Out with January in with February 2-2-15

Dear family and friends,

                  I am so happy that February is here!! January was a doozie. And I have to be quite honest I'm happy January is over. Mainly because with January brought transfers. And many companionships in the zone got transferred which drove a lot of cars to Fargo at the beginning of the month. And then of course we drove to MLC which is always a fun time. And then we had our Zone Training Meeting which drove a lot of cars to Grand Forks. And then we just had our Zone Conference down in Fargo which drove a lot of cars to Fargo again. You could safely say January taxed a lot of cars with a lot of mile requirements. But we safely squeaked by and stayed under on our mileage cap. So we are doing great! And we welcome February with open arms. This month we won't be driving down to MLC. So we will be able to give more cars more miles for this month. But it feels good to welcome this month because every day we are getting closer and closer to warm weather. This winter has been an awesome winter up here! The temperatures have been really good compared to last winter where there were 100 days straight of temperatures in the negatives. I believe I was here for at least 80 of those days (yes God has a great sense of humor.) But this week was good we had an awesome Zone Conference. I feel like our training went well overall. I could pick out some things I would change and some mistakes I would correct, but overall I feel like it was good and it taught missionaries well. Something cool that we did at the end of the training was we had each district come up with what they are going to work on to help their investigators teach 50% of the lesson. We had them write it down on a blank white puzzle piece. We then gathered the pieces and put them together on the board and taped them. We then flipped over this puzzle and it was a well sketched out picture of the savior. It was really cool! We promised them that as they apply these commitments it will help their investigators come closer to the savior. We met with Johnathan this week! And they are all excited to have this baptism coming up on the 21st. Elder Smith was chosen by Johnathan to give the talk on baptism. And I was chosen to give the talk on the Holy Ghost. This will be the first talk I give on my mission. I'm still striving to go 24 months without talking in sacrament meeting once. So far I'm doing good! We also got a new investigator this week. His name is Jean. He is from Africa! And he had some friends in Africa who were members. He seemed pretty interested when we shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with him. The reason we taught that to him was he grew up Muslim, but converted to Christianity not too long ago. So he doesn't really know what the gospel of Jesus Christ is. So it was cool to teach that to him, and we look forward to working with him! We will have to apply our training and use pictures to help teach him! Yesterday we went to another church and it was one of those southern churches with the clapping and the dancing. It was actually really fun! My ears hurt afterwards due to the loud music. But now I can say I have experienced an African American clapping church. The pastor was really funny as well. At one point he was talking about how their trying to pass a law that allows pastors to carry firearms in church. And he shared a story of a guy that would attend his church regularly who was always packing. At one point the pastor said "It was good I was preaching the right thing or I would have been shot!" Coincidentally we were sitting at the exact bench this man sat at every week. He then looked to us and said "I hope you two aint packing!" He was a really nice guy! Well that is about all for this week! I hope you all are doing well! I love you all and have a great week!

Love, Elder Barber