my Halloween weekend

hey fam!! sounds like you all had a rockin' halloween :) i want to see pics of all the costumes! james' costume sounds adorable. and mom and dad, the "big pimpin' award" huh? that's impressive haha. we couldn't dress up obviously but here are some pics of our orange and black outfits for the day :)



the other pics are:
*me with tia johnson the day she got her mission call! she's the bishop's daughter (abby's age) and she goes teaching with us all the time. i just adore her and now she's going to the japan fukuoka mission in march! her mom is japanese and she's already fluent so she'll jump right in. it was fun to watch her open her call...brought back lots of memories from mine! her little brother is going to brazil and they report the same day. fun huh?

*now this weird fuzzy picture is to capture the worst day ever hahahaha. we had 5 appointments cancel in a row, including 3 church tours with new investigators. so we went to visit a less active woman who breeds westies...she has 9 dogs. they were ALL over us and i was COVERED in dog hair. that's what the picture is of...me covered with dog hair (even though you can't really tell) holding up 5 fingers for our 5 cancelled appointments. no worries though, we had a really great lesson with [D] that night...the spirit was strong and we got to the root of a lot of her concerns...it was AWESOME! that's totally how the mission...one little success overshadows 100 disappointments :)

i'm going to send another email with pictures of our zone pumpkin carving last preparation day...

pumpkins!

so here's the pics of my first time carving my own pumpkin (weird huh? i really think it was my first time...dad always did it when we were little right?) and it was a success!! turns out they have patterns to use! who knew?? i was quite proud of my spider hehe. so fun. so yeah, there's a pic of the zone in there too...even though half of it is the table the camera was sitting on haha. good times




so yeah, halloween was great! pretty much a normal day for us. the week was good except a little disappointing with so many new investigators cancelling. we had one awesome new investigator from korea but turns out her boys have swine flu so she's on hold now. so yeah kind of a rough time, but some great progress made with [D] and [M], our eternal investigators, this week! pray for us to find people to teach! we had a great "sister study" with our district leader and zone leaders this morning that got us pumped with new ideas and new faith so i'm excited for the miracles :)

i'm still really happy and lovin' the work! lately i've been making an extra effort to have really productive study time in the mornings and plan ahead what to study. my testimony grows so much every day! no matter what happens in the day, if i have spiritual study time in the morning, i'm happy and excited because i know it's all true and i'm so grateful for what i know.

well that's about it! thank you for your emails! popsy, i cant' believe ukraine is cancelled! i'm so sorry, i know you were excited. could you still go to visit max or do you want to save the airline miles for ukraine next year? i'm glad you all had a good early thanksgibbons!! we've already been invited to 2 homes for thanksgiving so i'll be well taken care of :) time is flyin'!! i can't believe it's november. the mission is going too fast. mommy, i got your package on saturday and LOVED it! it was like christmas! so so fun. thank you so much. i haven't been able to watch the videos yet because they don't work on my camera, but i'm going to try watching them on the computer after i send this. hope you all have a great week!!

lizzie

I LOVE YOU ALL!!

all caught up . . . again!

My apologies for getting behind once again. I'm all caught up, so be sure and scroll down past the videos to see Liz's emails from the last four weeks! I'll do better, I promise!

Liz's mom

videos!

Liz sent us a few random videos a while back, and said I could share them with all of you! The "When You Believe" video actually was in several shorter segments, and Jenny spliced them together and added the real song to give it some continuity. It goes black a couple of times . . . don't worry, it will just be for a few seconds!

"When You Believe" takes place in Renton with Sister Yura. "Father's Day" is from Maple Valley with Sister Bush and Sister Sawyer. "Dancing in the Kitchen" is from Maple Valley with Sister Bush. Enjoy!

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

sister yura and I are still in renton!

hello family!! well we're staying in renton! this is acually sister yura's last transfer of her mission so i'll "kill her off" as they say! we're excited because we love our area and love being companions. we're kind of at a tough point where we don't really have any investigators that are progressing so we need to find them!! we have a goal of 2 baptisms in november, so we're going to need some miracles!! faith and hard work will do it though :) the Lord has many people prepared so we just have to find them! we're praying especially to find a whole family we can teach....so if you get a chance, remember us in your prayers :)

k i'm going to send this off so i can look at abby's cattle pics haha, but i'll send some pics in a minute...LOVE YOU ALL!

lizzie

pics!

oh my goodness, i don't think i can top the cattle drive pictures, but here are the pics of my normal week! haha. the first pic is me modeling my new haircut! my a-line had grown out so i got it cut again, not too different, still short. i don't like it as much as my first cut for some reason, but it's nice to have all the ends even again :) the 2nd picture is sis yura and i prepping to go get something from the car in the pouring rain. rainy season is definitely starting up! one day in particular it poured. it was pitch dark and we were tracting. we sang singing in the rain with our umbrellas on the way back to the car though so we had fun! my boots and raincoat are awesome! BRING ON THE RAIN!

i'm trying to think if there's anything else to tell you.... oh i hit my 6 month mark this week! CRAZY! i can't believe how fast time flies. sis yura and i got our favorite pizza (veggie delite from papa murphy's) to celebrate and we ate the whole thing! awesome. yeah i can't think of much other than that. just the same old usual awesomeness. sister allan was so cute, before we knew about transfers she told us "i've been praying every day that you 2 get to stay here!" so it must be that we stayed because sis allan had so much faith :) other people in the ward were really cute too...it always makes you feel good when the ward doesn't want you to leave. there are TONS of fall colors here now...it is GORGEOUS. ah with so many trees it's just breathtaking. love it. yeah i really can't think of much else to tell you except everyone hates us during tracting lately it seems haha. i think i've had more doors slammed in the past week than in my whole mission combined. sis yura and i still have fun tracting though. our new project is perfecting her english. she speaks well and can understand everything and everyone can usually understand her, but her sentences are always out of order. so my new job is to fix every sentence she says (not during lessons though obviously). she's improving a lot! i'm also helping her fix her pronunciation when we read together in the mornings. i didn't realize how hard a language english is to learn until i had to explain it to someone. there are so many exceptions to rules and random phrases that we use. did i tell you we're teaching a korean lady english too? i can't remember what i tell you. yeah she's super cute and we're introducing her to a korean family in the ward this week. should be way fun.

well that's about it for me! sounds like you've had a fun week watching james! he sounds like such a character and it sounds like he's grown up a LOT since i left. tell him i love him :) love you all!!! talk to you in a week :)

lizzie

CRAZY, BUSY WEEK!

hey family!! so i finally decided how to use the address book on here so i didn't have to type in all your addresses! sweet huh? also a little sad that it took me this long. on thursday, i will have been a missionary for SIX MONTHS! isn't that crazy? it's just flown by. i've loved every minute of it. (well probably not EVERY minute, but pretty darn close!)

so this week as been SOOO busy! tuesday we had temple day! (i attached a pic, but now i'm thinking i might have sent it last week, oh well). i love the temple! we got a fun picture of our whole zone in front of the temple too but i just have a hard copy. my zone is the best! we have such awesome elders and it'll be fun to have these friendships forever. wednesday we had interviews with the president. i love interviews! pres moffat is AWESOME. and sis moffat is great too. it's fun that they're from salt lake so i can stay in touch with them. then thursday we had some exciting happenings: sis yura and i were guest speakers at a womens studies class at the Bush School...a private high school near UW (which apparently costs $26,000 a year! isn't that insanity?). it's definitely a very liberal school so the kids asked a lot of questions about womens roles in the church, our views of homosexuality, etc...you know, the easy questions ;) it was so cool though! a really great experience. sis yura and i basically taught the whole restoration because they asked what sets our church apart from other christian faiths, and then we got to teach all about the law of chastity and word of wisdom in answer to some questions. really smart kids, really respectful and friendly. so yeah, definitely a highlight i'll remember from the mission. the picture at the gas station was taken on that same day...on our way to seattle, we were precariously close to running out of gas....so we exited the freeway in bellevue and could NOT find a gas station. finally we found one and they didn't take credit cards! there was a chevron down the street though and we were very relieved :)

the other exciting thing on saturday was [L]'S BAPTISM!! (i attached a pic) it was so good! such a wonderful night. i got to speak about baptism (my first time giving a talk at one of my baptisms actually) which i just loved. it was pretty cute, i was talking about enduring to the end and doing the little things like prayer and scripture study and i was wrapping it up saying something like "[L], i promise if you keep doing the little things...etc" and he interrupted be and said "okay okay i will" hahaha SO larry. it was pretty cute though because he wasn't saying it out of annoyance (okay okay is just [L]'s classic response to every question), he was just committing that he would do it hehe. i don't know if that made sense but it was fun. i also got to accompany sister argyle on the flute for the musical number. we played it in church yesterday too...cool arrangement of a poor wayfaring man of grief! . . . but yeah the baptism turned out great! we had a bunch of support from our ward and also the singles ward because [L] will be going there. just a very happy day! the only sad thing was the building was out of hot water so the font was COLD. then [L]'s leg came up so they had to baptize him twice! poor guy.

then i went on an exchange with sister bush in maple valley from break friday to break saturday. SO FUN! i just adore her. i got to see . . . a bunch of members that i adore. it was so good to be with sister bush again. OH GUESS WHAT! at her zone conference, she said the closing prayer, and when she was shaking president's hand after, he said "we'll have to get you and sister gibbons together again before you go home...we can't keep you together for very long, but we'll have to do it" isn't that fun?? he just brought it up out of the blue. sister bush has 3 transfers left, so we'll see if we get to be companions again :) hopefully for christmas or my birthday! speaking of, transfer calls come on saturday (oh before i forget...next week p-day is tuesday just to warn you) and i have NO idea what will happen. i'm the only sister that has moved areas since i came to the mission in may (except for sister sawyer who came to maple valley with us for one transfer, but then she went back to her original area in puyallup) so we're expecting a LOT of changes. i'm 99% sure i'll stay in renton which is fine with me because i LOVE it here! sister yura is 99% sure she's leaving, but we'll see!! it's kind of exciting! i'll let you know next week!

well i've gotta get going....pray that we will find more investigators!! we need more people like [L]...he was a little miracle. i love you all! you're always in my prayers :) keep up the wonderful things you are doing! but remember "if you're too busy to pray and read your scriptures every day, then you're much busier than God ever intended you to be" haha....sister morriss had that on her wall. LOVE YOU ALL AND SUCH AHHHHH

wibby (haha i typed wubby at first...good times)

hola!

hey guys!! sorry i didn't warn about the change...p-day is today because we got to go to the TEMPLE!! love it. attached a pic. i also attached a pic of us with the maple valley sisters after an exchange because turned out they won the gold plates for their zone! so the sisters rocked it this transfer :) we asked this awesome guy on a motorcycle at the gas station to take the pic. he had a sweet leather jacket and turns out he just moved to renton! he left with a smile on his face and a restoration pamphlet :)

which reminds me of the funny story of the week!! i was in maple valley with sister burch (there's a pic of her attached) and we were tracting. this police car pulled up behind us and an officer got out and said "what's going on here ladies" "we're missionaries! we're proselyting" "oh, we got a call from someone in the neighborhood...we're been having problems with people going door to door recently. they've passed an ordinance which makes soliciting illegal in maple valley." "oh well, we're not selling anything, just sharing the gospel of jesus christ, so as far as we know, it's legal" meanwhile ANOTHER police car pulls up and two MORE officers get out (i guess we looked intimidating so the first had called for backup haha) and asked the SAME questions. then, "oh yeah, you're right, religious proselyting is the exception to the rule. well get it in the car...we'll have to take you down to the jailhouse"... sister gibbons just laughs... "you think i'm joking??" ....pause..."you're joking right?" "yeah i'm joking" haha. so we went on our merry little way. and then i realized THEY came to US and we didn't even talk to them about the gospel. they were still standing around so i said "sister bush let's go back and talk to them about the gospel!!" so we went up to them and talked to them, but they weren't interested haha. they wouldn't even take our website card haha but oh well. i said "well we thought we might as well ask since YOU came to US" and they laughed and got in their cars. THE END. pretty funny huh?

so yesterday we got a call from [L] (who always answers the phone "hey gibbons" no matter how many times i tell him it's SISTER gibbons haha) saying "hey, you know my baptism this saturday?" "yeah" "well something came up" (missionary's worst nightmare. you die when they say those words) "i'm flying to hong kong on friday and i'll be gone for three weeks" so of course i think ERG he's changed his mind and everything will die off while he's gone. but then he said, "can we do it on thursday night?" yay!! so his baptism is moved up and we have it all set to go! he has his interview tonight! we helped him find the address of the church in hong kong so he can go while he's there. i think it'll be way cool for him to go there because one of his original concerns was that it seemed like an american church to him. we had a great lesson with him yesterday and it's cool so see how far he's come. i don't think any of his family or friends will come to his baptism :( they're "not really into it" in [L]'s words. hopefully that will change sooner or later. so yeah that's the exciting thing going on!

other than that we're trying to find new investigators and help others progress...the usual :) life is good! sis yura and i have gotten super close. we're working really hard and having TONS of fun. she's awesome!!! transfers are on the 20th and i hope we just stay but we'll see. sis yura only has 2 transfers left so i don't know if president will just leave her here or send her somewhere else for her last 2. we'll see!

wasn't conference awesome?? i'm glad you all got to watch! my favorite session was saturday morning i think and some of my favorite talks were elder holland, pres uchtdorf, pres eyring, pres monson, that one guy who talked about missionary work, elder christofferson, and the very first talk of the whole thing (was it scott or hales??) anyway i'm listing almost every talk but it was just so good! we watched all the sessions at the stake center...it was great! easy to stay focused :) i thought of you all eating tacos! did you have scones? well anyway, i'm SO grateful we have living prophets on the earth. i know if we strive to follow their counsel, we will be happy, we will be safe, and we will have peace in a chaotic world.

well that's about it folks, i'll send another email with pics of me making buuz with the mongolians!! LOVE YOU ALL!!!!!!! thanks for the emails and the prayers and everything!

sister gibbons

making buuz with the mongolians!

making buuz with sis yura, sarah, tuya, and moko!