Received Mon Oct 5, 2009

Dear Family,

Yes Mom, I did get the cookies, they did not melt, and they were delicious. They were all gone in 2-3 days. Thank you for sending them...I loved them. My companion also thought they were amazing.

Congratulations Christopher! I bet that is a relief to have all that under your belt now. I think that would be awesome if Christopher came to Houston for an interview, just to see how everything is. It would definitely be an experience. As much as I love Houston, I don’t think I would ever live here by my own free will. At least not in actual Houston. As a missionary I absolutely love it though.

Unfortunately I got sick this week…I’m not sure what it was, but I think it’s allergies. At the beginning of the week I got a really bad headache and I started to get a sore throat and an upset stomach. Then I didn’t get any sleep at all the next night and was just exhausted the next couple days. On Friday I finally talked to our missionary doctor guy and he told me to buy Zyrtec, so I did and it has helped a looot. I still have a cough and a stuffy nose sometimes, but at least I don’t feel exhausted all the time. I also apparently got poison oak all over my arms when I chopped down that forest last week and its been spreading all over my arms. I usually just tell people I have leprosy. I think finally it stopped spreading and its slowly starting to heal and go away. It is not fun though. It itches like crazy and it spreads like wildfire.

I thought all of conference was good. I always like to try to figure out what the overall theme of conference is going to be. Since being on my mission I’ve noticed that each conference has some overlying theme. This conference it seemed to me that the theme was love. That was a good topic because there is less and less love in the world. People don’t really know what real love feels like. Being on a mission and getting to know so many people has really shown me how lucky I am to have a solid family where we actually love each other. There are sooo many broken families here and I’d say at least 60% of the couples living together here are not married. There are so many children being born in unestablished families. If you have a strong family, life is soooo much easier and people are forgetting that. I loved President Uchtdorf’s talk, and when he said “Let us be known has a people who love God, and who love our neighbors as ourselves.” I get the feeling that the world around us is going to keep degenerating, but that is no excuse for us to lower our standards or change our way of living. I think that is why so many of the talks have been based off simple, but important principles.

Just being on a mission here has really helped me see how big of a blessing the gospel is. All these little things like, going to college, being able to speak English, having a decent place to live, are all blessings I didn’t realize were that big or that uncommon.

Despite being sick, we actually had a really good week. We have 4 people with baptismal dates now. We had a really cool experience with a recent convert too, his name is Anibal. He agreed to come out teaching with us one night, so we picked him up and went to go to our appointment. We had the apartment number, but apparently there were 4 different buildings/sections, A B C D, so we ran to every single building, knocking on every apartment number 218 and stopped and talked to people quickly between apartments. Of course they were in the very last one we checked, so we got there kind of late, but so did the people we had the appointment with, so it all worked out well. We didn’t have much time, so we talked to them about the Book of Mormon and I’m not even sure what else, but Anibal bore his testimony about how all of this has blessed his life and the people we were teaching loved it. Afterwards when we got into the car to go back, Anibal told us that he loved going out and teaching people about the gospel and that it made him feel so good. That little experience changed him totally. It was a good night.

We also found these 2 other people named Jocelyn and Alejandra Rodriguez. Alejandra is 9 and she is Jocelyn’s daughter. Jocelyn is in her mid 20’s and they all live in an apartment with Jocelyn’s boyfriend named Mario. We found them because we had an appointment with their neighbors, but they weren't home, and the door to the Rodriguez’s apartment was open so we stuck our heads in and asked if we could share our message with them. We had a good lesson and Jocelyn and Alejandra both accepted the invitation to prepare themselves to get baptized. Last night we had another lesson with them..it was a really memorable one. When we came to the door they were on their way out to go wash clothes at a nearby Laundromat, so we asked if we could drive to the Laundromat and just teach them there. They said OK, so we went and had a lesson sitting on the curb outside the Laundromat. We had a really good lesson and they opened up and told us everything…all their concerns and their whole stories and everything. I’ll spare the details, but like most people we’ve talked to here, they have had tough lives and they are not in a good situation right now. They know that the gospel is the way to fix everything and they are excited to get baptized. The cool part about the whole lesson was that we had this good experience in a huge parking lot in the middle of a huge busy city.

Ok, well that’s about it for this week….I cant think of any other good stories to write about for this week. I am finally almost done unpacking…I just have a couple more things to put away. Ok, have a good week!! I love you all!

Love,
Chase