Dear Family,
This has been one crazy week. I feel like I’ve been on the phone from Wednesday til today. We haven’t had a chance to do full morning studies since Wednesday either. So, here is the news. My new companion is Elder McFadyen. He is from Roseville, California. Hes been out for about 15 months and he is actually a Chinese speaking missionary. He became a zone leader a transfer or 2 ago. I think he is definitely going to be one of my favorite companions. There are some people that you just seem to click with and you're always on the same page about missionaries and there are other missionaries where you wonder where the heck they are coming from. Elder McFadyen fits into the first category and as much as I liked Elder Roberts, he definitely had his own idea about how missionary work should be done. Elder McFadyen and I will hopefully be able to correct a lot of things that have gone on here in the past and get this area up and running.
In the few days that we’ve been together we have already seen some pretty amazing things happen. One of the coolest things is that we found a new investigator and gave him a baptismal date. Here is the story:
So a week or 2 ago the Spanish Elders gave us a referral for a guy named Keith Greear. Elder Roberts and I set up an appointment, but when we got there he wasn’t there because apparently his grandson fell down and broke his arm. So on Friday last week Elder McFadyen and I decided to stop by and see if we could at least set up another appointment. Well when we stopped by he miraculously let us in. He walks around with 2 canes because he has some back problems from when he broke his back in 8 places from falling out of a massive tree. Then some time after that he got hit by a car while he was riding on his motorcycle and messed it up again. He was also standing by a tank of napalm that exploded when he was on a boat and somehow managed to survive. So anyway, he has a pretty crazy story. We told him he was probably being kept alive for a reason. He strongly agreed with that and started talking about how ever since he has been bedridden he has had a hunger to learn about God, so he has read “all the bibles, even the Book of the Mormon.” He got his hands on all sorts of crazy religion books. Well we taught him about the restoration and he actually understood everything really well and definitely felt the spirit and accepted a baptismal date. We taught him for a 2nd time yesterday and taught him about the Book of Mormon, or Book of the Mormon as he calls it, and he thought that was fascinating. He just so happened to be studying all about the American Indians before we got there. He was pretty excited to research about these Lamanite people.
We have also found an unusually large amount of people who have been receptive to us this week. On Sunday our whole district also fasted so that we could all find more people to teach. This has been a pretty tough area for a long time, so hopefully this will help.
On Thursday, after our transfer meeting on Wednesday, we had our big long meeting down in Sugar Land, but this time it was a mission wide leadership meeting rather than a meeting just for the Zone Leaders. All the zone leaders did have to get there an hour early and stay a few hours after though. I think we got out of our meeting at like 6 and finally got back to our area at 7:45, and we left at like 7 in the morning. For a big part of the meeting President talked a lot about obedience and how after we had a big push for obedience when he first got here, people started to get a little lax and that we need to make another push. So a LOT of little rules were clarified and he strongly encouraged us to follow them. I am definitely not a fan of a whole bunch of little rules for everything, but unfortunately there are a lot of people out there who don’t have common sense and they think that if there's no specific rule against a specific action, it is ok. I prefer to just be a missionary and do what a could missionary would do and use common sense to know what we should be doing, but like I said, unfortunately we cant do that. So we are fixing a lot of little things that haven’t been done correctly here in League City. Oh that reminds me of a story. So one of the rules is that we are not supposed to have dinner appointments on P-days because we are supposed to be out and proselyting when our P-day ends at 6:00pm. Well there is this one lady in our ward. She is a very good person and does a lot of good for people. So, she has told the missionaries that the only possible day that she can have the missionaries over for dinner is on Mondays. We had to go try to tactfully correct this problem, so we went up to her and told her about this “new rule” and told her we cant do that anymore, but we said that we would be willing to end our P-day an hour early and go over to eat at 5 instead of 6. She started to get all emotional and said that there was no way her husband could get home in time and all this other stuff. We told her we would be willing to do breakfast lunch or dinner any day of the week, or come over after church or any time they were open, but she said that it would never work, then she stormed down the end of the hallway crying, then stormed back past us and we told her that we would try to see if we could work something out, but she just screamed, “NO, I don’t want to be the cause of your disobedience.” And stormed out of the church. I was half expecting something like that to happen just because that is kind of how this lady is, but my companion was totally blown away. That was his welcome to League City moment.
We also had a really good lesson with a lady named Chrissy Ross. Her husband is a member and they have an 8 year old daughter who they want to have be baptized on March 14, when the husband’s mother will be in town so she can see the baptism. Chrissy wants to be baptized too. We haven’t been able to get in contact with her for a long time, so we haven’t taught her much at all, but we finally got in and brought a member with us and taught her the Word of Wisdom, because she smokes. Shes been smoking for like 24 years. It was a pretty powerful lesson though and she is determined to stop so she can get baptized.
Oh yeah, I spoke in sacrament meeting yesterday. I don’t mind speaking in sacrament meeting, especially on my mission, but this time the topic was not the greatest. The theme for the sacrament meeting was the standard works, so the 2nd counselor called me and asked me to speak on “which of the standard works do the missionaries use when they teach.” Well the answer is all of them. There's not a whole lot to talk about that. So I answered that question at the beginning of the talk and kind of took my own route and talked about other things that were more interesting. It went pretty good, but I only had like 20 minutes to prepare it because we have had absolutely no free time.
Well that’s about all for this week. We still have a big huge To Do list, so its going to be another busy week. Busy is good though. I hope you all have a good week and good luck at the doctor’s office today. I love you all!
Love,
Chase
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Received, Mon Jan 25, 2010
Dear Family,
When you live with members, you get to hear a little bit more than normal about whats going on in the news and whats going on in the world. They’ve been telling us about all this huge flooding and mudslides that have been going on in Southern California. I’ve had a couple other people tell me the same thing and I’ve seen a few pictures. Then in Mom’s e-mail I just hear there was a little rain storm then it was sunny all day. I thought that was funny. I was disappointed that I was missing out on some awesome rain storms. I knew it couldn’t be very bad, but I imagined that there would be like a river going down Highland Oaks dr, like there has been in other huge storms. Our house is in a pretty ideal location, up on a little hill, so even if there was a lot of flooding, it couldn’t touch us.
Ok, here is the transfer news. My companion, Elder Roberts, is getting transferred! There is going to be a change in every zone leader companionship this transfer. There have been a lot of changes and moving around lately. I am pretty excited for it though. My companion is an awesome guy, but he’s been in this area forever and he is a pretty strong headed guy, so he naturally tries to do everything by himself. It has gotten a lot better since the start of the transfer though. My guess is that I will probably get a pretty new, if not brand new zone leader. You never know though. I’ll find out on Wednesday.
Elder Pedersen and Elder Campbell, 2 of my companions are going home tomorrow. A couple other of my friends in the mission are going home too. I think the weirdest thing though is that all the sister missionaries who came out with me are going home tomorrow too. I don’t think I would be able to be satisfied if I already went home. I know these next couple months are going to flyyy by…time always seems to be going faster and faster and faster in the mission. That’s why you just have to do everything you can, while you can and not take a single day for granted.
This week I got to on 2 exchanges. The first one was to a Spanish area that covers the north part of my area. I was with Elder Carroll, who I have served around a lot in my mission, so it was fun to be with him again. It was also fun to be in a full Spanish area again. I loved it. One thing I noticed is how my Spanish has not gotten rusty at all. If anything it has just gotten better. It feels good to be at a very comfortable level of speaking the language. In my area I still run into a couple Hispanic people a week. This week I ran into a Hispanic guy and he told me he was from Bolivia, then I mentioned that I knew some people from Bolivia and that I had tried Peanut Soup, which is a popular thing to eat in Bolivia, and he was really surprised and opened up and started talking to me about everything. Then we talked about he church and he said the church was all over in Bolivia, then he said, “So when are you coming over to visit me?” I love Hispanic people. I didn’t even have to ask him. I gave that referral over to the Spanish elders…hopefully something good comes from it. It is amazing how I talk to 70 people a week and maybe 1 or 2 says I can come by sometime and if I am extremely lucky, maybe they’ll even set up an appointment, and if I’m unbelievably lucky, they might actually be there when we show up for the appointment. Then probably around half the Hispanic people I talk to say that we can come back and teach them. I hope I get to end my mission in a Spanish area…we’ll see.
I also got to go on exchanges to Galveston Island this week. This was the first time in almost a year I have been there. They are rebuilding all the piers at the beach and all sorts of stuff. It was way fun to go back there. It was a good day too, just like how I remembered it. Like 72 degrees with a nice ocean breeze. I think the coolest thing that happened though is that I ran into this lady who I taught my very first lesson to. We gave her and her 2 daughters baptismal dates, but then they disappeared with all the hurricane stuff. Well, I ran into her again and the missionaries are going to go back there and start teaching them again. I am excited about that.
In our area we still don’t have a whole lot going on right now, but we are working with a 10 year old kid named Anthony. He is living in a pretty bad situation. He lives with his mom and dad, who is almost never home, and his brother and his cousin. They live in this nasty little motel room. The mom is way too overweight, so she cant really move around a whole lot, so the place is just gross. All the kids do all day long is sit there and play video games. They have had pretty rough lives as you can imagine. All of them are members except for Anthony, but all of them are inactive. Anthony has started coming to church and he asks us every week if he can get baptized. Unfortunately we cant baptize him if he has absolutely no family support, because there isn’t very much of a chance he will be able to stay active. We have made a ton of progress with him in the past couple weeks though. He is now involved in scouts which he absolutely loves, which also helped him make a bunch of friends and people are available to give him rides to church and scouts every week. Elder Roberts and I are like big brothers to Anthony. We look out for him and make sure he does his homework and we reward him when he does something good. It has been neat to see him start to take responsibility and want to start to do good things as we reward him and help him see why it is good. Hopefully he will be able to get baptized.
We have had pretty good weeks these past 2 weeks. This week we taught 26 sit down lessons, which are lessons where we actually go into a home, say a prayer, have a full lesson, end a prayer, and leave. Elder Perry came and he challenged all of us to get 20 sit down lessons per week. We have been doing really well at that. We’ve also each been hitting our talk to 10 people each day goals as well. Hopefully we’ll start to see more good things happening. We have been seeing a lot of the less active people we teach start coming to church and progressing, which is awesome, but I hope we can start to see some results with non members too.
This should be an interesting week with Transfer meeting coming up, then Zone Leader Council, which is that loooong meeting we have with all the zone leaders once a transfer. I always have to bring candy to keep myself entertained and awake. I am not a fan of meetings. This meeting is always an awesome one though. Today we are planning on going to NASA to take a tour. That will be cool. Speaking of cool, enjoy that Cool Whip Delight…that stuff is delicious.
Ok, have a good week! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
PS. I also got a letter from Tony this week...he is doing well. I think he had a pretty difficult companion to start out with, but all is well now and it sounds like hes enjoying it a lot.
When you live with members, you get to hear a little bit more than normal about whats going on in the news and whats going on in the world. They’ve been telling us about all this huge flooding and mudslides that have been going on in Southern California. I’ve had a couple other people tell me the same thing and I’ve seen a few pictures. Then in Mom’s e-mail I just hear there was a little rain storm then it was sunny all day. I thought that was funny. I was disappointed that I was missing out on some awesome rain storms. I knew it couldn’t be very bad, but I imagined that there would be like a river going down Highland Oaks dr, like there has been in other huge storms. Our house is in a pretty ideal location, up on a little hill, so even if there was a lot of flooding, it couldn’t touch us.
Ok, here is the transfer news. My companion, Elder Roberts, is getting transferred! There is going to be a change in every zone leader companionship this transfer. There have been a lot of changes and moving around lately. I am pretty excited for it though. My companion is an awesome guy, but he’s been in this area forever and he is a pretty strong headed guy, so he naturally tries to do everything by himself. It has gotten a lot better since the start of the transfer though. My guess is that I will probably get a pretty new, if not brand new zone leader. You never know though. I’ll find out on Wednesday.
Elder Pedersen and Elder Campbell, 2 of my companions are going home tomorrow. A couple other of my friends in the mission are going home too. I think the weirdest thing though is that all the sister missionaries who came out with me are going home tomorrow too. I don’t think I would be able to be satisfied if I already went home. I know these next couple months are going to flyyy by…time always seems to be going faster and faster and faster in the mission. That’s why you just have to do everything you can, while you can and not take a single day for granted.
This week I got to on 2 exchanges. The first one was to a Spanish area that covers the north part of my area. I was with Elder Carroll, who I have served around a lot in my mission, so it was fun to be with him again. It was also fun to be in a full Spanish area again. I loved it. One thing I noticed is how my Spanish has not gotten rusty at all. If anything it has just gotten better. It feels good to be at a very comfortable level of speaking the language. In my area I still run into a couple Hispanic people a week. This week I ran into a Hispanic guy and he told me he was from Bolivia, then I mentioned that I knew some people from Bolivia and that I had tried Peanut Soup, which is a popular thing to eat in Bolivia, and he was really surprised and opened up and started talking to me about everything. Then we talked about he church and he said the church was all over in Bolivia, then he said, “So when are you coming over to visit me?” I love Hispanic people. I didn’t even have to ask him. I gave that referral over to the Spanish elders…hopefully something good comes from it. It is amazing how I talk to 70 people a week and maybe 1 or 2 says I can come by sometime and if I am extremely lucky, maybe they’ll even set up an appointment, and if I’m unbelievably lucky, they might actually be there when we show up for the appointment. Then probably around half the Hispanic people I talk to say that we can come back and teach them. I hope I get to end my mission in a Spanish area…we’ll see.
I also got to go on exchanges to Galveston Island this week. This was the first time in almost a year I have been there. They are rebuilding all the piers at the beach and all sorts of stuff. It was way fun to go back there. It was a good day too, just like how I remembered it. Like 72 degrees with a nice ocean breeze. I think the coolest thing that happened though is that I ran into this lady who I taught my very first lesson to. We gave her and her 2 daughters baptismal dates, but then they disappeared with all the hurricane stuff. Well, I ran into her again and the missionaries are going to go back there and start teaching them again. I am excited about that.
In our area we still don’t have a whole lot going on right now, but we are working with a 10 year old kid named Anthony. He is living in a pretty bad situation. He lives with his mom and dad, who is almost never home, and his brother and his cousin. They live in this nasty little motel room. The mom is way too overweight, so she cant really move around a whole lot, so the place is just gross. All the kids do all day long is sit there and play video games. They have had pretty rough lives as you can imagine. All of them are members except for Anthony, but all of them are inactive. Anthony has started coming to church and he asks us every week if he can get baptized. Unfortunately we cant baptize him if he has absolutely no family support, because there isn’t very much of a chance he will be able to stay active. We have made a ton of progress with him in the past couple weeks though. He is now involved in scouts which he absolutely loves, which also helped him make a bunch of friends and people are available to give him rides to church and scouts every week. Elder Roberts and I are like big brothers to Anthony. We look out for him and make sure he does his homework and we reward him when he does something good. It has been neat to see him start to take responsibility and want to start to do good things as we reward him and help him see why it is good. Hopefully he will be able to get baptized.
We have had pretty good weeks these past 2 weeks. This week we taught 26 sit down lessons, which are lessons where we actually go into a home, say a prayer, have a full lesson, end a prayer, and leave. Elder Perry came and he challenged all of us to get 20 sit down lessons per week. We have been doing really well at that. We’ve also each been hitting our talk to 10 people each day goals as well. Hopefully we’ll start to see more good things happening. We have been seeing a lot of the less active people we teach start coming to church and progressing, which is awesome, but I hope we can start to see some results with non members too.
This should be an interesting week with Transfer meeting coming up, then Zone Leader Council, which is that loooong meeting we have with all the zone leaders once a transfer. I always have to bring candy to keep myself entertained and awake. I am not a fan of meetings. This meeting is always an awesome one though. Today we are planning on going to NASA to take a tour. That will be cool. Speaking of cool, enjoy that Cool Whip Delight…that stuff is delicious.
Ok, have a good week! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
PS. I also got a letter from Tony this week...he is doing well. I think he had a pretty difficult companion to start out with, but all is well now and it sounds like hes enjoying it a lot.
Received Tue, Jan 19, 2010
Dear Family,
I’ll start off with the whole driver’s license thing. I’m glad you remembered because I totally forgot about all that stuff. If I do get something in the mail, maybe it would just be easier if one of you signed my name on the paper for me and sent it in. I don’t know how that would work or if it would work, but I thought I’d throw it out there.
I only have a couple things written down for this week. Its been mostly the same stuff going on. But I do have a couple things. The first one is about the show Extreme Home Makeover…I think that’s what its called. I know you know what it is. Well they are doing one of those houses here in Kemah, which is right by League City. I guess there is some family here and they take in all these foster kids. They’ve had like 20 something kids go through their home and they’ve adopted a lot of them…like 8 or 9. Several of them have disabilities too. Their house got destroyed last year by the hurricane and they haven’t had any money to fix it, so they have been living in FEMA trailers. So Extreme Home Makeover came in and built a massive house for them. It is the biggest house they’ve built on the show. Its something like 8 bedrooms and they have an elevator in the middle of the house so the kids with disabilities can go up and down. We stopped by to see the house. There were toooons and tons of volunteers there. I’d say probably 80% of them were standing around and they’d pick something up every once in a while and give it to one of the few contract workers who knew what they were doing. They really did work on it 24 hours a day though. I think that episode goes on the air in March or something.
You will never guess what I did for some service this week. We mucked out a house! I never thought that over a year after the hurricane I would muck out another house. Apparently some lady finally got cleared by her insurance to muck everything out, so I guess she knew a member and the member sent us to go help her. It was a lot more fun when everything wasn’t saturated in sewage water. The insulation was nasty though…I did not go near that stuff. It was black. It was fun to smash in the walls and tear everything apart though. It brought back a lot of memories.
The only other really eventful, out of the ordinary thing I remember from this week is that on Sunday I got to interview a family of 4 for baptism. Baptismal interviews are always fun to do. You get to hear first hand about all these people’s conversions. All of them are amazing too. Everyone had to overcome some pretty significant things whether it be family issues, friends, word of wisdom issues, or whatever else. Its probably one of my favorite parts in the mission.
I bought myself a little Christmas present yesterday. I’ve started to try to do exercises in the morning again and I decided that I’m just going to do pushups in the morning. I want to do 100 push ups every morning. I honestly didn’t think I would be able to do more than 15 pushups without stopping right now, but I was and I did a couple sets of 20. I’ve been doing about 85 pushups in the morning. Anyway, sometimes it hurts my wrists to do pushups on the ground and some missionaries have these things called Perfect Pushups that they use and I’ve used them before and I liked them, so I decided to use some Christmas money to buy them. They are those things you see ads for on the TV that were designed by some navy seal or something and basically all it is, is that you spin your wrists 90 degrees as you do the pushup and it works more muscles and takes the stress off you tendons. We’ll see how those work. They are small so it will be easy to just throw in my suit case.
This is the last week of the transfer! So that means next week I will have transfer news. Now I will be veeery surprised if I get transferred, but you never know. Everyone has been moving around a lot lately. My companion has been in this area for like 6 months, so he could go at any time. I am pretty sure I will go back to Spanish sometime, but my guess is that will be in 2 more transfers. Speaking of that, it has been really cool to see how my Spanish has not gotten worse at all. If anything it has gotten better. I see Spanish people throughout the week, so I always take the opportunity to go talk to them. It doesn’t feel like I’m rusty at all. Plus I’ve been handing out about an average of 1-2 referrals to the Spanish Elders every week, so that makes them happy. And today I am on exchanges in one of the Spanish areas, so that is fun. And all the interviews I do are in Spanish. I’ve done about 6-7 interviews this transfer, so that is always fun.
We are still searching for people to teach in our area. We have been hitting our goal of each talking to at least 10 people every day and we finally found a person or 2 who actually might be interested. We have return appointments this week, so we’ll see how it goes.
Well, as always it was awesome to hear the updates from home. And yes I am back to full health. And I bought some hand sanitizer, so I need to start using that stuff again. It always seems like there is something going around in every house we go into. And Bub, you should start that Driver’s Ed. You should just do it online like I did. I would just put on some music and read through that stuff on the weekends and I got done with it pretty fast.
Ok have a good week!! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
I’ll start off with the whole driver’s license thing. I’m glad you remembered because I totally forgot about all that stuff. If I do get something in the mail, maybe it would just be easier if one of you signed my name on the paper for me and sent it in. I don’t know how that would work or if it would work, but I thought I’d throw it out there.
I only have a couple things written down for this week. Its been mostly the same stuff going on. But I do have a couple things. The first one is about the show Extreme Home Makeover…I think that’s what its called. I know you know what it is. Well they are doing one of those houses here in Kemah, which is right by League City. I guess there is some family here and they take in all these foster kids. They’ve had like 20 something kids go through their home and they’ve adopted a lot of them…like 8 or 9. Several of them have disabilities too. Their house got destroyed last year by the hurricane and they haven’t had any money to fix it, so they have been living in FEMA trailers. So Extreme Home Makeover came in and built a massive house for them. It is the biggest house they’ve built on the show. Its something like 8 bedrooms and they have an elevator in the middle of the house so the kids with disabilities can go up and down. We stopped by to see the house. There were toooons and tons of volunteers there. I’d say probably 80% of them were standing around and they’d pick something up every once in a while and give it to one of the few contract workers who knew what they were doing. They really did work on it 24 hours a day though. I think that episode goes on the air in March or something.
You will never guess what I did for some service this week. We mucked out a house! I never thought that over a year after the hurricane I would muck out another house. Apparently some lady finally got cleared by her insurance to muck everything out, so I guess she knew a member and the member sent us to go help her. It was a lot more fun when everything wasn’t saturated in sewage water. The insulation was nasty though…I did not go near that stuff. It was black. It was fun to smash in the walls and tear everything apart though. It brought back a lot of memories.
The only other really eventful, out of the ordinary thing I remember from this week is that on Sunday I got to interview a family of 4 for baptism. Baptismal interviews are always fun to do. You get to hear first hand about all these people’s conversions. All of them are amazing too. Everyone had to overcome some pretty significant things whether it be family issues, friends, word of wisdom issues, or whatever else. Its probably one of my favorite parts in the mission.
I bought myself a little Christmas present yesterday. I’ve started to try to do exercises in the morning again and I decided that I’m just going to do pushups in the morning. I want to do 100 push ups every morning. I honestly didn’t think I would be able to do more than 15 pushups without stopping right now, but I was and I did a couple sets of 20. I’ve been doing about 85 pushups in the morning. Anyway, sometimes it hurts my wrists to do pushups on the ground and some missionaries have these things called Perfect Pushups that they use and I’ve used them before and I liked them, so I decided to use some Christmas money to buy them. They are those things you see ads for on the TV that were designed by some navy seal or something and basically all it is, is that you spin your wrists 90 degrees as you do the pushup and it works more muscles and takes the stress off you tendons. We’ll see how those work. They are small so it will be easy to just throw in my suit case.
This is the last week of the transfer! So that means next week I will have transfer news. Now I will be veeery surprised if I get transferred, but you never know. Everyone has been moving around a lot lately. My companion has been in this area for like 6 months, so he could go at any time. I am pretty sure I will go back to Spanish sometime, but my guess is that will be in 2 more transfers. Speaking of that, it has been really cool to see how my Spanish has not gotten worse at all. If anything it has gotten better. I see Spanish people throughout the week, so I always take the opportunity to go talk to them. It doesn’t feel like I’m rusty at all. Plus I’ve been handing out about an average of 1-2 referrals to the Spanish Elders every week, so that makes them happy. And today I am on exchanges in one of the Spanish areas, so that is fun. And all the interviews I do are in Spanish. I’ve done about 6-7 interviews this transfer, so that is always fun.
We are still searching for people to teach in our area. We have been hitting our goal of each talking to at least 10 people every day and we finally found a person or 2 who actually might be interested. We have return appointments this week, so we’ll see how it goes.
Well, as always it was awesome to hear the updates from home. And yes I am back to full health. And I bought some hand sanitizer, so I need to start using that stuff again. It always seems like there is something going around in every house we go into. And Bub, you should start that Driver’s Ed. You should just do it online like I did. I would just put on some music and read through that stuff on the weekends and I got done with it pretty fast.
Ok have a good week!! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Received Mon Jan 11, 2010
Dear Family,
This has been one crazy week. I think I mentioned last week in my e-mail that I woke up not feeling very well. Well it never really went away. Today I feel the best I have felt since I got sick, so I am hoping this whole thing passes. I called up the guy in charge of missionary medical stuff, but he is kind of crazy and just told me to take a bunch of medicine and stay inside for 48 hours. There was no way I could just sit around inside for 2 days…even if my health did get better, I would probably be mentally insane. Plus it wasn’t so bad, so we kept working.
So with that in mind, here are some of the things we had to get done this week. First, we had to plan, prepare, and do a Zone Meeting, which is basically a meeting where all the missionaries in the zone come to and we have to train them and put on this whole program. So we had to plan out the whole meeting and prepare our training. It actually turned out really well. We trained on the L. Tom Perry Plan, also called the Ward Mission Process, which is basically where the auxiliary groups are supposed to give us names of 5 people to visit. That hasn’t really been happening in any ward in the mission except for the League City ward, which is where Elder Roberts and I are serving. So we trained the missionaries on how to help their ward get that started. A lot of missionaries called us up afterwards and told us of a lot of good experiences that came from the things we trained them on. I am pretty happy about how it all went.
The next huge task was that we had to prepare for stake correlation, which is that meeting where we meet with the stake presidency, the high councilor over missionary work, and with our mission president and we talk about how all the wards are doing. We have to fill out these long tedious reports for each ward and we have 9 of them in our zone/stake, so you can only imagine how long that took. That meeting ended up going very well too. The whole Ward Mission Process came up into conversation and they decided that they wanted to train all the ward leaders on this whole thing and teach them how to get it started. That is exactly what we wanted to have happen, so we’re excited to have that happen. After this meeting and after all this gets running, there is going to be a big difference in the work here.
The NEXT thing is that we had to move on Thursday and help 2 other companionships move. We moved in with members. They are named the Seely’s. I’m not sure how to spell it. They are probably about 50 and their youngest daughter just moved out of the house to go to college. They are a pretty cool family. We live upstairs where we have our own room and study area and everything. Its definitely not as big and spacious as the Randall’s home in Richmond, but not very many people’s houses are that big. So we did all that on Thursday.
Then we just had all the normal missionary work stuff. In the mission we have recently been stressing how every missionary needs to get 10 OYMs a day. OYM = Open Your Mouth…so in other words, you need to talk to 10 people a day. It is actually a lot harder than it sounds. You just don’t see 20 people(for both companionships to get 10 OYMs) in your path each day, so we’ve had to go to shopping center parking lots to try to find people to talk to. We have not had much luck at all yet. Its so interesting to see how all the different cultures are. I could get rejected by 10 American white people in a row, then if I go up and talk to a Hispanic person in Spanish they always sit and listen and they always say you can come back and teach them. Of course a lot of the time they really aren’t very interested and they really don’t want you to come back, but they are too nice to tell you no. I think that a lot of the people who have grown up here just have it trained into their minds not to let anybody take advantage of you. They see 2 20 year old kids walking around in nice clothes, and naturally you think they must be getting something out of it and they must have some hidden motives. The good thing is that when you find someone who says you can come back, they are serious and they are usually really good investigators, so in the end it all ends up the same. We just have to keep looking!
The Keichler’s, who Mom got that knitted thing from, are an older couple who have had missionaries in their home for like 2 ½ years. The missionaries finally moved out into a different place. They live in our ward. So of course they love the missionaries and I guess she sends one of those things to all the missionaries who come into the ward. They are nice people.
So that was my week. Somehow we made it through all that and we got everything done on time and we had a decent week in terms of missionary work. This week will be much more relaxing.
In response to news at home and Mom’s e-mail…Bub you are the man. As long as you get a decent GPA you are pretty set. Of course if you think you can do even better, it never hurts to take it again, but a 30 is very good.
I think church at 11 is the perfect starting time. Our ward currently starts at 8:30 and it is way too early, especially when you have early morning meetings. We might have to cover another ward, which means we would have 6 hours of church plus at least another hour or 2 for meetings. That does not sound fun.
Alright I think that’s about it for this week. Ohh yeah..I realized yesterday that I hit my 18 month mark on Saturday! That is kind of exciting. I was gone on exchanges in Sugar Land with the assistants that day. I was with Elder Schwarz who is one of my good friends in the mission, so we had a really good time. It didn’t even cross my mind all day until Sunday in one of our meetings I saw the date was the 10th and remembered that the 9th is always another month mark. Oh yeah and one more thing. I don’t know how often they have you go and give a missionary report in sacrament meeting, but in your next one could you please tell everyone how grateful I am for all the letters and stuff they sent me at Christmas time. I don’t think I’m going to have enough time to write everyone back, but I don’t want anyone to go unthanked.
Oh and the other last thing is that it has been FREEZING here again. It was down in the 20s on Thursday and Friday, then it was in the 30s on Saturday and now today its warming back up and it will be warm again. We didn’t get any snow…the skies were all clear, but all the water puddles and everything did freeze over. I wont be surprised if it is in the 70s this week. There is a saying in Texas where they say, If you don’t like the weather, wait a couple minutes. Obviously referring to how frequently the weather changes.
Ok have a great week, I love you all!!!
Love,
Chase
This has been one crazy week. I think I mentioned last week in my e-mail that I woke up not feeling very well. Well it never really went away. Today I feel the best I have felt since I got sick, so I am hoping this whole thing passes. I called up the guy in charge of missionary medical stuff, but he is kind of crazy and just told me to take a bunch of medicine and stay inside for 48 hours. There was no way I could just sit around inside for 2 days…even if my health did get better, I would probably be mentally insane. Plus it wasn’t so bad, so we kept working.
So with that in mind, here are some of the things we had to get done this week. First, we had to plan, prepare, and do a Zone Meeting, which is basically a meeting where all the missionaries in the zone come to and we have to train them and put on this whole program. So we had to plan out the whole meeting and prepare our training. It actually turned out really well. We trained on the L. Tom Perry Plan, also called the Ward Mission Process, which is basically where the auxiliary groups are supposed to give us names of 5 people to visit. That hasn’t really been happening in any ward in the mission except for the League City ward, which is where Elder Roberts and I are serving. So we trained the missionaries on how to help their ward get that started. A lot of missionaries called us up afterwards and told us of a lot of good experiences that came from the things we trained them on. I am pretty happy about how it all went.
The next huge task was that we had to prepare for stake correlation, which is that meeting where we meet with the stake presidency, the high councilor over missionary work, and with our mission president and we talk about how all the wards are doing. We have to fill out these long tedious reports for each ward and we have 9 of them in our zone/stake, so you can only imagine how long that took. That meeting ended up going very well too. The whole Ward Mission Process came up into conversation and they decided that they wanted to train all the ward leaders on this whole thing and teach them how to get it started. That is exactly what we wanted to have happen, so we’re excited to have that happen. After this meeting and after all this gets running, there is going to be a big difference in the work here.
The NEXT thing is that we had to move on Thursday and help 2 other companionships move. We moved in with members. They are named the Seely’s. I’m not sure how to spell it. They are probably about 50 and their youngest daughter just moved out of the house to go to college. They are a pretty cool family. We live upstairs where we have our own room and study area and everything. Its definitely not as big and spacious as the Randall’s home in Richmond, but not very many people’s houses are that big. So we did all that on Thursday.
Then we just had all the normal missionary work stuff. In the mission we have recently been stressing how every missionary needs to get 10 OYMs a day. OYM = Open Your Mouth…so in other words, you need to talk to 10 people a day. It is actually a lot harder than it sounds. You just don’t see 20 people(for both companionships to get 10 OYMs) in your path each day, so we’ve had to go to shopping center parking lots to try to find people to talk to. We have not had much luck at all yet. Its so interesting to see how all the different cultures are. I could get rejected by 10 American white people in a row, then if I go up and talk to a Hispanic person in Spanish they always sit and listen and they always say you can come back and teach them. Of course a lot of the time they really aren’t very interested and they really don’t want you to come back, but they are too nice to tell you no. I think that a lot of the people who have grown up here just have it trained into their minds not to let anybody take advantage of you. They see 2 20 year old kids walking around in nice clothes, and naturally you think they must be getting something out of it and they must have some hidden motives. The good thing is that when you find someone who says you can come back, they are serious and they are usually really good investigators, so in the end it all ends up the same. We just have to keep looking!
The Keichler’s, who Mom got that knitted thing from, are an older couple who have had missionaries in their home for like 2 ½ years. The missionaries finally moved out into a different place. They live in our ward. So of course they love the missionaries and I guess she sends one of those things to all the missionaries who come into the ward. They are nice people.
So that was my week. Somehow we made it through all that and we got everything done on time and we had a decent week in terms of missionary work. This week will be much more relaxing.
In response to news at home and Mom’s e-mail…Bub you are the man. As long as you get a decent GPA you are pretty set. Of course if you think you can do even better, it never hurts to take it again, but a 30 is very good.
I think church at 11 is the perfect starting time. Our ward currently starts at 8:30 and it is way too early, especially when you have early morning meetings. We might have to cover another ward, which means we would have 6 hours of church plus at least another hour or 2 for meetings. That does not sound fun.
Alright I think that’s about it for this week. Ohh yeah..I realized yesterday that I hit my 18 month mark on Saturday! That is kind of exciting. I was gone on exchanges in Sugar Land with the assistants that day. I was with Elder Schwarz who is one of my good friends in the mission, so we had a really good time. It didn’t even cross my mind all day until Sunday in one of our meetings I saw the date was the 10th and remembered that the 9th is always another month mark. Oh yeah and one more thing. I don’t know how often they have you go and give a missionary report in sacrament meeting, but in your next one could you please tell everyone how grateful I am for all the letters and stuff they sent me at Christmas time. I don’t think I’m going to have enough time to write everyone back, but I don’t want anyone to go unthanked.
Oh and the other last thing is that it has been FREEZING here again. It was down in the 20s on Thursday and Friday, then it was in the 30s on Saturday and now today its warming back up and it will be warm again. We didn’t get any snow…the skies were all clear, but all the water puddles and everything did freeze over. I wont be surprised if it is in the 70s this week. There is a saying in Texas where they say, If you don’t like the weather, wait a couple minutes. Obviously referring to how frequently the weather changes.
Ok have a great week, I love you all!!!
Love,
Chase
Received Mon Jan 4, 2010
Dear Family,
I am glad to hear everyone had a good time with the wedding/visit to Utah/Idaho. It sounded like it was all fun. It sounded like a lot of eating too, which is definitely a good thing. So where are Steven and Heather living right now? I know they eventually plan on moving down to California again for Steven’s job.
I finally got the lost package with the Sees candy and stamps! I don’t know what the deal was, but it looked like it has been tossed around a lot. It was all ripped down the side and somebody had tried to tape it back together. Everything was still in there as far as I could see though. The Sees candy was still delicious, so thank you.
After e-mailing last week I got started to get sick and I think I had the 24 hour flu. My companion got it a couple days before and its spreading like crazy in the mission. Yesterday I started to get a sore throat and this morning I woke up and it has gotten pretty bad. I have a headache, backache, and sore throat. It already feels much better though. I called up the 2 senior missionaries in charge of all the health stuff with missionaries and they told me to stay in for 48 hours and to take Tylenol and ibuprofen. They are kind of crazy. I did take some Tylenol and I’m going to buy some ibuprofen…hopefully that helps with the back. There is no way I’m staying in for 48 hours though. I have never been sick so many times though. Before the mission I was never sick, now in the mission I’ve gotten sick like 7 times. I wash my hands all the time too. Luckily it usually never lasts more than 24 hours.
I got to go on exchanges to an area called Clear Lake this week. I know if I ever explained it fully, but I know I did mention the League City Zone was barely created when the League City Stake was formed about 2 months ago. Well when that happened, the stake took in wards from another stake just north of us, which is actually outside of our mission. Because of that our mission boundaries changed and we got a couple new areas and some new missionaries. Clear Lake is one of those new areas. Ever since being in our mission, the area has never had a baptismal date. I’m not really sure what the problem is…I know there were some pretty disobedient missionaries there who got sent home, and that always leaves a bad taste in the member’s mouths, but I honestly believe you can change that pretty fast if you just work hard and work well with the members. Anyway, when we went on exchanges we planned out some good lessons and planned to extend baptismal dates in every lesson. We only got in to teach 1 of the investigators they had planned, but we taught the lesson as we planned, extended the date and he accepted! I think a lot of missionaries just get afraid of extending baptismal invitations and they end up doing it pretty weak, or just not at all. I think our experience at least helped cure this problem at least a little bit. They went to teach one of the investigators who we had planned for, but wasn’t home, the day after I left and they extended another date. That was good to hear.
Elder Cameron, my last companion, also called me up last night to update me on how all the people from my last area are doing. A lot of the people that I found and taught with Elder Cameron are progressing well still and are getting closer to baptism. That was a pretty amazing area. Hopefully we can turn this area into an area like that. Our teaching pool is pretty sparse right now though. Although we did get another baptismal date and find a few new hopeful people, so things are looking better.
Ok, one more thing. My driver’s license expires on my birthday in April. I talked to our vehicle coordinator guy and he told me I have 2 options. 1: I can go to the DMV here and get a Texas driver’s license, or 2: I can write to my family and see if they can extend my driver’s license. At first I thought it would be pretty cool to have a Texas drivers license, but then I started thinking about it and thought it might cause problems living in California, but having a Texas driver’s license. I’d have to change the address and all that stuff. So the best option would probably be to extend my driver’s license at least until I get home, so I can go and get a new one when I get back. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll just get one here. So, could you please try to find out what all needs to happen in order to extend my license?
That’s about all for this week. Pray that we can find some new good people to teach! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
I am glad to hear everyone had a good time with the wedding/visit to Utah/Idaho. It sounded like it was all fun. It sounded like a lot of eating too, which is definitely a good thing. So where are Steven and Heather living right now? I know they eventually plan on moving down to California again for Steven’s job.
I finally got the lost package with the Sees candy and stamps! I don’t know what the deal was, but it looked like it has been tossed around a lot. It was all ripped down the side and somebody had tried to tape it back together. Everything was still in there as far as I could see though. The Sees candy was still delicious, so thank you.
After e-mailing last week I got started to get sick and I think I had the 24 hour flu. My companion got it a couple days before and its spreading like crazy in the mission. Yesterday I started to get a sore throat and this morning I woke up and it has gotten pretty bad. I have a headache, backache, and sore throat. It already feels much better though. I called up the 2 senior missionaries in charge of all the health stuff with missionaries and they told me to stay in for 48 hours and to take Tylenol and ibuprofen. They are kind of crazy. I did take some Tylenol and I’m going to buy some ibuprofen…hopefully that helps with the back. There is no way I’m staying in for 48 hours though. I have never been sick so many times though. Before the mission I was never sick, now in the mission I’ve gotten sick like 7 times. I wash my hands all the time too. Luckily it usually never lasts more than 24 hours.
I got to go on exchanges to an area called Clear Lake this week. I know if I ever explained it fully, but I know I did mention the League City Zone was barely created when the League City Stake was formed about 2 months ago. Well when that happened, the stake took in wards from another stake just north of us, which is actually outside of our mission. Because of that our mission boundaries changed and we got a couple new areas and some new missionaries. Clear Lake is one of those new areas. Ever since being in our mission, the area has never had a baptismal date. I’m not really sure what the problem is…I know there were some pretty disobedient missionaries there who got sent home, and that always leaves a bad taste in the member’s mouths, but I honestly believe you can change that pretty fast if you just work hard and work well with the members. Anyway, when we went on exchanges we planned out some good lessons and planned to extend baptismal dates in every lesson. We only got in to teach 1 of the investigators they had planned, but we taught the lesson as we planned, extended the date and he accepted! I think a lot of missionaries just get afraid of extending baptismal invitations and they end up doing it pretty weak, or just not at all. I think our experience at least helped cure this problem at least a little bit. They went to teach one of the investigators who we had planned for, but wasn’t home, the day after I left and they extended another date. That was good to hear.
Elder Cameron, my last companion, also called me up last night to update me on how all the people from my last area are doing. A lot of the people that I found and taught with Elder Cameron are progressing well still and are getting closer to baptism. That was a pretty amazing area. Hopefully we can turn this area into an area like that. Our teaching pool is pretty sparse right now though. Although we did get another baptismal date and find a few new hopeful people, so things are looking better.
Ok, one more thing. My driver’s license expires on my birthday in April. I talked to our vehicle coordinator guy and he told me I have 2 options. 1: I can go to the DMV here and get a Texas driver’s license, or 2: I can write to my family and see if they can extend my driver’s license. At first I thought it would be pretty cool to have a Texas drivers license, but then I started thinking about it and thought it might cause problems living in California, but having a Texas driver’s license. I’d have to change the address and all that stuff. So the best option would probably be to extend my driver’s license at least until I get home, so I can go and get a new one when I get back. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll just get one here. So, could you please try to find out what all needs to happen in order to extend my license?
That’s about all for this week. Pray that we can find some new good people to teach! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
Monday, January 4, 2010
Received Mon, Dec 28, 2009
Dear Family,
The whole story about trying to leave for Utah but running into all those problems was funny, but at the same time, I’m sure it was pretty frustrating. It will be a good story in the future though. That is pretty exciting that Steven’s wedding is already about to happen…that came up pretty fast. You will have to give me a full recap. Zak and Quinn will definitely have to go to Tucano’s some other time. It is definitely my favorite restaurant.
Well there is not too much to update on here. It was fun being able to talk on Friday. I thought about a lot of things before hand to talk about, but completely forgot about everything when I called. Its a weird feeling trying to talk about whats been going on for the past year and a half in only 40 minutes. I guess all that really matters is to know that everyone is doing good and were happy.
We definitely have a lot of work to do here in League City though. This last week has been kind of a difficult one with Christmas and our zone conference and my companion got sick, so were hoping for a good week this week. We honestly don’t have much of a teaching pool. It seems like the missionaries who have been in this area have been going to the same people over and over again for the past 10 months and they are getting nowhere. So hopefully we can find some new people.
I guess I will tell you a little more about my companion. Like I said, he is named Elder Roberts and he's from the San Francisco area. He is one of those guys who just taaaalks and talk and talk loud and all the time. It is so over the top sometimes it makes me laugh. He is definitely a people person though. He is good at talking to people and getting them to like us. We are definitely working on working together though. I guess with all his last companions they would just jump in and kind of cut each other off when they would want to say something. That is definitely not a very smooth way to do things, so we’ve talked about that and our teaching has gotten much better.
One thing I’ve learned is that in order to have powerful teaching, you and your companion absolutely have to work well together. A lot of times that won’t come naturally, so you have to talk about it, figure it out, and probably change/sacrifice a few things to make it work. It took me a little while to figure that out, but it makes things a lot easier. I think we will have a good time together.
Ok that’s really about all I have for this week. Hopefully I have some good updates for next week. I know you guys will. I love you all and I hope everyone has a great time at Steven’s wedding!
Love,
Chase
The whole story about trying to leave for Utah but running into all those problems was funny, but at the same time, I’m sure it was pretty frustrating. It will be a good story in the future though. That is pretty exciting that Steven’s wedding is already about to happen…that came up pretty fast. You will have to give me a full recap. Zak and Quinn will definitely have to go to Tucano’s some other time. It is definitely my favorite restaurant.
Well there is not too much to update on here. It was fun being able to talk on Friday. I thought about a lot of things before hand to talk about, but completely forgot about everything when I called. Its a weird feeling trying to talk about whats been going on for the past year and a half in only 40 minutes. I guess all that really matters is to know that everyone is doing good and were happy.
We definitely have a lot of work to do here in League City though. This last week has been kind of a difficult one with Christmas and our zone conference and my companion got sick, so were hoping for a good week this week. We honestly don’t have much of a teaching pool. It seems like the missionaries who have been in this area have been going to the same people over and over again for the past 10 months and they are getting nowhere. So hopefully we can find some new people.
I guess I will tell you a little more about my companion. Like I said, he is named Elder Roberts and he's from the San Francisco area. He is one of those guys who just taaaalks and talk and talk loud and all the time. It is so over the top sometimes it makes me laugh. He is definitely a people person though. He is good at talking to people and getting them to like us. We are definitely working on working together though. I guess with all his last companions they would just jump in and kind of cut each other off when they would want to say something. That is definitely not a very smooth way to do things, so we’ve talked about that and our teaching has gotten much better.
One thing I’ve learned is that in order to have powerful teaching, you and your companion absolutely have to work well together. A lot of times that won’t come naturally, so you have to talk about it, figure it out, and probably change/sacrifice a few things to make it work. It took me a little while to figure that out, but it makes things a lot easier. I think we will have a good time together.
Ok that’s really about all I have for this week. Hopefully I have some good updates for next week. I know you guys will. I love you all and I hope everyone has a great time at Steven’s wedding!
Love,
Chase
Received Mon, Dec 21, 2009
Dear Family,
Transfer news: All of my predictions for transfers were correct! I am in League City.
It is an English area. Half the zone is English and half is Spanish, so I will be doing all the Spanish baptismal interviews and all the exchanges to Spanish areas and my companion will do all the English stuff. So thankfully I will still get to speak a little Spanish. You can look on a map to see where League City is, but it is basically just a little more on the mainland from where Galveston is. So I will get to go on exchanges to Galveston! I am excited about that. League City is also where a huge NASA base is. You know in all those famous lines where they say “Houston…we have a problem” or whatever? Well they are talking to the space center here in League City. A lot of the members at church work at NASA. There are always air force jets flying around here to patrol the area too. I’m sure for one of these P-days I will go tour the place.
My companion is Elder Roberts. He has been out for about 14 months, and this is his 2nd transfer as a Zone Leader. He actually has a twin brother in this same mission. His twin brother came out about 8 months before him and he just happened to get called to the exact same mission. He is from northern California somewhere. All of my companions except for my Tongan companion have been from Utah up until now. He is a pretty funny guy. He is pretty outspoken and opinionated…it makes me laugh. He goes off on these rants talking uncontrollably sometime. It is pretty funny…I am helping him with that. This zone was created last transfer when the League City stake was created. So everything is pretty new and President told me he wants us to really get things going here. It should be fun. At our district meeting on Friday it was really weird to find out that I am the oldest (as far as time in the mission) missionary in our district. Time really has been flying by.
We are living in an apartment here, but we are going to move in with some members at the beginning of the year. I have mixed feelings about that. Its always kind of hard to have to share a fridge and everything with members. I’m sure it will all be good though. And no I am not unpacked yet. Our P-day ends at 2 today too so I don’t think I will be able to unpack today either. The second half of our P-day is going to be used on Christmas this Friday. So on Christmas we will do our normal studies in the morning until 11, then were thinking everyone in our zone will come to the stake center here and we’ll open presents and half a lunch and all that stuff until about 3, then we will go out and start working again. On Sunday we passed around lists for members to sign up and let us come by on Christmas and share a short Christmas message with them. So that is what we will be doing for most of the day. But on Tuesday is when we will be having our Christmas Zone Conference. We haven’t gotten very much info as to what is going to happen, but I will let you know next week.
Christmas phone call: I am thinking I will call at around 7pm my time on Christmas day, which is 5pm California time if I am not mistaken. And yes, I still do remember our home phone number and mom’s cell phone and dad’s cell phone number, so I should be ok.
In our area we don’t really have a very big teaching pool right now, so we will be working on that. In the mission we have a goal to have every single companionship baptize every transfer. I’ve actually had a personal goal in my mission to at least average 1 baptism per transfer too. I am right on track with that right now, so hopefully we can keep that up. Good things have been happening all across the mission too. Areas are starting to baptize where they haven’t seen baptisms for a long time and more and more people are starting to baptize. It is pretty exciting.
It has been pretty slow in the area so far because of all the meetings and things we’ve had.
On Wednesday it was transfer meeting and we had to drop everyone off in their areas and drive all over the place, so we got back at like 7. Thursday we had a Zone Leader Conference, which is pretty much an all day meeting. We left at like 7:30 and we got back at about 6:30 or 7. Friday we had our District Meeting, then a big planning session which lasted several hours. Saturday was our only mostly normal day. Then Sunday we had church which starts at 1 (the worst time for church…it eats up your whole day. Next year it starts at 8:30 I think). Then we had an investigator fireside at 7 which goes until the rest of the night. I think the investigator firesides are probably one of my favorite meetings…I may have written about this before. It is the fireside that Bessy Aquino spoke in last week. Well that was for the Spanish one, then last night we had an English one for this part of the mission. 2 recent converts of only a couple weeks speak, then a convert of like 5+ years speaks. They always have good stories.
I do have one kind of funny story. One of the few people in our teaching pool is a 10 year old kid named Anthony. The rest of his family are inactive members. So we were teaching him on Saturday and trying to get him to come to church but he kept throwing out the excuses like “I am busy” and other made up things. Basically he just wanted to stay home and play video games. We explained to him that in order for him to understand why he needs to come to church, he needs to come and find out for himself. Its something that you just feel and you know is right. He kept asking why, so I used this analogy that I heard…I think Boyd K Packer use. I asked him how salt tasted. And he was like…”I don’t know how to describe it!” Then he runs over to the cupboard and pulls out thing of salt and dumps a bunch in his mouth. It was hilarious. Then of course he starts to spit it out, so I asked him, “now do you know how salt tastes?” and he yelled”YES!!” then I say, “How?” He says as he is still trying to wash his mouth out, “BECAUSE I TASTED IT!” Then I said, “Ok, so how are you going to find out why you need to come to church.” He promptly yelled, “BY GOING!” It was hilarious….it worked a lot better that I had ever expected too.
Ok, well that is about all for this week. We will talk on Friday, so I will be able to fill you in on any other stories that come to mind then. Heather also wrote me this week…that was nice. Ok, have an excellent winter break and a merry Christmas! I love you all!!
Love,
Chase
Transfer news: All of my predictions for transfers were correct! I am in League City.
It is an English area. Half the zone is English and half is Spanish, so I will be doing all the Spanish baptismal interviews and all the exchanges to Spanish areas and my companion will do all the English stuff. So thankfully I will still get to speak a little Spanish. You can look on a map to see where League City is, but it is basically just a little more on the mainland from where Galveston is. So I will get to go on exchanges to Galveston! I am excited about that. League City is also where a huge NASA base is. You know in all those famous lines where they say “Houston…we have a problem” or whatever? Well they are talking to the space center here in League City. A lot of the members at church work at NASA. There are always air force jets flying around here to patrol the area too. I’m sure for one of these P-days I will go tour the place.
My companion is Elder Roberts. He has been out for about 14 months, and this is his 2nd transfer as a Zone Leader. He actually has a twin brother in this same mission. His twin brother came out about 8 months before him and he just happened to get called to the exact same mission. He is from northern California somewhere. All of my companions except for my Tongan companion have been from Utah up until now. He is a pretty funny guy. He is pretty outspoken and opinionated…it makes me laugh. He goes off on these rants talking uncontrollably sometime. It is pretty funny…I am helping him with that. This zone was created last transfer when the League City stake was created. So everything is pretty new and President told me he wants us to really get things going here. It should be fun. At our district meeting on Friday it was really weird to find out that I am the oldest (as far as time in the mission) missionary in our district. Time really has been flying by.
We are living in an apartment here, but we are going to move in with some members at the beginning of the year. I have mixed feelings about that. Its always kind of hard to have to share a fridge and everything with members. I’m sure it will all be good though. And no I am not unpacked yet. Our P-day ends at 2 today too so I don’t think I will be able to unpack today either. The second half of our P-day is going to be used on Christmas this Friday. So on Christmas we will do our normal studies in the morning until 11, then were thinking everyone in our zone will come to the stake center here and we’ll open presents and half a lunch and all that stuff until about 3, then we will go out and start working again. On Sunday we passed around lists for members to sign up and let us come by on Christmas and share a short Christmas message with them. So that is what we will be doing for most of the day. But on Tuesday is when we will be having our Christmas Zone Conference. We haven’t gotten very much info as to what is going to happen, but I will let you know next week.
Christmas phone call: I am thinking I will call at around 7pm my time on Christmas day, which is 5pm California time if I am not mistaken. And yes, I still do remember our home phone number and mom’s cell phone and dad’s cell phone number, so I should be ok.
In our area we don’t really have a very big teaching pool right now, so we will be working on that. In the mission we have a goal to have every single companionship baptize every transfer. I’ve actually had a personal goal in my mission to at least average 1 baptism per transfer too. I am right on track with that right now, so hopefully we can keep that up. Good things have been happening all across the mission too. Areas are starting to baptize where they haven’t seen baptisms for a long time and more and more people are starting to baptize. It is pretty exciting.
It has been pretty slow in the area so far because of all the meetings and things we’ve had.
On Wednesday it was transfer meeting and we had to drop everyone off in their areas and drive all over the place, so we got back at like 7. Thursday we had a Zone Leader Conference, which is pretty much an all day meeting. We left at like 7:30 and we got back at about 6:30 or 7. Friday we had our District Meeting, then a big planning session which lasted several hours. Saturday was our only mostly normal day. Then Sunday we had church which starts at 1 (the worst time for church…it eats up your whole day. Next year it starts at 8:30 I think). Then we had an investigator fireside at 7 which goes until the rest of the night. I think the investigator firesides are probably one of my favorite meetings…I may have written about this before. It is the fireside that Bessy Aquino spoke in last week. Well that was for the Spanish one, then last night we had an English one for this part of the mission. 2 recent converts of only a couple weeks speak, then a convert of like 5+ years speaks. They always have good stories.
I do have one kind of funny story. One of the few people in our teaching pool is a 10 year old kid named Anthony. The rest of his family are inactive members. So we were teaching him on Saturday and trying to get him to come to church but he kept throwing out the excuses like “I am busy” and other made up things. Basically he just wanted to stay home and play video games. We explained to him that in order for him to understand why he needs to come to church, he needs to come and find out for himself. Its something that you just feel and you know is right. He kept asking why, so I used this analogy that I heard…I think Boyd K Packer use. I asked him how salt tasted. And he was like…”I don’t know how to describe it!” Then he runs over to the cupboard and pulls out thing of salt and dumps a bunch in his mouth. It was hilarious. Then of course he starts to spit it out, so I asked him, “now do you know how salt tastes?” and he yelled”YES!!” then I say, “How?” He says as he is still trying to wash his mouth out, “BECAUSE I TASTED IT!” Then I said, “Ok, so how are you going to find out why you need to come to church.” He promptly yelled, “BY GOING!” It was hilarious….it worked a lot better that I had ever expected too.
Ok, well that is about all for this week. We will talk on Friday, so I will be able to fill you in on any other stories that come to mind then. Heather also wrote me this week…that was nice. Ok, have an excellent winter break and a merry Christmas! I love you all!!
Love,
Chase
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