A Sheep Rodeo!

Hey gang, it was a kind of slow week down here in Sanford. I think a lot of people went out of town for memorial day and stayed out of town for a while. So some things were nd of slow. But still, had some miracles, some funny stories, and good times were had by all.

First off, thanks again to everyone who has been sending me gifts and cards, it's made these past 2 weeks really fun and exciting, getting lots of mail. And it was my companion's birthday yesterday so he's getting lots of mail as well. So mail is coming out of our ears. So we have lots of letters to write so don't get worried if I haven't written back to you right away. I'll get there don't worry!

So we got some cool hot mission gossip this week that has been confirmed. 1st: New phones. We are going from Verizon to Sprint, and getting...TEXTING! Woohoo! it's so crazy but Denver South mission has had texting for a while now and I guess it finally made it down to us. It's so cool though, except we can't get text messages in Sanford. It's funny, we'll drive into Alamosa and suddenly our phone will get 5 messages and voicemails. So I don't know how that's going to work out but it's pretty cool. 2nd: And it will shortly come to pass...Portable DVD Players! Yep, so we can watch the Preach My Gospel movies during companionship study. The District 1 and 2. I don't know if you've heard of them but they're pretty awesome and you can get a lot of revelation watching them. It's part of the new training that supposed to enable brand new missionaries to be able to train in 2 transfers. Could you imagine being on your mission for 3 months and training a new missionary? That's the plan for the future. And 3rd: After many days, it shall come to pass....Laptop computers. Yep. Amazing. This is like 6-12 months down the road, but it's going to be for Online Proselyting which is going to be so much fun I can hardly wait. Like going on to chat rooms and stuff. Obviously some are reading this thinking "wow. Think of how many problems that is going to cause" but if you think about it, you could easily dress up in pday clothes and go to an internet cafe and do whatever you wanted anyways. All I know was President Pfile said something along the lines of "I am so glad I won't be here for these changes." There will be problems, but it will make things so much more fun! Imagine bashing...I try not to though, there's going to be some nice trolls I'll bet.

But let's drop away from the realm of technological change and return to good ol' Sanford. So the Exterminator came and sprayed the house, and put out some spider traps. So far we've caught only 1 brown recluse and one beetle. So I think our spider problem is pretty much finished. We've had more problems with the dogs this week. See, it was funny at the beginning to have the dogs following us around, but now it's getting annoying. We'll be tracting and the dogs will run up the porch before we get there and get in fights with the owners dogs, or the other day they tried to eat a members chickens. So it's been ruining some of the trust we have with people so we're cracking down. The other day we decided to go tract in the country, and the dogs were following us so we were like "well, lets bike out really really far really really fast and they'll give up". So we did and they followed us at a dead sprint. They were so tired by the end of it they looked like they were about to die. They wouldn't leave though, and our district leader and other people advised us to throw rocks at them, which we did (and felt terrible doing by the way) but they just laid down and took it. I felt so bad about it. But we're talking to the cop and getting the dogs to stay with their owners. It's interfering with the work.

And speaking of the work. Chris is doing good, he was really looking forward to his 19th baptismal date, but didn't come to church yesterday and so that will have to get moved. We haven't gotten a hold of him yet so we don't know what happened. We've got a lot of potentials looking up, a lot of people waiting to get on the escalator, but not a lot of numbers yet. And it's not about numbers, but they are a good indication of how you're doing. We did find this one guy off of tracting, he was an 83 year old catholic that almost became a priest. We talked to him for a bit and he said he believed Joseph Smith was a prophet and the Book of Mormon was true, and some other points of our doctrine. he liked to talk so we didn't get a chance to capitalize on what he said, but we'll go back and help him be baptized. So that was a cool miracle. And it came as a result of faith, when we tract just to use time, nothing happens, but that day we were all pumped like "yep this person isn't a member and has a shirt saying "I want to be baptized"" at every door, and 4 doors down BAM miracle time. So it's cool. If we want missionary work to take place, we need to have faith. Saying things like "oh yeah this is a tough area" or "everybody here has heard it a thousand times" (and i'm not talking about Sanford, i'm talking about everywhere in the world that people say that) might be true but we have to rise above that. Faith precedes the miracle, not the other way around.

It's going good here though. It's a short transfer, they are not next e-mail, but the one after. So I don't think anything is changing here, I'd be pretty sad if it did. Last night at dinner, the member had a couple of sheep and we went outside to look at them. Now, my companion made a joke that I was light enough to be able to ride the sheep. Well I took that challenge to heart. One of the members grabbed the thing, and with determination in my eyes, I rode that sheep about 15 meters. I can now add "sheep" to the list of animals I have ridden. It was a great day. Some of my other goals here are to brand and milk a cow, though preferably not at the same time.

Anywho, love you all!

Elder Gibb