hola familia!

hello everyone!! it is a rainy rainy day here in renton :) still beautiful though. it's fun to get your emails and hear how everyone is doing!! i'm sorry everyone is getting sick! sis yura and i were also sick this week. i slept in a few extra hours on friday and that seemed to take care of it! better to miss exercise and language study and get better faster than to miss proselyting time! sis yura is still kind of congested but i'm all better! miracle :) it is pretty miserable to be sick on the mission. wednesday night we were at our last appointment at 8 o clock with a less active family that we just love and we were curled up with blankets as we shared our message. they were sweet :) sister allan took care of us too and gave us medicine. hope you all get feeling better!

other than that it's been kind of a slow week without a lot of investigators. BUT we worked really hard and got five new investigators! we have 4 church tours set up today and tomorrow so pray they will go through :) one morning we were especially blessed with miracles. we had zone service in the morning (i learned how to lay sod! i'm pretty manly now) and decided not to shower even though we were all muddy (haha sounds pretty gross but we sprayed smell good stuff on so no worries) so we could get tracting in before some lessons...because we knew we needed investigators badly!!! we found 2 new investigators in 30 minutes! that was the day we were super sick too. tender mercies! so yeah, hopefully this week we'll see some fruits of our labors.

the 2 pics are from our ward halloween party. we weren't allowed to dress up but we switched name tags with the elders as our costumes haha. so this year i was elder price for halloween! fun costume eh? the little girl is one of my favorites: cosette ray dressed as a knight! she reminds me a lot of annie when she was little. ah she's a riot. i love visiting them.



well that's about all the news! oh except this morning i found out elder perry is coming to speak to our mission next friday!! cool huh? i'm so excited :) also some members gave us a george foreman grill and a BREADMAKER! we will have fresh homemade bread when we get home from the library. AWESOME HUH?? ah the simple pleasures.

one cool thought from my personal study this morning: the whole mission is reading the book of mormon together by new years. this morning we were on mosiah 3 and 4...AWESOME chapters. we highlight all verses about Christ in blue, and all of christ's words in red. it's so cool to see visually that the BofM truly is another testament of Christ! mosiah 3 is practically all blue!! anyway my favorite part was verses 11 and 12 (i actually can't remember if it was in chapter 3 or 4). it talks about the blessings that come from enduring to the end. it says that after we have been converted (and after we've made covenants like baptism) we can't stop. we must remember how merciful the Lord is, remember our own nothingness and how we must depend on him. if we humble ourselves and call upon him daily (essential as we KEEP our covenants) the blessings are BEAUTIFUL: we'll always rejoice (so true! we are truly happy when we keep our covenants), we'll always retain a remission of our sins (even though we are imperfect...we are made perfect as we apply christ's atonement daily), and we grow in the knowledge and glory of God! there are no greater blessings! anyway i just loved those verses.

well i hope you all have a happy halloween and thanksgiving dinner before dad leaves! can't wait to hear about ukraine and jerusalem. whenever i meet people from ukraine i always tell them my dad is going there soon! hehe. how long will you be gone pops? jenny and jonathan, how was your trip? jonathan you've still never written me an email, where is the love?? come now. i miss and love you all!!! thanks for your prayers, emails, love, support, etc etc etc

sister gibbons