Many are cold, but few are frozen.

Oh boy, when my companion dropped that line while we were walking, I almost died. It had to be my update title.

Ok so by the title, I hope you can understand the magnitude of the cold weather that Parker experienced this week. I have to say, even being from Edmonton, where temperatures routinely drop below the -30 mark, I was impressed at what Parker dished out on us. They cancelled schools on Tuesday and Wednesday (I would say wimps, but there was about an inch of snow in addition and they didn't want people getting stuck and freezing to death), and told people to NOT go into work. Unfortunately, all we got was "try not to be outside for too long at a time". From what we gathered, it was about -4 or -25 with the wind chill, which was rough because 2 days before it was about 63. And yes I'm speaking in Farenheit (sp?). Unfortunately, it's just too difficult to convert. Maybe someday when the Americans take us over, they will institute the metric system as a nice gesture of appreciation. It makes more sense. But I digress. I believe the Missionary Handbook says to not get engaged in political conversations.

So with the cold, our tracting hours went down. See, I thought it was going to be great because everyone was home, but most people didn't answer the door, and the people that did were more abrupt than usual. Or they called us crazy and told us to get warm. So that didn't go so well, so we decided to member/former/potential/investigator hop. We would walk from house to house that were near each other, and talk about missionary work, and investigators, and try and get people excited about the work. It went pretty good! And we did manage to talk to a potential that we haven't been able to see in a while, so that was a plus as well. But it was really cold. And apparently it's going to be the same this week. A really cold Tuesday in the negatives. And there is lots of snow on the ground so we are bikeless for the most part. Which really slows down the work.

And another thing that's slowing down the work. My mission presidents wife thinks I pulled my achilles tendon, so walking has been painful. I have to get in to see a doctor, and apparently I have to deal with insurance. Why isn't it free, like in Canada? Oh wait, no political talk, sorry. But yes, that has made walking long distances a lot of fun.

And that's all the slightly negative news I have. Sorry aboot that, so heres the good stuff:

So I mentioned the investigator we have that doesn't want to be baptized until his wife gets back from Ohio. Well we were praying for a miracle and a breakthrough, because she wasn't supposed to get back until a couple more weeks. Well Sunday, we are sitting there and suddenly they all walk through the door! It was so awesome! So now we are trying to get in and teach them and give them baptismal dates. And it was fast and testimony meeting, and this ward knows how to do fast and testimony meeting right. There was no empty pauses, just inspiring testimonies. And nobody brought up deep/false doctrine in Gospel Essentials class, so that was also nice. So this has been a truly amazing miracle at the end of a depressing week.

And the week wasn't all bad, we had Zone Conference on Friday which was, as always, amazing. Seriously, listening to the Zone Leaders, the Assistants, and President Pfile is always so inspiring, and I always come away with so much inspiration as to what I need to do to make myself a better missionary. One big thing I got out of it, was a lot of little things that I could be doing better. And I'm hoping as I change these things, that I can become a more powerful teacher. Another big thing we talked about was working with the Less Actives more. It's something we should be doing more of, and the feeling I got was that we should try and schedule an appointment with a less active at least once a day. we should be having 7 lessons every week with the less actives at least. So we will definetely start implementing that.

After Zone Conference, President Pfile came and spoke to the young men of the Stonegate/Dove Valley wards. We went to it because we invited some less active boys, and it was awesome. We gave a presentation on the missionary handbook to start, and it was recieved pretty well, and then President and Sister Pfile spoke and it was great! They kept pulling me and Elder Summers up, and making fun of us, and at one point, President got me and Elder Summers up to share the first vision with the boys. It was really great, and the spirit was really really strong. It was probably a life changing experience for some of the boys who really haven't had the spirit pointed out to them before. And in Fast and Testimony mtg, one of the boys who was there stood up and bore powerful testimony of the experience. It was really cool. Stuff like that makes the cold days worth it.

And in items of lesser importance, we played Catan:Cities and Knights on monday for P-day. It was fun, took up the whole P-day though. I tell ya, Catan is like THE game that missionaries play. Either that or Risk. It's fun.

And I hope that was a good letter. I didn't mean to be negative at the beginning. My hope is that you laugh at me. Go, "oh that silly boy, he needs to grow thicker skin".

And that's all for now. Share the gospel with your friends. I'm going to go have another Nerf war.

Elder Gibb