the lessons again after football season was over. Yep. And then in the afternoon, didn't really find anyone off tracting although people were nice to us, and then we had to pick up supplies from the ZL's so i was dissapointed. But then we were walking and this lady started yelling at us from her car. We answered her questions, but then the light changed and she pulled away. Well we were walking in front of a store, and suddenly that same lady jumps out and starts asking us about prophets and stuff. She really just wanted to bash, but I kept bringing it back to the fact that my knowledge of the truthfulness of the BOM comes not from scientific fact, but an answer to prayer. She kept changing the subject and bringing up anti stuff, and so i figured "ok, this is wasting our time". I said "well, we really got to get going now" and she said something that stopped my blood cold. "What, isn't my soul important too?" So I don't know if she was truly interested in having us answer her questions or not, but
we got her information and she lives in the other Elders area so we'll see what happens. That would be sweet if she got baptized.
And that's it for now. Stay fresh.
Elder Gibb
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