Kniha Mormonova?

The title of this update is "Kniha Mormonova" or Czech for "The Book Of Mormon". Last week I ended my letter with the update that we were going to go and teach someone. It was sweet, getting a call at the library from a former investigator asking us to come by. It's probably the first time that a potential investigator called us back. So it was sweet. His name is Dave and he's from the Czech Republic formerly known as Czechoslovakia. His wife is a member from Armenia or Albania, I can't remember which. But both of them come from communist countries and have a little trouble with english. He's been taught by missionaries before about a year ago, and we don't really know what ended up happening because they weren't too diligent about record keeping, but we went by 2 weeks ago and he was all like "you here for a lesson?" so it was cool to get that all set up. We ended up giving him a blessing for his back, and he's hoping to start a job on an oil rig, so we gave him a blessing of protection as well. And we promised him that if he read the Book of Mormon in english, his english would improve and apparently he's been reading every night. But the Czech version he has is from 1933 and is a really bad translation, so I ordered a new one for him. So that was a pretty awesome miracle this week.

The less active lady we were teaching and her non-member daughter who had a date for the 26th ended up moving to the Parker Ward, which is the ZL's area. So we went by with them to do the "hand-off", just teach brief lesson so they get a chance to meet the new missionaries and don't get lost in transition. It was so cool because the daughter remembered everything we taught, and the mother was able to chip in with stuff we hadn't even taught her! So Hanna (the daughter) is getting baptized this Saturday at 3:00, and we're going to go! It's going to be real cool and i'll make sure I send home some pictures.

We taught another person on our rescue list this week. Her name is Loris and she is pretty old. Has started coming back to church since we started teaching her, but doesn't stay the full 3 hours because she says she has health problems with sitting that long. Which is fine, it's not our place to judge. But we were going through a couple of the commandments this week, and Elder Summers asked a great question about her baptism. She opened up a lot and then after we talked about that for a bit, I remember thinking I needed to ask her if she'd been to the temple. Well she hasn't, but seemed open to it, so it's giving us something else to help her work on which is going to be good.

Also had more people giving us poop this week. You know how stop signs are sometimes on people's front lawns? Well we've been locking our bikes up to stop signs since I got here in Parker, and nobody has given us any problems, but this week, someone put a note in my helmet saying "DO NOT Park your bikes in my yard. If I find them again, I will dissassemble them". And, with anything like that that happens, the best thing to do is laugh. So we kept the note and made photocopies to put in our journals. I feel bad for the missionaries that tract that street in 6 months and get their bikes dissassembled. And on that same street, someone drove past us and shouted "Jesus is a myth!" and we saw him pull into a cul-de-sac. Well, my companion was like "you know what? let's go talk to him" so I grudgingly followed my companion into the cul-de-sac. We knocked on his door and they didn't even give us the time of day. Didn't even want to talk about it. BUT We did pass out a Book of Mormon and a KJV of the bible to a teenager on the street. And he is good friends with a member in the ward and the member said he'd start reading scriptures with the guy and stuff like that. So when Satan is testing you, you know that something good is about to come. In hindsight, there was really no point in following that one guy that yelled at us, but i've read a lot of miracle stories in the ensign and our mission newsletter that start with a scenario like that and end up with a couple baptisms. So you never know.

And we also taught a great first lesson this week and got 2 more people with baptismal dates in April. It was a member referrall, where the teenage daughter was interested, and her mom was going to come along to support the daughter. And at the beginning of the lesson the mom pretty much said, "I'm not really into this stuff". But after the First Vision, we invited the daughter to get baptized and she was all shy about it and not really sure, and then the mom was like "well i'm willing to work towards that!" So that was pretty awesome! The mom was more interested than the daughter who calls herself a mormon. So that's pretty cool, the only problem is with spring break, everyone is going out of town, and so this upcoming week might be kind of rough.

Speaking of rough, we had our first 8:30-5 in Church yesterday. We were doing pretty good until about 4:00. Then both me and Elder Summers kind of shut down. It was really a struggle to stay awake. But we succeeded. And hey, General Conference is in 2 weeks (HOLY SMOKES)

And one of our investigators invited us to dinner for last night and today. So that's been going good. THINGS ARE HAPPENING WOOHOO! Sorry I don't have any really funny stories from this week. I'm sure next week will bring something. But this week was definetely a spiritual high. And we've been super tired lately, so we must be doing something right. And the wind is getting so gusty.

But that's all for now. Stay in School.

Elder Gibb