Monday, February 23, 2009

Received Mon, Feb 23, 2009

Transfer news: I'm getting transferred!!! That's all I know until Wednesday when we have our transfer meeting and we find out who our companion will be and where our new area is. The only transfer meeting I've been to was right when I got into the mission and that one was way different because they had to condense it to give people time to evacuate. Apparently they give talks and and other meeting-type things then they say who's getting sent to each area and who their companions will be. That will be fun.

I'm really sad to have to leave all these people here, but I'm also excited to move on and start in a new area and get more experience. All I know is what its like in Galveston, so it will be fun to learn a new area and see what other places are like. So next week I'll be writing from some random place down here in Texas. Hopefully its Houston, we'll see. Who ever gets transferred here is going to be one lucky missionary though. We have like 4-6 people who are on the verge of being ready to be baptized. When me and Elder Pedersen first became companions we had 1 investigator and she was a crazy Indian lady who turned out to be schizophrenic or something. Now we have like 20-30 people who we have to visit. Its almost more than we can handle.

The thing I've learned about Galveston is that you can talk to tons of people a day and even get tons of them to let you come back at teach them. As a UTMB doctor in our ward put it, Galveston is kind of a safe haven for psychotic people. A lot of people here have something a little wrong with their heads. So we could probably get like 20-30 new investigators in a week if we really wanted too, but we'd have to eventually drop all of them. The task we have is to find the ones that are prepared. We've found a lot of them and even though some of them didn't accept the gospel right now, they felt the spirit and they wont ever be able to deny that and some day in the future the missionaries will cross their paths again and they'll remember those feelings and start taking the lessons again.

On Sunday all the full time missionaries, ward missionaries, and the ward mission leader sang Ye Elders of Israel in sacrament meeting. That was kind of fun. That's one of my favorite songs. I don't really mind singing in Sacrament meeting as long as there's at least a little group.

This week Mardi Gras has been going on, so its been pretty crazy here. Galveston Island is one of the big places to go for Mardi Gras. There are motor homes and campers parked all along Seawall. The only times where we have to be careful are on the weekends where they have a bunch of parades. On those days we've had to go back to our apartments early.

Ok, well that's about all of the new and excited news for this week. I'm going to e-mail Christopher and Steven now because I didn't get time last week. By the way, Zak and Kylie both owe me e-mails!!

Ohh, yeah, last week I went out to get some ice cream with Brother Jensen. That was pretty fun. We took a picture afterwards...I was going to send it in my e-mail today but I forgot to bring my flash drive.

Ok, well I love you all!! I'll talk to ya next week!

Love,
Chase

Monday, February 16, 2009

Received Mon Feb 16, 2009

The answer is no, I dont print out my e-mails, there is no printer here. So I'm just going to start with this e-mail and I might have to finish writing back next week. I'm not going to have a lot of time this week again to e-mail...we keep getting cheated out of e-mail time.

But anyway...this week was a pretty good week. The sisters had a baptism for something named Salvador. He's like 21, and he's your classic looking gangster. He's got tattoos, wears a bandana, wears gangster looking clothes, but he is the coolest guy. I got a picture with him, so you'll see what he looks like. Baptisms are always so much fun to go to.

Elder Craig C. Christiansen also came to tour our mission this week. He's in the quorum of the 70. He talked a lot about the atonement and said a couple interesting things. His wife is a little bit crazy though. She is waaaaaaaaay over the top. She's just overly excited about everything to the point of being really unnatural. She frantically took notes the whole time and when it was her turn to talk she announced she took 5 pages of notes. Haha....watching her provided some comic relief throughout the meeting, so I was grateful for that, because those meetings get sooo long.

Our spanish investigator with a baptismal date, William, is doing awesome still. He keeps telling us that after he gets baptized he wants to go out with us on bikes and help us find hispanics to bring into the church. He's going to be an amazing member.
Next week is the end of the transfer, so I'll find out if I'm getting transferred or not next week. I'm pretty sure I'm getting transferred, but we'll see.

Mom: Wow...starting up your own little business. That sounds really exciting. It also sounds like it will be a ton of work. I would love to see your website and a screen shot of what your purses look like.

Sister Brown plays the piano for the Spanish branch. She's a piano teacher so she gets really into it and makes sure she follows the conductor exactly. Unfortunately the conductors aren't really all the experienced and they usually just wave their arms around and follow the piano. Sister Brown refuses to start playing the next verse until the conductor starts moving her arms and it confuses the conductor every time. So there's always like 5 second gaps between verses and everyone starts singing early. Haha...singing with a spanish congregation is definitely a unique experience. Its something I will never forget. Our district has actually sung in sacrament meeting a couple times. I dont really get nervous at all..it doesn't really bother me unless there's only like 3 other people. We're going to sing Ye Elders of Israel next week.

Oh yeah...sister Cramer and the Hix's both sent me valentines day cards. Sister Cramer sent a 2 dollar bill and wrote "even more rare than a 2 dollar bill is a great missionary like you." I thought that was creative. The Hix's also sent some money to buy me a valentines treat...it was really nice of them.

Griffin: I like to do somersaults and roll around sometimes too. My favorite is doing backwards somersaults. I got a leonardo valentines day card and a sucker from 5 year old boy named CJ. Leonardo is my favorite ninja turtle. Maybe I'll be leonardo for halloween when I come back home. Maybe we can play Sonic Racers too!

Quinn: I havent done any pullups since I left the MTC. I think I stopped at 15 pullups. We dont have a pullup bar in our apartment so I cant really do them anywhere. I'm going to start exercising every morning though. I'm going to do pushups and situps. I think the most pushups I've ever done without stopping was 45. I did that when I was a junior in highschool I think. Next week I'll tell you how many I can do now...see if you can beat that. 8th grade was easy for me too. I took Library Aid for one of my classes and all I did was sit in the library and do my homework every day and sometimes take library slips to peoples classes. So every day I finished all of my homework in there and I never had to do homework at home. So I have a challenge for you Quinn. I challenge you to at least start your homework every day when you get home from school. My challenge will be to do exercises every morning. I've been getting really really tired every afternoon and I think its because I havent been doing any exercises to get my heart pumping. Ive already set a goal to do morning exercises like 5 times and I can never do it. So lets have a competition and see who can do better. You start your homework right when you get home every day and I'll do exercises every morning. Remind Mom to ask me how many mornings I exercised this week and you tell Mom how many times you started your homework right when you got home.


Ok, thats about all for this letter!! Mom, the pictures worked out good...I really liked it a lot. The only problem was that I couldn't see the captions, that's fine though. Unfortunately in the future we can't really do that cause I won't have a laptop in my apartment. Hmm...I might have to find a way to send pictures home too.

Ok well I love you all!! I'm glad everyone wrote me..I love hearing from everyone. Have a good week!!!

Love,
Chase

FROM JULIE (THE MOTHER) CHASE ALSO WROTE ANOTHER LETTER TO KERRY. HE TOLD SOME INTERESTING STORIES:

So is the L. Tom Perry plan going on in Arcadia too?? He must be busy traveling everywhere. Maybe Arcadia should think about doing the focus family thing like we have. The ward council chooses 5 families that might be recent converts, less actives, inactive, or just families that would need visits from missionaries, and the missionaries visit all 5 of them every week. We've developed some really good relationships with less actives that no other missionary or ward member has been able to for the past 5+ years. I've loved it. I love teaching members and visiting them just as much as I do investigators. I consider a reactivation to be just as good as a convert baptism. Our job is to strengthen the wards and branches and bringing back a whole family is a very effective way to do that. Me and Elder Pedersen have actually been able to help bring back a lot of people...that alone makes me feel like we've been so successful here.

We are starting to get fed really well. The branch presidents wife made a dinner calendar for us and passed it around in the ward and the branch. Every week we have at least 5-6 dinner appointments, but almost all of them are from the spanish branch. Hispanic people are so loving and humble. Everyone on the island got hit pretty hard by the hurricane and everyone is trying to recover. The hispanics probably got hit much harder than anyone else because they always live in the bottom floors and in pretty unstable houses. But they are the ones who went out of their way to serve us and feed us dinner. Ward members do call us from time to time and set up appointments with us every once in a while too. The ward and branch here are awesome. I have a really good relationship with almost all the members in both the ward and the branch. It will be hard to leave, but I know I'll always be exactly where the Lord needs me. I couldnt imagine trying to leave after being in an area for over a year...thats pretty much unheard of here.

I feel like I can speak Spanish at least alright right now. Its always kind of frustrating though. I was just starting to feel pretty confident and independent (meaning I felt comfortable talking to hispanics without always having my companion by my side) then I got sick for like 9 days. During that time I couldn't study and I didn't speak a word of spanish and that really hurt my progression. I really really treasure my 3 hours of study time every morning though and I feel like I do pretty effective studies. So it's always getting better and better. This area is a really tough one to learn spanish, but I feel pretty good with myself. Every sunday I go around and talk to every single spanish member and whenever I don't know how to say something, they help me out. They've been awesome at helping me learn spanish.

Elder Pedersen is not a BYU football player right now, but he hopes to be in the future. His dad is going to talk with Bronco sometime this month, so he'll find out if he can get a scholarship or if they can work something out. He's a wide receiver. He's pretty good too...his dad sent him his highlight film from high school. He's really big for a receiver too...hes like 6'4 200lbs and during the season he gets up to like 215 or 220 lbs. Yeah were still together though. We've been together for 3 transfers, which is a really long time, so at the end of the transfer its almost for sure that one of us will get moved. Its pretty unheard of to stay together for 4 transfers.

I'm glad grandma loves my letters. It seems like she likes to write too. She'll wakes up early in the morning and go out to the deck and write me a letter. She writes a lot about the animals that she sees and how cold it is and everything like that. They are pretty interesting letters sometimes..haha. I always love them though.

I really hope Nate contemplates going on a mission. I think the best thing he could possibly do is to sincerely pray about it and find out for himself if Heavenly Father wants him to be on a mission. I know that if he does he will get an answer.
I remember talking to Tony a lot about going on a mission. I wrote him a letter in the MTC and I told him that I'm not about to tell him he needs to fill out his papers write away and just leave on a mission. I told him that nobody has a right to do that. I said the best possible thing for him to do is to pray and find out if he needs to be on a mission. He's doing awesome right now too. He studies the scriptures every day and he's studying Preach My Gospel a ton too. He kind of dug himself into a hole with school and other things and hes going through one heck of a time to climb out of that hole. But he's doing it and hes determined to leave on a mission. That makes me happy.

That is cool to hear that our ward (well at least bishop) is fired up and excited about missionary work. Our ward here is pretty fired up too. We are working really well with our members and we're having a lot of success. It shouldn't be too hard to give the missionaries lessons to teach either. If nothing else works then they can go with home teachers to less active members homes. That'll boost home teaching numbers and give the missionaries more lessons to teach.

Ok Dad...thanks for the awesome letter! I loved hearing from you. Thanks so much for everything that you do. I absolutely love being out here and I love being a missionary. I love this area, the members, the people, even the drunks. I learned that the best missionary work you do is when youre happy and having fun and laughing. I've been having a blast out here and I have front row seats to real life miracles every day. I love you Dad!!

Love,
Chase

Monday, February 9, 2009

Received Mon Feb 9, 2009

Good news: I'm pretty much totally healthy now. I've just got a little cough and I'm still coughing stuff up that I've got to constantly spit out. Its kind of gross, but its not affecting me too bad so I'm happy.

My companion is also fine, so we've been working this week. We've had a really good week this week.

Yesterday we taught 3 really good, powerful lessons all with members. We also gave out another baptismal date! His name is Francisco but his nickname is Pancho. He's from Mexico but he's grown up here since he was like 3, so he prefers English. He works at Arlan's Market with Abraham (a member). He's our age, so were actually really good friends with him. We've primarily just been his friend and kind of taught him and gave him advice on the side. We've taught his whole family like 2-3 times. He is really the only one that has a lot of interest though, so we've been focusing on him. We taught him yesterday at Abraham's house and he chose March 8th as his baptismal date. This is the same date as William, so we'll have 2 baptisms on march 8th. I'm pretty excited for it. We still have a lot of things to teach, hopefully it all goes well.

We also taught one of Abraham's daughter's (Kim's) friends named Ryan. He's gay, so its kind of weird teaching him, but we taught a good lesson to him about the plan of salvation. We'll see how serious he is as we keep teaching him.

Then last night we went over to a recent convert's house for dinner. His name is Bobby Reyna. He's a really cool guy...we always hear lots of funny stories when we eat with him. He feeds us every Sunday night. You never know if the food is going to be amazingly good or..not so good. A few weeks ago we ate some chicken that was definitely not cooked long enough. It was really pink. We were afraid we were going to get sick, but luckily we didn't. Anyway...this time he fed us fajita that he marinated for 3 days, so it was really good. His girlfriend from Mississippi came down and when we first met her at the beginning of the night she was pretty against the church. She thought Mormons were crazy people and all sorts of bad things. So she was very stand off-ish at the start. Religion came up a few times but conversation always died down quick. A little later on we asked a couple questions and it kind of sparked something in Deborah's (the girlfriend) head and our little lesson started. We resolved a lot of doubts and opened her eyes to a lot of things. We talked to her about how we aren't here to try to prove things and convince people that were right. We come and present information, teach a lesson, then we tell them to pray to God and ask if its true. Because if this really is Jesus Christ's church, then God will tell you. She was very impressed by that and she is going to pray about it. She is very sincere too. Now she has a lot of respect for our church and her opinions are 100% changed. It was neat to see the huge change she made in one night. So we'll see what will happen there.

We got a referral for a Hispanic family that we feel really good about too. They are the Trujillo family. The father is from Columbia and the mother is from Puerto Rico. They have two kids who live with them and two kids that are fully grown. They're just nice genuine people who want to find a good church. We're excited to start visiting them too.

Something that I've noticed out here is the huge diversity in the people that we teach...especially the Hispanics. We are currently teaching people from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Columbia, Puerto Rico, Peru, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras and other places that I cant think of right now. We're also teaching black people, white people, all sorts of mixes, gangster people, old people, rich people, poor people. We see pretty much everything.

Haha...another random thing that I've noticed is how a lot of Hispanic people ALWAYS have their phones on, so phones ring all the time in sacrament meeting. Last week one of the members was giving a talk when his phone went off, but the funniest part about it was that his ring tone was a Kelly Clarkson song. Some Hispanic people have the funniest ring tones. Yesterday in church someone's phone rang with the Titannic theme song as their ringtone. They always have the girl singers...its pretty funny.

Other than that...I got pretty much everything Mom sent to me. I didn't get the journal yet. I also got the painting that Dad made. That is one awesome painting...I've got it sitting on my desk. Everyone who has come into our room has seen it and complimented it. Thank you Dad. I also enjoyed getting all the letters and pictures. I must have gotten Mom's ESP because I did end up finding some Ibuprofen and taking it. It did help with the bad back pains. I'm just glad I'm over all that and I don't have to deal with that anymore.

Mom: Then next time you send something you could throw in a few stamps and also return address labels. I'm doing OK on stamps, but it wouldn't hurt to have more, but I'm totally out of return address labels. They were really useful.

Ok, that's about all for this week. We're starting Week 5 of the transfer, so all we have is this week and next, then I could get transferred! I'm pretty sure I am leaving because me and Elder Pedersen have been together for 3 transfers and that is a long time, so one of us is going to get transferred. I've been here longer, plus Elder Pedersen is the district leader here and the district leaders always stay here foreeever. Alright I love you guys!! Have a good week!

Love,
Chase

Monday, February 2, 2009

Received Mon, Feb 2, 2009

Pretty much the only thing that happened this week is that I got sick. I'm not sure what it was, but I guess it was some kind of flu. I wasn't every nauseated though. I had a horrible headache, horrible backache, and a horrible sore throat. We didn't leave our apartment pretty much all week. I finally started to feel a little better on Saturday, then on Sunday my companion started getting sick. Hopefully he stays healthy so we can finally go out again. I'm going crazy! I'm still really weak, but I think that will leave when we finally get out and just start working and get back into normal life.

The other thing that happened was on Tuesday, Elder L. Tom Perry came and spoke to our mission. He is a very powerful speaker. In the room, on the front stands there were: All the stake presidents in our mission, two area seventies, president & sister Allred, and L. Tom Perry with his wife. There was a lot of power in that room. He came to try to "bring the fire back" to this area. He said that the Great Southwest has always been one of the highest baptising areas in America, but last year success in America fell flat.

So he talked about lots of different things, a lot of motivating things, then he challenged us to always teach at least 20 lessons under a roof every week. It doesn't matter if its to an investigator, less active, or active member, just as long as you make sure you teach at least 20 lessons under a roof. On average we probably teach like 17-20, so its not going to be a very big stretch for us. Elder Perry also went and spoke to the other two Houston missions earlier and gave them the same challenge. He also spoke to all the bishops, stake presidents, ward mission leaders, and ward missionaries and told them they need to give us names of people to visit if we cant get the 20 lessons on our own. Basically, he wants to make sure were teaching a bunch. It was a really good meeting though, even though my back was killing me the whole time.

He shook all of our hands before he started too, so that was nice. He's really tall. He called us all by name and said "how are you doing" or something as he shook our names, it was pretty neat.

I actually saw part of the super bowl because someone invited us over for a bbq last night and they had the game on. I didn't watch it that much of it, but it looked like an amazing game. I saw the part where Larry Fitzgerald caught a pass and burned everyone for a touchdown. It looked like the Cardinals were on fire. That's crazy how random teams can come out of nowhere and all the sudden be the best. I thought the Cardinals were going to win for a while...I actually kind of wanted them to make the comeback and win.

Oh yeah, about the journal. If you haven't already sent it, can you send it straight to Galveston? Otherwise it'll take 2+ weeks before I actually get it and I only have 3 pages left in my journal.

Ok, well I've got to get going. I'm glad everyone liked the pictures and the movies!

I love you all!

Wash your hands so you don't get sick...its not fun!

Love,
Chase