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