If a tree falls and hits the house, does it make a sound?

Yes. I testify it does. Philosophical debate over.

Well howdeedooldy, this has been a fantastic week in the CCSM, probably one of my favorites. Had good things happen. It was like the week of tender mercies, just nice things that was like "aww...that's awesome".

Yes I didn't email yesterday because yesterday was zone conference, so our P-day got moved. I don't mind a Tuesday p-day if there is something going on the day before. But the worst is having nothing planned. Anywho. I'll probably give you the low-down on zone conference next week, but suffice it to say it was great. We talked a lot about language, and using refined dignified language. I guess there is a problem in the mission of, as the Americans call it, cussing, so hopefully that gets taken care of. It was good for me, because I use a lot of slang words which I probably shouldn't, so that's something to work on.

We taught Max a New Member Lesson (finally), the kid that got baptized back at the beginning of October. It was pretty good because he still remembered a lot of stuff, and his non member dad sat in on the lesson. He played the "I'm not listening I'm sleeping card" but he was fascinated by the whole thing. At the end he started asking a bunch of questions, and in some of our answers we could tell his curiosity was getting piqued. For example, he was asking how old Joseph Smith was when he died, and we explained the whole story and he was like "woa, they made a martyr of him?" So he is definitely getting more curious about everything, and seeing a lot more validity to what we teach. That was good to see.

We had a gale-force windstorm Wednesday morning, some nasty nasty cold front came in from Canada (thanks a lot) and just froze everything. It was so cold our furnace was running on full blast and our house was only somewhat warm. Usually our furnace makes our house cook, but the wind was coming in through all the cracks in the walls, windows, and door frames. There was snow involved and it was just miserable. Fortunately, that morning was weekly planning so we got to stay inside, and when we left the house the weather had warmed up considerably. The curious thing was before it was time to start personal study that morning, I was just kind of chilling on the couch, listening to the wind and having some pondering time. Suddenly I heard this weird crackling crashing noise, and wondered what the heck was going on. I went to investigate and sure enough, one of the trees next to our house had fallen and hit the house, and crashed over to the side. Right next to where my pillow is. It's a good thing we didn't decide to start sleeping in in the morning. It didn't go through the house, it wasn't that big, but you'll see in the picture how it went down. Windy day.

We also had a correlation meeting with our ward mission leader, and during the meeting his youngest son was watching Star Wars- Episode 4. I couldn't see it but I could hear it. It was a great little "tender mercy" as I call it.
Another cool little thing. One of the Elders that just got transferred to San Luis served there like a year ago, and now is back, so he knows the Sanford house super well. He asked if we knew where the hot chocolate maker was. We had no idea, but then realized that this useless piece of trash that we almost threw our was a hot chocolate maker! Takes 2 minutes and super easy. It explained why they had so much hot chocolate in our cupboards, so now I drink lots of the stuff. Mmmmm...

Tony's good friend, who he's been taking care of for like 5 years passed away this week. So we decided to support Tony, and we had met him a few times and decided to go to the funeral. Interesting. My first time inside another church for a legitimate church service. They had the Knights of Columbus there with swords and stuff, and he was a WWII vet, so they had a 21 gun salute at the burial. We couldn't stay for that as we had an appointment, but the funeral itself was quite good. I felt the spirit. It seemed to me though, a huge part of the sermon that the priest did was about how great of a catholic he was, and how we should look to his example, and how he was definitely in heaven etc. etc. But it made me wonder what a funeral would be like for a person who didn't live a good life, or an unbaptized infant. His whole sermon basically used his life as an example. So I wondered about that, but there were some different things and the priest took a stab at us for sure. "We are the adopted children of God. Not the literal children of god. By grace, not nature" and looked right at us when he said it. Oh well. They sang "How Great Thou Art" for the opening hymn, so I could belt that and people seemed surprised that the "mormon missionaries" knew the hymns.

In other news, 2 potentials that we are trying to work with in La Sauses are moving to Sanford so that makes things way easier. And I guess they both want to be baptized. So hey! Celebrate! And we didn't get to meet with Chris this week because he was duck hunting. But hopefully this week, he's been reading the BoM and feeling the spirit from it, so we can't complain.

That's the week though! Rawr!

Elder Gibb