The Mecca of Evangelical Christianity

Hello hello my dear friends, here we are! In the Black Forest/Northgate wards up in Northeast Colorado Springs. Let me tell you it is way different here than it was in Sanford. One thing, we have a truck now! With a ton of miles on it! Although we are starting to run low so we have to watch out. But one part of the area is a lot smaller, more suburby kind of thing, and the other part is like the bigger houses on 5 acre lots, so tracting up there is a bit different. And it's like impossible to find your way around, unlike Sanford that was a perfect rectangle, laid out in city blocks, this is all over the place. So it's been different. And if that wasn't enough, the Headquarters of New Life International is in our area. I'll have to get a picture of it for you. The Mecca or Palmyra of evangelical Christianity. And apparently Tim Tebow went there the other day. None of you probably know who that is but he's a christian football player for the Denver Broncos. Everyone here loves the Broncos, so I pick a thing or two up about it. But it's been a difficult adjustment.

My companion is an Elder Robledo from near San Antonio TX. He's pretty cool and we've gotten along really well so far. He's been out about 5 months and has spent pretty much his whole mission in the Northeast Zone. It's weird, when I got with Elder Summers back last January, I'd been out 5 months, and he'd been out 16 months. Now I've been out 16 months, and Elder Robledo has been out 5. It just feels really weird and I've started to realize how fast this thing is going by. Sheesh by the next time I email, I'll only have one phone call left.

I suppose I can regale you on some of what's going on in the area. We do have one person with a baptismal date right now, someone they gave a date too the Sunday night before transfers. That's something nice to work towards at least and it seems to be going well at this point. Some roadblocks, but that's nothing new. We did have good experiences tracting this week, talked to some guy from Focus on the Family (they hate us) and got a pretty good conversation going. We got to bear testimony of the Book of Mormon and Jesus Christ and I think in doing so he realized that our view of Grace and his view of Grace are pretty much the same when you boil it all down. He wanted to do lunch with us after the New Year (he's the marketing director for FOTF so a pretty busy guy) and part of me feels Admiral Ackbar saying "It's a Trap!" but the other part is intrigued.

We also had someone let us in off tracting this week and we taught them a bit about the restoration. Honestly they were more interested intellectually in what we teach, not so much to learn if it was true and change, but we did leave them with a Book of Mormon and told them to call us. We'll probably stop by again later. That was one lesson where we felt prompted not to share the First Vision with them...it would have been kind of not appropriate for the situation. That's a big thing in missionary work, the things that fly 99% of the time are sometimes not going to fly.

Went Christmas Caroling with the youth last night. We organized it at the end of church and got like 20 kids out. We felt like kind of a mob haha because there was so many of us, but it was good to visit some less actives, members, potentials, some of their non-member friends and just spread Christmas cheer. It also showed that the youth have a good relationship with the missionaries. We have a "Preach My Gospel Basketball" class every Thursday night where we teach something out of PMG for a bit and then play basketball. 2 weeks ago they got a non-member to it and I guess it was interesting having him role play teaching the Plan of Salvation. But ya, that's pretty much whats going on.

Hmmm....I think that's all for today! Love you!
Elder Gibb