For the First Time in 12 Years...

Hey everybody, had a crazy week down here in Colorado Springs. some crazy stories for ya.

One thing that happened was we street contacted a Muslim. It was this old guy from Jerusalem and we had no idea how to teach him. Everyone we talk to has a Christian background, but this guy was like "Jesus was a prophet, but he was not the Son of God." and we were all like....ok...uhhhh.....We tried to talk about prayer and stuff like that but he disagreed with us on the idea of Jesus Christ. So we weren't really sure how to make it work but he wasn't really interested anyways. Plus I don't think we're allowed to teach Muslims. Something President Pfile said at the beginning of my mission.

Then, we had to deal with a situation in the district one night, and because it was later at night we didn't have our Missionary clothes on. And we forgot to grab our wallets. And we were working on paperwork in the house on the car, and so we had all the insurance information inside the house. We realized this halfway through the drive but thought, "meh, hopefully we don't get pulled over". Sure enough, we get pulled over. The Cop wasn't too happy, and thank goodness I wasn't driving because he managed to find Elder Robledo's license in the system but I don't know what would have happened with me....Anywho, he walks back to the car to check stuff out, and all we can do is pray. We didn't really have a reason to be speeding because the people we were going to visit were adults and so legally we didn't have any obligation for them, and we didn't have our missionary clothes to prove we were missionaries (luckily Elder Robledo had grabbed his tag and ministerial certificate) and so we just said a prayer asking for a miracle because the officer looked ticked, and there had been an accident on that road the night before...and we were facing a $300 ticket...But he came back and gave us a warning. It was a true miracle and we dealt with the situation and all was well in Zion. Except now we have to cover another 2 wards until the end of the transfer at least, so that's been stressful.

In terms of missionary success this week, we visited a part member family this week that we've been going by for a while. Well this past time, Elder Robledo and I both felt impressed to invite the non-member of the family to take the missionary lessons. She related that 12 years ago she had the lessons, something came up and the missionaries stopped coming by...and had only come over to "play with the kids" since then....So we were the first missionaries in 12 years to invite...man that was so awesome and now we have an appointment for this Tuesday night to teach. That was a pretty sweet experience, never assume anything, that someone is not interested or heard it before and we were so grateful for that.

Had our zone conference this week which was a good one. They've created a new "policy guide" for the mission and it's really helped people understand what is ok and what is not. Music had kind of gone to the dogs for a little while, with missionaries thinking that non-lds artist Christian Rock was ok, and other crazy things. So that and a lot of new policies have come out that will really help the mission to reach it's goals. We are really working on the Standard of Excellence, that is, Each companionship baptizes one person a month. And the big thing with that is it's a standard, not a goal. Think about the difference between a Standard and a goal. So we have a really important responsibilty to fulfill that Standard.

Well, I suppose that's all for the week. It was a crazy one. We should be getting a visa waiter joining our companionship on Thursday. And our truck is in the shop right now because the "Black Boxes" they put in our car didn't agree with the car and started reporting "seatbelt violations"...if you want to experience something annoying, try listening to a little black box yell "Seatbelt violation" at you for 40 minutes while your seatbelts are in. So they gave us a retired mission Malibu with basically unlimited miles. So that's been nice. Except the malibu has a hard time in the snow. We almost got stuck up in Black Forest.

Oh yeah, this guy came outside to argue with us one day, and he ended up accepting a Book of Mormon and said he'd be baptized on the 18th of March if he knew it was true. Yep fun times.

Elder Gibb