After thinking about it after I e-mailed last week I also decided Christmas would be the best day to call home. So it will be sometime after 7pm...that's all I know. 7 my time is 5 your time I believe. I'm pretty excited about that.
Christmas came up so fast. As a missionary your perception of time is so much more different. You measure time by transfers (6 month periods) and by weeks. For example, for me right now, the time is 3rd transfer, week 4. We had our Christmas Sunday yesterday as well...it was an interesting one for me. English and Spanish met together at the same time. When we showed up the branch president came up to us and said he needed 3 of us to translate. Well...it wasn't full on translating, but when the narrators would go up to read a scripture, we had to read it into a little microphone thing in Spanish. All the Spanish speakers had those headset things on and listened to us translating. People in English read fast!! I read Spanish as fast as I could and they still always finished before me. None of us could keep up with them. Then when I looked at the program I saw that part of the program was a song by the missionaries. I guess nobody felt it was very important to let us know before hand. It all turned out fine though...we sang Hark the Harold Angels Sing or whatever that song is called. After we finished the first verse, Elder Pedersen accidentally started singing the 1st verse again instead of the 2nd verse...it got some laughs.
We had a Spanish Branch party on Friday Night. I was on splits with the Zone Leaders and the one that was with me for the day didn't know any Spanish at all. So the party was pretty fun for me to watch. When we showed up one of the members came up to me and said that she wanted one of us to be Santa Claus. The white handbook got me out of that one though...we aren't allowed to have little kids sit on our laps, so a member of the branch presidency did it. We also got asked to sing last minute for that party.
This last week we've had a lot of investigators kind of fall off the face of the earth and lose all interest in the church, so we've been focusing on finding more people. We had another big week...we found 15 new investigators. That reminds me of a little story about our investigator named Erica. So at first she was so happy about us coming over and we helped her so much, she started seeing a ton of blessings, she even got a perfect job where she didn't have to work on Sunday. Well, she's kind of a workaholic and her boss started to pressure her to work on Sundays, so she did. She said she wanted to get a lot of money so she could buy her kid a ton of stuff for Christmas. We were pretty disappointed, but we figured we just let her be and hope that she realizes that life isn't as good without the spirit in your life. I remember using her as an example to a couple other people we were teaching. In talking about the Book of Mormon I would talk about the pride cycle: how people become really righteous, then they get blessed, then they become prideful and forget God and just glory in their riches, then they get humbled by something bad happening, then the cycle goes around again. Well, Erica just made it all the way around the cycle. She called us a couple days ago (after not talking to her for a week) and she was crying, telling us about how she got fired. She told us she needs the church back in her life and she realized how empty her life was without it. So we can start teaching her again...hopefully all goes well.
We really cracked down on Max and Angie yesterday. We told them that in order to progress spiritually they need to live the commandments, including the law of chastity. We said, spiritually, you don't just stand still. You re either progressing or you re falling back. And they can't progress when they're constantly breaking commandments. We told them they either need to get married right now, or one of them needs to move out. They took it really well. That was exactly what they needed...they needed someone to be bold with them and just tell them to their face how it is. So they are praying about that and they're going to make a decision hopefully very soon.
One of our other investigators who we were going to give a baptismal date just disappeared...this alcoholic guy that she was living with said that she moved in with her daughter in League City. There was definitely something odd about the situation...were going to try to figure it out. I don't know if I ever told you about this lady...her name is Debbie and she just got into a horrible car accident. She has 8 metal rods in her back and she's been on the verge of death. There's no reason for her to all the sudden decide to move out where shes been living forever...its kinda creepy.
Well...thats about all this week. On Christmas we have a Zone Conference and the entire mission is going to meet together in Sugar Land, then were going to open presents afterwards. They are keeping every one's Christmas packages down in Sugar Land so we can just open them there. So I'm just assuming they have it.
Oh yeah...its been freezing cold again for most of this week. Its been reeeally foggy. All the fog has been rolling off the ocean and we cant even see the ocean when we ride down sea wall anymore because the fog is so thick. By the time we make it back to our apartment at night after riding home, my hair is all wet and all my clothes have a layer of water on them. The fog is different too...its more like ocean mist than fog. You can literally see all the individual water particles floating around. I guess that's what 100% humidity is like.
Ok...I'm excited to talk to everyone on Thursday night!! I love you all and hope everyone has a great Christmas like we always do!
Love,
Chase
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