Travel Arrangements

Well things are really starting to get close to the end. A lot of people are asking me stuff like "so how does it feel to be almost done?" "are you excited to go home?" "what are you going to do?" and most of the questions I don't have ready answers for. But the best way I can describe it is it's weird. That missionary who extended went home on Saturday so now my group and I are the oldest (timewise) missionaries in the mission. Mainly because all throughout my mission I never thought this day would come. It always seemed so far away. But now I'm at the point where I can say "I go home next week". And I buy milk that expires after I do. I'm still working hard though and doing effective things. We had zone conference and exchanges this past week so we didn't spend a lot of time in our area. But we did have a baptism. And our other investigator with a date is getting baptized this weekend! So I get to finish off my mission with a baptism. That will be nice. And she is so prepared it's crazy.

Let's see....zone conference. It was so cool. We talked alot about Mormon.org and the "mormon moment" as the news media is calling it. See, we are allowed to check "Church Approved" websites on pday and so I can get onto the ldsnews and newsroom so I've heard a little bit about these things, and some of the articles that have been in newspapers/magazines. It's pretty cool. Apparently, the mission at the MTC that operates the "Chat With Us" thing on mormon.org is the highest baptizing mission per capita (many many baptisms but only 15 missionaries) and those are the missionaries that couldn't serve full time due to one thing or another. So if you couldn't serve a full time mission, there's still a lot of cool stuff you can do. But we all were committed to put up a mormon.org thing so I made a profile: http://mormon.org/me/9F3K/Theo haha enjoy. My favorite one i've come across was the one that said "I'm So and So. I'm Batman. And I'm a Mormon". Good stuff. But we were committed by our mission president to make a mormon.org profile so I did one. And if anyone reading this hasn't made one yet I'd invite you to do the same. Then link it to your facebook or something. I don't really know how those things work anymore but I guess I'll figure it out. We also talked a lot about obedience and getting people to Church and all kinds of fun things. Got my travel arrangments in the mail this week. The "Trunky Letter". I'm not really looking forward to 3 hours of layovers and 4 hours of flying but it will give me time to reflect on the service I've rendered and plan out my homecoming talk or something. As long as it isn't like the flight to the MTC, where I leave the house at 6 in the morning and don't arrive until 2 in the morning the next day. As long as it isn't that bad, then I'm good. But my mission basically ends next thursday because I have to be at the mission office by 6:30 so plus travel time and packing that day is pretty much gone. Our baptism went super well. We planned one of the songs from the primary songbook but we forgot to make copies of it so the first verse was a little interesting as people struggled to remember the words to the song. One really awesome thing about the La Junta ward is it's probably about 50% converts. So sometimes the primary songs aren't as "second nature" as they are to people who have been members their whole lives. So that was cool. Aaaaand a Seventh Day Adventist guy just came up to us and started talking to us right now. Gave us some books. Told us he'd been baptized mormon in '85. He was talking really loud about how the Catholic church is an abomination in a library full of hispanics (aka catholics) that was interesting. Speaking of hispanics, had a funny experience yesterday. A lot of people will tell us that they don't speak english in an attempt to get rid of us, but most of them do. For a while, I heard a technique from another missionary where you say something like "I have enourmous feet" and if they look down then that means they speak english. Well I actually tried that on a guy yesterday but he actually didn't speak english. He didn't even bat an eye. And our investigator is progressing very well towards her date this Saturday. She has everything she needs, we finally got her to pray out loud and it was such an amazing experience where she prayed about how grateful she was that we had come into her life, and filled the hole that she was missing. I had to break the news to her this week that I was leaving soon and she was not too happy to hear that. But everything is on schedule for the baptism. She's committed to keep all the commandments, answered all the baptismal interview questions, and even accept a calling after baptism. Awesome stuff there. That's why we do it. Last district meeting was this past friday. Since we are having a zone meeting this next friday I only have to do a 3 minute spiel and that's it, as opposed to leading an hour long discussion in district meeting. For the last district meeting we ate some Canadian Candy, talked about finding and had probably the most revelatory district meeting of my whole mission. I also had one of the missionaries play "The Throne Room" song from Star Wars on the piano while I handed out a medal that said "interim district leader" on it, because when I leave someone has to be DL for the week. I don't have authority to do that but it was a fun distraction anyways. I liked to keep my district meetings fun, but also serious at the same time. Well, that's all until next week. The final letter. Love ya! Elder Gibb