Dear Family,
I do not have a whole bunch to report on this week, so I will start by responding to Mom's e-mail.
Are the Colt's Steven's favorite team? They are definitely an awesome team. Isn't Austin Collie playing for them? I like the Colts, but I'd have to say the Saints are my back-up team.
Wow...I that is crazy that Christopher was in my area last week. Where all those hospitals are at is the very east side of my area, we only go out there when we have to give blessings to people in the hospital. We are always over in the other side of the area in the ghetto.
Good job Zak and dominating the ACT test. One of the good things about that test is that (I believe) it is graded compared to everyone else, like a curve. So if the test is hard, everyone else does bad, and you just have to do better than them and you'll get a high score. 28 is definitely good though...I think I got 27. I think the average score for incoming freshman is either 28 or 29.
I definitely want to do intramural soccer when I get back. Everyone here watches soccer, so it makes me want to play. I have a FC Barcelona jersey and I claimed that team to be my favorite, but then I found out Ronaldino is not on that team anymore, so I don't like it as much, so my backup team is Chivas. I don't know anything about them, but everyone talks about them and they have cool jerseys...I will have to get one before the end of my mission.
I don't ever remember singing In Our Lovely Deseret. That could be useful though because well sing a hymn a lot at the start of our lessons and we always teach about the Word of Wisdom. Its pretty much impossible to find someone who doesn't have a problem with the word of wisdom. Same thing with the law of chastity too. Most people here don't get married, they just start living together, so before they can get baptized they have to either separate or get married.
We have 2 people who are going to get baptized on December 6th, and 1 of them is going to get married and the other one is still deciding what to do. They are awesome investigators. I think I may have explained a few weeks ago how this member named Samuel Aquino was inactive, but then the missionaries found him and reactivated him, then he went on a mission, now hes back and hes bringing his 2 brothers, his sister, and their boyfriend/girlfriends to church. His siblings are members but have been inactive until now and the boyfriend/girlfriends are not members. 2 of them have baptismal dates right now and they are awesome. They've committed to live the Word of Wisdom as well as the law of chastity (that's why they are getting married), which are 2 of the biggest commandments and they have been coming to church for over a month now.
Our other best investigator named Victor, who is from Nicaragua, was supposed to get baptized yesterday, but about a week and a half ago he just disappeared. Its sad, but unfortunately that happens here. People don't have enough money for rent, so they just leave and they don't have phones or any way of contacting us. We just have to pray some other missionaries find them.
Then we have Maritza. She is the one who got sent to jail with her husband after they got drunk throwing a party, celebrating that they came to church. Her husband is not deported and back in Mexico and I'm not sure what his plans are. He doesn't have papers, hence the deportation, and it costs a lot of money to cross the border illegally. Basically the more money you pay, the safer the method you can take to cross the border. It costs several thousand dollars though and that is a ridiculous amount for most people trying to come here. Maritza doesn't want to go back because her kids will have much better lives here, plus it is very dangerous back where they lived. They both had several family members killed by the drug cartels and they were getting hunted down by them when they were back in Mexico. But anyway, Maritza came to church yesterday and she loves it. She was very active in another church until she realized all her tithing just went to the pastor and she realized the church was false, so she stopped going. But she loves our church, so that is good. If she ends up being able to stay here she will definitely get baptized.
Here is my story for the week. So in the mission when you want a haircut you obviously go to the cheapest place you can find. And there are tons of those 5 dollar haircut places in Houston. Well, unfortunately the haircuters there aren't always the best. I actually haven't had a problem until my last haircut. About 5 weeks ago I got a haircut at the place across the street and when I came back and showered I noticed that my hair looked kind of lopsided. She totally didn't cut the front right part of my hair. It was funny, but I wasn't willing to leave it like that so I got some scissors and cut it myself. It actually turned out OK. So last week I stupidly went back to the same place, hoping that the same lady wouldn't be there. Of course she is and this time she did an even worse job. When I came back and showered I went to check my haircut and it was wavy. There were like 3 rows of hair that was longer than everything else so it looked like I had 3 waves going through my hair. I was not willing to try to re-cut everything because I would make it worse, so the next morning I went back and told her to fix it. She barely speaks English (almost all the haircut people are from Vietnam), but she understood well enough and she did fix a lot of it. But there was still one part that was a little longer and I tried to fix it myself...not so much luck this time. I cut it shorter than everything else. It is funny, but its not too bad. Luckily my hair grows fast. Mom will have a lot of repairing to do to my hair when I get back.
Ok, well that's about all for this week. We have our zone conference this Thursday which is always good. After that my companion and I have a correlation meeting with the stake presidency and all the bishops and ward mission leaders, which is usually boring.
Ok, have a good week...I love you all!!!
Love,
Chase
Monday, November 16, 2009
Monday, November 9, 2009
Received Mon Nov 9, 2009
Dear Family,
Happy Birthday Christopher! When I was serving in Richmond, a lot of the members worked for Exxon. They were all attorneys and project managers and stuff like that. Tons of people here work for the gas companies. If you were ever near the Medical Center area with all the huge hospitals or by the Reliant stadium or by Lakewood church, all that stuff is in my area. I would guess you were up north in the other part of the city. I think that’s where those big business offices are.
I got that letter from Mom a few days ago. I always love those things. All the FF stuff was interesting, and no it doesn’t distract me at all. All of the stuff about Heather was interesting as well. I was pretty impressed with the blog post about how she selected her football team. The Seahawks is a respectable choice. Wasn’t Jim Mora the coach for the Falcons before?
It seems like that is a huge epidemic of some sort of sickness going around here. In almost every single household there are people sick. We make sure we use our hand sanitizer all the time.
Congratulations Mom for running 6 miles. That is definitely further than I have ever gone. I don’t like running at all either. I think it is boring, but I do love to listen to music, so whenever I went running I just looked at it as a time to listen to music, that way it was so much more fun.
Here is my story for the week. We are teaching this family from Honduras named the Mejia family. (They are the black ones who speak Spanish). Well they have to move because they don’t have enough money to pay for their current apartment, so they decided to move to an apartment just down the block. So of course we volunteer to help and we got our ward mission leader to come with us and he brought one of the youth. Well when we showed up to help they had done absolutely no preparation for the move. Everything was still a mess, dirty dishes in the kitchen. Her husband was sick too so he was just laying on the couch. We figured we just start taking all the big stuff out like the couches and get started on the move, so we asked where the moving truck was and she was like, ok wait a second. She ran outside and came back in 5 minutes with a shopping cart. She said we should just put everything in there and walk it down to the new apartment. They didn’t have a car or truck or anything. So that is exactly what we did. We picked up the big huge couch and balanced it on the shopping cart and started walking towards the new apartment. Along the way we acquired 3 more shopping carts and we started caravanning back and forth, loading up the shopping carts and pushing them down to the new apartment. We put big huge couches on those things, an entertainment center, but I thought the most hilarious part was when we put a whole oven in one of those shopping carts and pushed it down to the new apartment. As we walked down the sidewalk pushing our shopping carts with couches and whatnot balancing on them, everyone stared at us as they drove past. It was hilarious. At one point it was just me and my companion pushing 2 shopping carts down the street with 2 big huge TV’s (EVERYone here has big huge TV’s here regardless of how poor they are. Even if they don’t have couches they always have to have their big screen TV), and it definitely looked like we were stealing the TV’s. Well after 4 hours we got all of the big stuff and we left. That was probably one of the most ghetto moves I’ve ever seen. It was hilarious. I am glad we were able to help them.
Here's my kitchen story…I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this one. I think I mentioned a few weeks ago about how one of the members taught us how to make banana milk and it is delicious. Well, a few weeks ago I started to buy frozen strawberry’s and I always buy that Kern’s juice stuff in a can. Instead of Kerns, I buy a brand called Jumex and its like 33 cents a can and it is delicious. Well we also have a magic bullet, which I love. I throw in some frozen strawberries, a banana, a scoop of ice cream, some strawberry banana juice, and blend it up and it is delicious. I usually have a smoothie with every lunch I make.
Yesterday at church I noticed 2 funny things that happened. The first one was that when we started at 10:30 like we are supposed to, we only had 20 people there. Like always, everyone starts to trickle in as time goes on and by the end of the meeting we had 104 people there. Not even a 5th of the people showed up on time. The next funny part was that the closing prayer was given by an old man who is a recent convert named Fernando. He is from Costa Rica. He has a lot of health problems and he always wears these black sunglasses because the light hurts his eyes. Well I guess he wasn’t satisfied with just giving a prayer, so he gave a prayer/talk. He got up and it sounded like he was praying, but then he started talking about how grateful he was that his daughter was able to come, and he asked her to stand up, so she did and everyone opened their eyes and realized he wasn’t praying. And he went on to talk about some of his experiences he had throughout the week and threw in a story or 2, then he continued on with his prayer and ended. Afterwards everyone was looking around thinking, what happened?? We visit Fernando all the time, so we were surprised at all, but it made me laugh.
One of my favorite people in the ward is named Manfredo. He is from El Salvador. He is 70 years old and he always signs up to go out on exchanges with us. He reminds me of Santa Claus. He is a jolly old man with white hair and he is always laughing. Well on Wednesday the other elders in our district had to use our car to go to transfer meeting, so we went out on our bikes and Manfredo went out biking with us to go visit people. I wish I could have gotten a picture of us riding around with Manfredo. He actually goes out almost every week with the bike Elders too. He is awesome.
In other news, the church started to do something new with all the missions a few months ago. The church had ads for the Book of Mormon and other movies and stuff on the TV, and people call in and order those things, then we get a text message that has all their information. Well they set up a system, where we call this number when we contact the referral and we report whether or not we dropped them or we are still teaching them and all that stuff. Our mission was terrible at it the first couple months. The church spends more money on advertising in different areas depending on what percentage of the referrals the missionaries report. Well this last month we got on top of that and started calling all the missionaries to get the referrals reported and our mission president informed us in a meeting this week that our mission is now #1 in the world for reporting referrals. I thought that was pretty cool.
Unfortunately our best investigator named Victor has kind of disappeared on us. That is one of the struggles with teaching people here. Victor doesn’t have a cell phone or any way of contacting him, so if he gets a new job or moves or anything, we lose him and we just have to keep stopping by his apartment until we get lucky and find him home. He is supposed to get baptized this Sunday, so hopefully we can find him this week. We have taught him everything and he is absolutely golden…he hasn’t run into any problems.
Oh yeah, here is another story. It is funny/ironic/sad. We have been teaching this other family for a week or 2 and they finally came to church last Sunday and they absolutely loved it. We stopped by their apartment a day or 2 after and their son answered the door and said that his parents were in jail. Uh oh! He explained that they threw a big party and had a big barbeque and invited all the neighbors and their friends to come over and they invited them all to come to church with them the next week. Well, like every party here, everyone started drinking and the parents got drunk and started fighting with one of their older kids. (Yes they were drinking to celebrate coming to church). They ended up calling the cops to try to get their son in trouble, but when the cops came they arrested them instead. The wife luckily has a work visa which expired the day after they got arrested, but the husband is here illegally and is now going to get deported. That’s definitely a problem when your investigators get deported. We don’t know whats going to happen with the rest of the family, but they're probably going to have to go to Mexico because they don’t have any money to pay for anything. Unfortunately its not very unusual to have this kind of stuff happen.
G-Man: I miss you too. I like to play with army mans too sometimes. You had a cool Halloween costume. If I was going to dress up for Halloween I would be Leonardo.
OK, that is all for this week. I love you all and hope you have a good week!!
Love,
Chase
Happy Birthday Christopher! When I was serving in Richmond, a lot of the members worked for Exxon. They were all attorneys and project managers and stuff like that. Tons of people here work for the gas companies. If you were ever near the Medical Center area with all the huge hospitals or by the Reliant stadium or by Lakewood church, all that stuff is in my area. I would guess you were up north in the other part of the city. I think that’s where those big business offices are.
I got that letter from Mom a few days ago. I always love those things. All the FF stuff was interesting, and no it doesn’t distract me at all. All of the stuff about Heather was interesting as well. I was pretty impressed with the blog post about how she selected her football team. The Seahawks is a respectable choice. Wasn’t Jim Mora the coach for the Falcons before?
It seems like that is a huge epidemic of some sort of sickness going around here. In almost every single household there are people sick. We make sure we use our hand sanitizer all the time.
Congratulations Mom for running 6 miles. That is definitely further than I have ever gone. I don’t like running at all either. I think it is boring, but I do love to listen to music, so whenever I went running I just looked at it as a time to listen to music, that way it was so much more fun.
Here is my story for the week. We are teaching this family from Honduras named the Mejia family. (They are the black ones who speak Spanish). Well they have to move because they don’t have enough money to pay for their current apartment, so they decided to move to an apartment just down the block. So of course we volunteer to help and we got our ward mission leader to come with us and he brought one of the youth. Well when we showed up to help they had done absolutely no preparation for the move. Everything was still a mess, dirty dishes in the kitchen. Her husband was sick too so he was just laying on the couch. We figured we just start taking all the big stuff out like the couches and get started on the move, so we asked where the moving truck was and she was like, ok wait a second. She ran outside and came back in 5 minutes with a shopping cart. She said we should just put everything in there and walk it down to the new apartment. They didn’t have a car or truck or anything. So that is exactly what we did. We picked up the big huge couch and balanced it on the shopping cart and started walking towards the new apartment. Along the way we acquired 3 more shopping carts and we started caravanning back and forth, loading up the shopping carts and pushing them down to the new apartment. We put big huge couches on those things, an entertainment center, but I thought the most hilarious part was when we put a whole oven in one of those shopping carts and pushed it down to the new apartment. As we walked down the sidewalk pushing our shopping carts with couches and whatnot balancing on them, everyone stared at us as they drove past. It was hilarious. At one point it was just me and my companion pushing 2 shopping carts down the street with 2 big huge TV’s (EVERYone here has big huge TV’s here regardless of how poor they are. Even if they don’t have couches they always have to have their big screen TV), and it definitely looked like we were stealing the TV’s. Well after 4 hours we got all of the big stuff and we left. That was probably one of the most ghetto moves I’ve ever seen. It was hilarious. I am glad we were able to help them.
Here's my kitchen story…I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this one. I think I mentioned a few weeks ago about how one of the members taught us how to make banana milk and it is delicious. Well, a few weeks ago I started to buy frozen strawberry’s and I always buy that Kern’s juice stuff in a can. Instead of Kerns, I buy a brand called Jumex and its like 33 cents a can and it is delicious. Well we also have a magic bullet, which I love. I throw in some frozen strawberries, a banana, a scoop of ice cream, some strawberry banana juice, and blend it up and it is delicious. I usually have a smoothie with every lunch I make.
Yesterday at church I noticed 2 funny things that happened. The first one was that when we started at 10:30 like we are supposed to, we only had 20 people there. Like always, everyone starts to trickle in as time goes on and by the end of the meeting we had 104 people there. Not even a 5th of the people showed up on time. The next funny part was that the closing prayer was given by an old man who is a recent convert named Fernando. He is from Costa Rica. He has a lot of health problems and he always wears these black sunglasses because the light hurts his eyes. Well I guess he wasn’t satisfied with just giving a prayer, so he gave a prayer/talk. He got up and it sounded like he was praying, but then he started talking about how grateful he was that his daughter was able to come, and he asked her to stand up, so she did and everyone opened their eyes and realized he wasn’t praying. And he went on to talk about some of his experiences he had throughout the week and threw in a story or 2, then he continued on with his prayer and ended. Afterwards everyone was looking around thinking, what happened?? We visit Fernando all the time, so we were surprised at all, but it made me laugh.
One of my favorite people in the ward is named Manfredo. He is from El Salvador. He is 70 years old and he always signs up to go out on exchanges with us. He reminds me of Santa Claus. He is a jolly old man with white hair and he is always laughing. Well on Wednesday the other elders in our district had to use our car to go to transfer meeting, so we went out on our bikes and Manfredo went out biking with us to go visit people. I wish I could have gotten a picture of us riding around with Manfredo. He actually goes out almost every week with the bike Elders too. He is awesome.
In other news, the church started to do something new with all the missions a few months ago. The church had ads for the Book of Mormon and other movies and stuff on the TV, and people call in and order those things, then we get a text message that has all their information. Well they set up a system, where we call this number when we contact the referral and we report whether or not we dropped them or we are still teaching them and all that stuff. Our mission was terrible at it the first couple months. The church spends more money on advertising in different areas depending on what percentage of the referrals the missionaries report. Well this last month we got on top of that and started calling all the missionaries to get the referrals reported and our mission president informed us in a meeting this week that our mission is now #1 in the world for reporting referrals. I thought that was pretty cool.
Unfortunately our best investigator named Victor has kind of disappeared on us. That is one of the struggles with teaching people here. Victor doesn’t have a cell phone or any way of contacting him, so if he gets a new job or moves or anything, we lose him and we just have to keep stopping by his apartment until we get lucky and find him home. He is supposed to get baptized this Sunday, so hopefully we can find him this week. We have taught him everything and he is absolutely golden…he hasn’t run into any problems.
Oh yeah, here is another story. It is funny/ironic/sad. We have been teaching this other family for a week or 2 and they finally came to church last Sunday and they absolutely loved it. We stopped by their apartment a day or 2 after and their son answered the door and said that his parents were in jail. Uh oh! He explained that they threw a big party and had a big barbeque and invited all the neighbors and their friends to come over and they invited them all to come to church with them the next week. Well, like every party here, everyone started drinking and the parents got drunk and started fighting with one of their older kids. (Yes they were drinking to celebrate coming to church). They ended up calling the cops to try to get their son in trouble, but when the cops came they arrested them instead. The wife luckily has a work visa which expired the day after they got arrested, but the husband is here illegally and is now going to get deported. That’s definitely a problem when your investigators get deported. We don’t know whats going to happen with the rest of the family, but they're probably going to have to go to Mexico because they don’t have any money to pay for anything. Unfortunately its not very unusual to have this kind of stuff happen.
G-Man: I miss you too. I like to play with army mans too sometimes. You had a cool Halloween costume. If I was going to dress up for Halloween I would be Leonardo.
OK, that is all for this week. I love you all and hope you have a good week!!
Love,
Chase
Monday, November 2, 2009
Received Mon Nov 2 2009
Dear Family,
We got our transfer information this morning! Neither me nor my companion is getting transferred. Our district leader and 1 of the sisters in our district are getting transferred. Our district leader was a really cool guy…he is one of my good friends in the mission, so it is sad to see him go, but we expected it. I’m glad nothing changed in my companionship though.
I actually have some pretty good stories this week. I’ll start off with Halloween, since Mom asked about that. No, not very many people at all went trick or treating. I don’t think any parents feel safe walking around with their kids in these apartment complexes. We drove through a nice part of our area, called Bellaire, which is like a city within Houston, and there were a lot of people trick or treating there. But, the eventful thing for that night was that we went to the Lakewood Church (Joel Osteen’s church). We went on exchanges with one of our members earlier in the week and we started talking about Lakewood and he talked about how he use to go to Lakewood before he joined our church, then when he found out both of us wanted to go there sometime he offered to take us on Saturday night. That was quite an experience. We got there a little late because we were finishing up at an appointment. The building is huuuge. It actually reminded me of the Marriot Center at BYU…it was actually almost the exact same size. But anyway…when we got there there was a band playing on the stage and the music was blasting. There are 3 big jumbotron screens to watch the people on the stage and it had the words to the songs. The music was actually really good. It was a pretty legit concert, with music blasting, fog coming down from the ceiling, people dancing around and everything. After that, Victoria Olsteen came up and talked about how they had just visited Kenya and they played a little movie thing showing their visit there. After that she talked about families and told everyone to stand up if they wanted her to say a prayer and dedicate their families. Then she started praying. Oh yeah, and the whole time there was someone playing background music on the piano. When they pray all the people who are really into it raise their arms into the air and if they really like it they stand up too. After that there was more music, then Joel came up and he started his sermon. He started by quoting Psalms 47:1 that mentions a “shout of praise.” His whole sermon was on how we just need to shout (literally) praises to God to overcome trials and be more faithful. He used the example of how the army walked around the walls of Jericho 6 times, but then on the 7th time they all shouted a praise, and that’s what tore the walls of Jericho down. Then he told everyone to get up and to shout. So everyone did, and we did that a couple more times throughout his whole sermon. People would yell out some Hallelujah’s and Amen’s throughout if they liked it. It was all so interesting. Then at the end on the way out, one of the Usher guys asked us if we would like to meat Joel. (All the workers there knew we were missionaries from the LDS Church). We said ok, so he took us to the other side and he let us go in first and we all had to stand in a line side by side…there were probably 40 other people there. They gave us these little book things. Then Victoria and Joel came in and they signed our little books and the Usher guys took pictures for us.
All in all, I thought it was an awesome experience to see other people’s opinions of church. Now I know what some people are expecting when we invite them to come to church. Brother Ramos, the member who took us, explained it pretty well. He said the church is a church about nothing. Joel Osteen is a great motivational speaker and seems like a really nice guy, but you don’t really learn anything. You don’t learn the gospel. Now I understand why so many people don’t understand why people come to church every week. Going there makes you feel good and everything, but its more like a show and you don’t make covenants or learn about the scriptures or gospel. Well…that is probably a lot more than you all wanted to hear, but I thought it was all fascinating. I left out a lot of details and thoughts, but I’ll just have to tell that experience in person.
Next…so we have this apartment complex called Jefferson House where we have tons of investigators and everyone always sees us there and we always find more and more people to teach. Well, in the morning we stopped by one of our investigators and asked how she was doing. She was sitting on the couch and said her stomach was really hurting. We asked if she had taken any pills to help, and she said yes but it didn’t take away any of the pain. She said she was just going to wait for her husband to get home at 5. So we left. A couple hours later we were back in that same complex teaching someone else in their apartment when we hear a banging on the door. They open it and we hear screaming and crying. It was Lucia Mejia, our investigator we visited in the morning. She could barely stand. Apparently she knew the people we were teaching. They sat her down in a chair and she just kept screaming and crying and breathing hard. Then all the sudden she stopped and her whole body just went limp and it went dead quiet. That definitely scared me. The people ran and grabbed some rubbing alcohol and held it in front of her mouth and nose and that brought her back to consciousness. Meanwhile the neighbor was calling 911, but she could speak English, so my companion talked to them. Then we ran to the front of the complex, found out what the code was to open the gate and opened it when the ambulance got there. Then they took her to the hospital. A day later we stop by and shes back on the couch again at her normal spot with the front door wide open as usual. Apparently she had a uterus infection…awkward! She is taking some pills and she feels better now, but that was a pretty traumatic experience.
What else….we had a pretty interesting dinner this week. It was a big huge pot with a soup, filled with full sized, unpeeled, untouched shrimp (antennas, eyes, little crawly legs, shells, and all), octopus meat, squid meat, and imitation crab meat. I didn’t really know exactly how to eat it. At another dinner a few weeks ago they plopped a full size untouched fish on my plate, and I wasn’t sure what to do with that either. They ate the whole thing. They ate the skin, the brains, the fins, everything. So now with this shrimp I didn’t know if they were going to eat the whole shrimp or what. Luckily they expected us to crack them open and eat the meat on the inside. They would eat the brains and all…I couldn’t make myself do that. The octopus was actually pretty good and the squid wasn’t bad either. After that meal we reeked like fish food though. We went on exchanges with a member and when we got into the car he said we stunk. It was pretty funny.
I also went on exchanges this week with a companionship who’s having a tough time. It is a brand new missionary and his trainer who doesn’t know what to do. The new missionary had a hard couple of first days. He is scared of black people and his area is in the middle of the black ghetto, so he is scared out of his mind. He also is really fiery…he wants to whip that ward into shape, and he has good intentions, but he is offending a lot of people (members mostly) when he tells them they need to repent and change all these things in their lives. The trainer isn’t really confident either and he doesn’t know how to handle any of it. So we had a really good exchange with them...they were both really happy at the end of it. It turns out that new missionary is getting transferred and he is probably going to go out to the country somewhere where he can be more comfortable.
Hmm…I cant think of anything else. We knew about day light savings time because President Saylin texted us and told us to tell everyone in our zones.
We did have our primary program a couple weeks ago…it was awesome. I loved hearing all the songs in Spanish.
Ok, I am about out of time…I love you all!
Love,
Chase
We got our transfer information this morning! Neither me nor my companion is getting transferred. Our district leader and 1 of the sisters in our district are getting transferred. Our district leader was a really cool guy…he is one of my good friends in the mission, so it is sad to see him go, but we expected it. I’m glad nothing changed in my companionship though.
I actually have some pretty good stories this week. I’ll start off with Halloween, since Mom asked about that. No, not very many people at all went trick or treating. I don’t think any parents feel safe walking around with their kids in these apartment complexes. We drove through a nice part of our area, called Bellaire, which is like a city within Houston, and there were a lot of people trick or treating there. But, the eventful thing for that night was that we went to the Lakewood Church (Joel Osteen’s church). We went on exchanges with one of our members earlier in the week and we started talking about Lakewood and he talked about how he use to go to Lakewood before he joined our church, then when he found out both of us wanted to go there sometime he offered to take us on Saturday night. That was quite an experience. We got there a little late because we were finishing up at an appointment. The building is huuuge. It actually reminded me of the Marriot Center at BYU…it was actually almost the exact same size. But anyway…when we got there there was a band playing on the stage and the music was blasting. There are 3 big jumbotron screens to watch the people on the stage and it had the words to the songs. The music was actually really good. It was a pretty legit concert, with music blasting, fog coming down from the ceiling, people dancing around and everything. After that, Victoria Olsteen came up and talked about how they had just visited Kenya and they played a little movie thing showing their visit there. After that she talked about families and told everyone to stand up if they wanted her to say a prayer and dedicate their families. Then she started praying. Oh yeah, and the whole time there was someone playing background music on the piano. When they pray all the people who are really into it raise their arms into the air and if they really like it they stand up too. After that there was more music, then Joel came up and he started his sermon. He started by quoting Psalms 47:1 that mentions a “shout of praise.” His whole sermon was on how we just need to shout (literally) praises to God to overcome trials and be more faithful. He used the example of how the army walked around the walls of Jericho 6 times, but then on the 7th time they all shouted a praise, and that’s what tore the walls of Jericho down. Then he told everyone to get up and to shout. So everyone did, and we did that a couple more times throughout his whole sermon. People would yell out some Hallelujah’s and Amen’s throughout if they liked it. It was all so interesting. Then at the end on the way out, one of the Usher guys asked us if we would like to meat Joel. (All the workers there knew we were missionaries from the LDS Church). We said ok, so he took us to the other side and he let us go in first and we all had to stand in a line side by side…there were probably 40 other people there. They gave us these little book things. Then Victoria and Joel came in and they signed our little books and the Usher guys took pictures for us.
All in all, I thought it was an awesome experience to see other people’s opinions of church. Now I know what some people are expecting when we invite them to come to church. Brother Ramos, the member who took us, explained it pretty well. He said the church is a church about nothing. Joel Osteen is a great motivational speaker and seems like a really nice guy, but you don’t really learn anything. You don’t learn the gospel. Now I understand why so many people don’t understand why people come to church every week. Going there makes you feel good and everything, but its more like a show and you don’t make covenants or learn about the scriptures or gospel. Well…that is probably a lot more than you all wanted to hear, but I thought it was all fascinating. I left out a lot of details and thoughts, but I’ll just have to tell that experience in person.
Next…so we have this apartment complex called Jefferson House where we have tons of investigators and everyone always sees us there and we always find more and more people to teach. Well, in the morning we stopped by one of our investigators and asked how she was doing. She was sitting on the couch and said her stomach was really hurting. We asked if she had taken any pills to help, and she said yes but it didn’t take away any of the pain. She said she was just going to wait for her husband to get home at 5. So we left. A couple hours later we were back in that same complex teaching someone else in their apartment when we hear a banging on the door. They open it and we hear screaming and crying. It was Lucia Mejia, our investigator we visited in the morning. She could barely stand. Apparently she knew the people we were teaching. They sat her down in a chair and she just kept screaming and crying and breathing hard. Then all the sudden she stopped and her whole body just went limp and it went dead quiet. That definitely scared me. The people ran and grabbed some rubbing alcohol and held it in front of her mouth and nose and that brought her back to consciousness. Meanwhile the neighbor was calling 911, but she could speak English, so my companion talked to them. Then we ran to the front of the complex, found out what the code was to open the gate and opened it when the ambulance got there. Then they took her to the hospital. A day later we stop by and shes back on the couch again at her normal spot with the front door wide open as usual. Apparently she had a uterus infection…awkward! She is taking some pills and she feels better now, but that was a pretty traumatic experience.
What else….we had a pretty interesting dinner this week. It was a big huge pot with a soup, filled with full sized, unpeeled, untouched shrimp (antennas, eyes, little crawly legs, shells, and all), octopus meat, squid meat, and imitation crab meat. I didn’t really know exactly how to eat it. At another dinner a few weeks ago they plopped a full size untouched fish on my plate, and I wasn’t sure what to do with that either. They ate the whole thing. They ate the skin, the brains, the fins, everything. So now with this shrimp I didn’t know if they were going to eat the whole shrimp or what. Luckily they expected us to crack them open and eat the meat on the inside. They would eat the brains and all…I couldn’t make myself do that. The octopus was actually pretty good and the squid wasn’t bad either. After that meal we reeked like fish food though. We went on exchanges with a member and when we got into the car he said we stunk. It was pretty funny.
I also went on exchanges this week with a companionship who’s having a tough time. It is a brand new missionary and his trainer who doesn’t know what to do. The new missionary had a hard couple of first days. He is scared of black people and his area is in the middle of the black ghetto, so he is scared out of his mind. He also is really fiery…he wants to whip that ward into shape, and he has good intentions, but he is offending a lot of people (members mostly) when he tells them they need to repent and change all these things in their lives. The trainer isn’t really confident either and he doesn’t know how to handle any of it. So we had a really good exchange with them...they were both really happy at the end of it. It turns out that new missionary is getting transferred and he is probably going to go out to the country somewhere where he can be more comfortable.
Hmm…I cant think of anything else. We knew about day light savings time because President Saylin texted us and told us to tell everyone in our zones.
We did have our primary program a couple weeks ago…it was awesome. I loved hearing all the songs in Spanish.
Ok, I am about out of time…I love you all!
Love,
Chase
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Received Mon, Oct 26, 2009
Dear Family,
Well this week I don’t have a ton of stuff written down, but luckily Mom has provided me with a nice long list of questions/things to talk about.
First off, I am glad everyone is enjoying my iPod…I definitely had some good music on there. I think I have a workout playlist on there too that has crazier music to keep me entertained when I use to always go running. I don’t think I ever mentioned that the music rules got a lot stricter in the mission a month or 2 ago. We are now only allowed to listen to Mormon Tabernacle Choir, classical music, and EFY music. Usually we listen to motab in the morning, EFY in the car, and classical music on P-days and other times were in the apartment. I actually like classical music…it is the best workout music we have. Between my companion and I we have EFY CD’s 1999 to 2009. There are surprisingly a lot of really good songs on the newest EFY CD’s but I am definitely getting sick of hearing the same stuff over and over and over and over again. I just tell myself that I am going to really love and appreciate normal music when I can listen to it again.
Halloween: We haven’t gotten any direction yet. I’m sure we’ll just have a normal day. To be honest I doubt very many people are going to go out trick or treating around here. If I was a parent I definitely wouldn’t want my kids walking around at night time in this area. I will have to report next week what happens though.
I’m pretty sure I know Elder Barrow’s grandpa. He is a crazy old man named Wiley Barrow. He is in one of the 3 Sugar Land wards. I did service with him during the hurricane. With him, we patched up peoples roofs. They told us to be really careful if we were going to be on roofs and to try to stay away from steep roofs and 2 story houses. Well all the houses he took us to were really tall 2 story houses and they were all really steep. It was probably my most fun day of service though.
ACT: The second time taking the ACT is always better. I don’t remember where I got it from…but I got a practice test and I took that a week before I took the real thing. I think they had it in the office at the high school or something. All the counselors there are absolutely oblivious to the ACT, but I think they do have a stack of practice tests you can take. I also did like all of the practice questions they have online. That helped me out a lot.
Dads talk: I actually shared the same story about Captain Moroni 2-3 times this week. The wars chapters of the Book of Mormon are my favorite part of the whole thing and Captain Moroni is my favorite one to read about.
AHS Soccer: Quinn that is too bad about not making it onto the team, but its also no big deal. The same thing happened to me and Christopher. I will tell you one thing though, I wish that I had tried out for the track team as well. I would have loved to do the 100m dash and the long jump and maybe the high jump. If you like to do any of that stuff I would definitely do that…it would be fun.
Swine Flu: We haven’t gotten any direction on the swine flu as far as the vaccine, but at our last zone conference the Saylin’s bought a ton of those little hand sanitizer bottles and have them to us and told us to use them all throughout the day. They’ve told us to be careful and wash our hands a lot. A couple weeks ago when I got sick I don’t know what it was but I had all the symptoms of the swine flu. So maybe I already got it, I don’t know. I survived and I’m fine now, so I’m not worried about it. I actually worked every day I was sick too.
Yes I got the 1001 pitfalls book and I read it every morning as I eat my cereal and during lunch too. It is a good book. I also found this picture dictionary we have in our apartment. It takes a scene like a grocery store and it has definitions of allll the things you can find in a grocery store. So its like you study the vocab by topic which I have been loving too.
I actually just got an e-mail from Tony today. He got to Argentina a few weeks ago (he had a little Visa delay). His companion is from Buenos Aires and has a thick Argentine accent, so he can barely understand him. He says everyone talks fast and with that accent so they are hard to understand, but he says its getting better every day.
Ok I am just about out of time. This week has been a good one though. We had 10 people at church yesterday. We are teaching a bunch of really good people are I don’t doubt are going to get baptized in the near future. This is our last week of the transfer so we will get the transfer call next week. There is not much of a chance either of us will get transferred and I definitely hope we both stay. Its pretty certain that I’m going to kill him off, as we say in the mission. Hes only got like 2 transfers left…he goes home January 23 or something.
Oh yeah, and about that thing we need to send to the Burtons, I am planning on writing that little paragraph today and I’ll just send it in the mail, then Mom maybe you could type it up and e-mail it to Sister Burton along with those 2 pictures. I’ll probably just send you the letter that she sent to me that has all her information and a description of what exactly it is.
Ok, have a good week! I love you all!
Chase
Well this week I don’t have a ton of stuff written down, but luckily Mom has provided me with a nice long list of questions/things to talk about.
First off, I am glad everyone is enjoying my iPod…I definitely had some good music on there. I think I have a workout playlist on there too that has crazier music to keep me entertained when I use to always go running. I don’t think I ever mentioned that the music rules got a lot stricter in the mission a month or 2 ago. We are now only allowed to listen to Mormon Tabernacle Choir, classical music, and EFY music. Usually we listen to motab in the morning, EFY in the car, and classical music on P-days and other times were in the apartment. I actually like classical music…it is the best workout music we have. Between my companion and I we have EFY CD’s 1999 to 2009. There are surprisingly a lot of really good songs on the newest EFY CD’s but I am definitely getting sick of hearing the same stuff over and over and over and over again. I just tell myself that I am going to really love and appreciate normal music when I can listen to it again.
Halloween: We haven’t gotten any direction yet. I’m sure we’ll just have a normal day. To be honest I doubt very many people are going to go out trick or treating around here. If I was a parent I definitely wouldn’t want my kids walking around at night time in this area. I will have to report next week what happens though.
I’m pretty sure I know Elder Barrow’s grandpa. He is a crazy old man named Wiley Barrow. He is in one of the 3 Sugar Land wards. I did service with him during the hurricane. With him, we patched up peoples roofs. They told us to be really careful if we were going to be on roofs and to try to stay away from steep roofs and 2 story houses. Well all the houses he took us to were really tall 2 story houses and they were all really steep. It was probably my most fun day of service though.
ACT: The second time taking the ACT is always better. I don’t remember where I got it from…but I got a practice test and I took that a week before I took the real thing. I think they had it in the office at the high school or something. All the counselors there are absolutely oblivious to the ACT, but I think they do have a stack of practice tests you can take. I also did like all of the practice questions they have online. That helped me out a lot.
Dads talk: I actually shared the same story about Captain Moroni 2-3 times this week. The wars chapters of the Book of Mormon are my favorite part of the whole thing and Captain Moroni is my favorite one to read about.
AHS Soccer: Quinn that is too bad about not making it onto the team, but its also no big deal. The same thing happened to me and Christopher. I will tell you one thing though, I wish that I had tried out for the track team as well. I would have loved to do the 100m dash and the long jump and maybe the high jump. If you like to do any of that stuff I would definitely do that…it would be fun.
Swine Flu: We haven’t gotten any direction on the swine flu as far as the vaccine, but at our last zone conference the Saylin’s bought a ton of those little hand sanitizer bottles and have them to us and told us to use them all throughout the day. They’ve told us to be careful and wash our hands a lot. A couple weeks ago when I got sick I don’t know what it was but I had all the symptoms of the swine flu. So maybe I already got it, I don’t know. I survived and I’m fine now, so I’m not worried about it. I actually worked every day I was sick too.
Yes I got the 1001 pitfalls book and I read it every morning as I eat my cereal and during lunch too. It is a good book. I also found this picture dictionary we have in our apartment. It takes a scene like a grocery store and it has definitions of allll the things you can find in a grocery store. So its like you study the vocab by topic which I have been loving too.
I actually just got an e-mail from Tony today. He got to Argentina a few weeks ago (he had a little Visa delay). His companion is from Buenos Aires and has a thick Argentine accent, so he can barely understand him. He says everyone talks fast and with that accent so they are hard to understand, but he says its getting better every day.
Ok I am just about out of time. This week has been a good one though. We had 10 people at church yesterday. We are teaching a bunch of really good people are I don’t doubt are going to get baptized in the near future. This is our last week of the transfer so we will get the transfer call next week. There is not much of a chance either of us will get transferred and I definitely hope we both stay. Its pretty certain that I’m going to kill him off, as we say in the mission. Hes only got like 2 transfers left…he goes home January 23 or something.
Oh yeah, and about that thing we need to send to the Burtons, I am planning on writing that little paragraph today and I’ll just send it in the mail, then Mom maybe you could type it up and e-mail it to Sister Burton along with those 2 pictures. I’ll probably just send you the letter that she sent to me that has all her information and a description of what exactly it is.
Ok, have a good week! I love you all!
Chase
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