A Wild Raccoon Appears!

Sorry, the title is a throwback to the old game-boy color Pokemon game. But you see, we were biking and suddenly, a wild raccoon appeared and then ran away. It was the first one I've ever seen in my life, so it was pretty monumental for me. Speaking of Pokemon, it's actually the game to play on P-day now. haha. See what happens when you deprive a bunch of 19-21 year old guys of entertainment? It's great though, I've enjoyed not having to worry about movies or TV, just get back to the simple things.

So we had a great week here. We have a baptism on Saturday so I'll make sure to send home pictures of that. That is going to be really awesome, it will be my first adult baptism. So it's an exciting moment.

Had a pretty cool experience whilst tracting. We were on the second last door on the street, and this lady opened it and saw us and was like "oh hey!" she was quite old and a little bit physically slowed down. We introduced ourselves and she was like, "well, I have to go get my groceries out of my car" So we offered to help and she accepted, so we brought her groceries in and she invited us to sit down. So we were chatting for a bit and then she was like "You know? I just knew God was going to send someone to help out with my groceries. I didn't know how I was going to take them all out myself, but he sent you, so thank you". It was pretty cool, we read "The Family: A Proclamation to the World" with her, and got to know her a bit, and she taught us some spanish, and so it was good!


Also had a really crazy experience on Saturday. So we were tracting a road, and then some lady was coming the other way knocking on doors and giving out flyers, so we were all like "aw man, lets go to another street". So we started walking down and picked a street we hadn't done before. Well people were abnormally rude and abrupt with us, and we were like "man, what is the deal today". But we kept going, I just was thinking "well, when it's like this, you know something good is about to happen". So we get to the end of the street, and I see this 13/14ish looking kid walking really slowly down the sidewalk. We had come up to a T intersection, and he was walking down the top of it. Well all of a sudden this cop car pulls up and the cop gets out and stops the kid and gets him to take his backpack off. Then 2 other cop cars show up and the cop starts to handcuff the kid. Bear in mind, this is in Parker CO, and this wasn't the rough area of town. This was 300K to 400K homes area. So we are just like "uhhh...what the heck do we do?" so we turn left at the intersection to get away from all of this. Well then this policewoman gets out of her car and comes up to us and arrests us! Just kidding. She came up to us and was all like "do you have a permit?" and we politely and diplomatically responded "oh we're not solicitors". Legally, we are not solicitors. And as our mission president said, if any officer comes up and gives us trouble, we are supposed to get their badge # and name and call the Chief of Police. But we didn't know that, and she told us that if we got any more complaints something might happen. So it was really cool, one of my life goals is to get arrested for something that I didn't do, or isn't my fault. I just want to spend some time in jail without worrying about having a criminal record or lasting consequences. It sounds weird, but remember I'm a kind of weird guy.

We also taught our new investigator with the Bishop of the ward. It was really great, Bishop was able to help him out and have a mini counseling session right during our lesson, which was pretty good to have. He came to church and is progressing well. During conference, the thought came to me to have him count his blessings, so that's what we gave him as homework. And also, I kept thinking during the lesson, "what scripture story applies to his situation?" He feels guilty because of something someone else did, that he feels like he could have prevented it. Well the thought struck me of the story of Alma the Younger. I'll bet Alma felt like a failure a bit when his son went off the deep end. I'll bet he wondered what might have happened if he'd had better FHE, or better morning prayers. But it's a great story. It's amazing when you look at the Book of Mormon how well it patterns modern life. It was truly written for our day. People talk about having an ideal family or wishing they had the ideal family, but when you look at it, Lehi had a pretty dysfunctional family. And he was a prophet. You can't override others agency. That's Satan's plan.

And on to more light things, the members we are staying with had some family over for the weekend for their farewell talks before they go to Romania. They had a big dog over, and apparently it suffers from some kind of separation anxiety, so the family went out for the evening, and the dog broke out of it's cage, ran downstairs, and ate all my bagels. I had 6 large bagels left and it ate them all. Just left a big pile of crumbs on the floor. It also ate all my bread. But it left Elder Summers stuff untouched. I guess it doesn't like whole wheat. But ya, that was pretty funny. Sometimes all you gotta do is laugh.

Alright. I'm out. Love ya all.

Elder Gibb