It is hot here

Hey guys and girls.

This week was hot. Not hot in the metaphorical sense of "This area is on fire" but hot as in "oh wow the sun is melting my eyeballs". It's been a weird year here. The valley which is the coldest place in the Lower 48 had a very nice winter with little cold and moisture. Now it's having an unusually hot summer. At least there is a breeze sometimes and the mosquito clouds are mostly gone. I heard a couple weeks ago about the 3 M's of the Valley. Mormons, Mexicans, and Mosquitoes. It's true. but ya, we have been sweating like crazy and trying not to die. I blame the weather as of late on that volcano that spewed ash and stuff for a couple days back in Iceland. Remember that? and they had to shut down air traffic over Europe. That's messed everything up, why Denver area is getting pounded with moisture and stuff. Man we've been trying for 50 years to cause global warming, and it took a volcano one week to do everything we supposedly did. But I digress...

This past week was alright. Had a lot of things happen that were good, but then failed to deliver. It's nice because there are lots of little tender mercies that happen that kind of get you through the day, but then you follow up on them and it turns out to be noothing. Example, this week we were tracting, and we walked past a house and I felt like someone shocked me and I felt super strongly we needed to knock on that door. It was kind of far back and hidden a bit but we walked up to it and there was a lady outside. As we got closer she ran inside, but we went up and knocked anyways. She came out, seemed really interested, took a Book of Mormon and we set up a return appointment for Friday evening. Well we realized later that Friday wouldn't work, so we went back to reschedule for Saturday. She still seemed cool and excited about it. Then Friday morning we tracted a street near her house and accidently knocked on the front door of her house (we'd been doing the back door) She said hi, still seemed good and said, "yep see you on Saturday". So at this point we are super pumped. We've given her 3 chances to say no and she hasn't. Well Saturday night comes and she decided to go to catholic church. We got to talk to her husband though and he seemed alright. It wasn't a total fail, but it was a tad dissapointing. Oh well, sometimes you just have to laugh.

Speaking of the Catholic Church. Our investigator Tony who is an 83 year old catholic has been pretty tough to teach. He's a really great guy and he likes to talk a lot. But he'll go on these rants of everything he dislikes about the catholic church and everything he loves about our church, but he just keeps on saying he can't change. For a list of things he has said
-He believes infant baptism is evil
-He believes there are different "degrees of glory" after this life (his actual words)
-He believes we have the "fulness of the gospel" (actual words)
-He doesn't like a lot of the popes
-He believes there was an apostasy
-He thinks priests should be able to get married
-He believes that the Book of Mormon is true and Joseph Smith is a prophet
-He thinks the catholic church is wrong because it doesn't do missionary work
-He feels like God is in his home when we come over, and leaves when we leave
-He feels empty and unfilled after catholic church and can't remember anything that was said, but when he comes to our church he feels full and can remember sermons for years and years.

That's a slight example of some of the things he says. It's really hard for us to see because he wants to be a member so badly but he can't get past tradition. And it's not like we're trying to bash on another church, we never have said anything like, "ya and you know why else the catholic church is wrong?" or anything like that, he just starts doing it and we actually committed him to read 3 Nephi 11 and pray to know if he should be baptized. He did it and felt like he didn't have a strong enough answer, but admitted his prayer probably wasn't good. He's not used to praying from the heart. So we're still working with him, we have him committed to read the Book of Mormon every day, but it's crazy that if his Priest read the list of grievances he has, or heard he went to our church, he'd be in big trouble.

We had some things fall through and needed something to do for about a half hour, so I suggested we go visit a house we hadn't been to yet that had new move-ins (the goldmine of Sanford - New move ins) one the way there, this lady in a FedEx truck pulled over and chatted with us. She said she used to be Mormon but switched to baptist, so we got to talk a little bit but then some guy wanted to talk to us as well and pulled over behind her, so she left pretty quick. It was nice, we invited her back to church but she didn't seem to interested. Actually pretty anti, but she loved "my Elders".

Had a pretty cool experience last night with a less active. We went by his house and visited with them for a bit. His wife is really active and we were going to set up a time we could come back and share the lessons with them. She invited us to share something right then, so I reached into my backpack thinking "What do we do" and it came so clear to me "Read the Doctrine of Christ". I looked at my companion and he was like "I think we should read the Doctrine of Christ" so that was pretty good sign of what we needed to do. So we did and near the end we talked a lot about enduring to the end (he's kind of old and has gotten a bit lazy in addition to some medical problems) Great teaching experience, you always know the spirit is there when you start saying things that you weren't really planning to say, that just kind of roll out of your moth. But near the end he asked for a blessing, which was a great experience. It was something we said that just sparked him to want that. So that was a great experience.

We also had some loser yell at some missionaries in Fox Creek "hey, send the missionaries to my house, I live on 606 Greenleaf in Sanford" so we got all excited and went to Greenleaf but there was no 606, and 660 wasn't interested at all, and we knocked on a bunch of other doors and nobody was home. So somebody thought it was funny to do a fake referral. But we did find a part member that hasn't talked to missionaries before while tracting way out in the country. They weren't on the list either, so that is a great potential!

Good things are happening. This week is Pioneer days, and this is literally the best place to be in the mission right now. I will walk in a parade this week, which is one of my life dreams. It's a once in a lifetime thing to be a missionary, in Sanford, during pioneer days. And we're singing in the choir for the pageant much to the dismay of my companion.

Well, keep the faith! Let the Spirit guide! We're going to go climb a mountain!

Elder Gibb