The Fast Begins

Well, this week marked the start of our 40 day fast. It's super cool. Everyone in the ward is getting fired up, and wants to do missionary work! Nothing that we have seen has come about yet, but we have a lot of faith that things are going to start cooking pretty soon here. I hope to be able to say at some point in the future "This area is on fire!"

So for last P-day we got to go to the Olympic Training Center with one of the youth in our ward who is training to be an Olympic gymnast. He took us through the "Athletes only" section which wasn't too exciting, but hey. I like going where not just anyone can go. I got a picture of the Canadian Flag as well, to show some pride for my country. That was a neat P-day, and he gave us a ride so we didn't have to use any miles. Speaking of which, some emergency service came up this week and we used a ton of miles to do it, so now we have 16 miles left for today and tomorrow...And the library we're at is like 4 away...It's going to be a close one.

I suppose I'll tell you about this wonderful service. I think I mentioned it in my last email, but this old guy is being evicted from his house, so we went and helped him load ALL his stuff into 2 Uhaul trucks. We figured, this guy has 2 days to leave, he'll only take the most important stuff but he was grabbing everything, even just random garbage stuff. It was funny though, and we love the guy, but every time he'd hand something to us, he'd tell us how much it was worth. Or he'd ask us if the church could use a ______. Eg. "This is carbonized steel...worth about $200" or "This table was built by your forefathers in 1750...worth about $15,000" which was unfortunate because in grabbing said table I accidentally broke a tiny piece off...Woops...he said he'd just glue it back on. The biggest problem though is the smell. For whatever reason, the place smelled more foul than anything I have ever experienced in my life. Like B.O. mixed with wet dog, mixed with cat urine. It was so potent you could taste it if you breathed through your mouth. But "Sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven" (Hymn no. 27) and he is calling himself an unbaptized member. He lives in the Falcon Ward so those missionaries will be teaching him, but he is ready to go! An awesome thing, how service softens hearts.

Our good friend Stanley is doing good, he still will not let us know why he won't come to church. He's reading the Book of Mormon. He's praying about it, but he's not getting an answer because he won't come to church! And we tried so hard to dig it out of him but no dice. Can't figure out what's going on there.

Had a very interesting thing happen this week. Met this guy who curiously enough, had met with missionaries in Minnesota back in 91-92 under mission president Hughes (?). Anywho this guy was a methodist minister who had been through tons of missionaries and had a General Authority "prophesy" he'd be baptized. He brought up his "biggest" concerns which were really weak doctrinal concerns that would take me about 5 seconds to blow through. Then almost as an afterthought, he mentioned that he prayed, and God told him the Book of Mormon wasn't true....Ok...There were a couple of problems with that. First, it wasn't really that big of a deal to him. Second he kept on saying that "when God tells him otherwise". This means to me that he didn't have a lot of faith in his original answer because if he *did* receive that revelation, then why wouldn't he have shut the door right then. Anywho, it bugged me a lot. People don't realize Moroni didn't just say "hey grab this book, glance through it, and then fire off a quick prayer". SINCERE HEART. REAL INTENT. He was a former in our area book, and before he told missionaries that if he joined the church, his whole mindset would have to change.

I share this story for a couple of reasons, not to destroy anyone's faith because I testify in the name of the Lord that when he said God told him it wasn't true, the spirit left. Immediately. I share this to say that any SINCERE seeker of truth can come to know the Book of Mormon is true. But you have to be sincere. You have to be willing to ACT on the answer you receive. You have to put some work into it. You need to study it out in your mind. I promise to anyone reading this email, if you haven't already learned for yourself the Book of Mormon isn't true, you gotta find out. You just gotta. I know it is and testify to that. It'd be one thing if Joseph Smith had said, there was no Christ. Or if he said "I am Christ". But the biggest problem our critics have is that he completely testified of Christ until his dying breath. It's a problem they have to resolve and we could tell our friend had a problem with that as well. Anywho, I hope I haven't shaken anyone's faith with this. If you want to know, you can know.

Well, I think that's good for now! Remember the Church is true!

Elder Gibb