Received Mon Jan 11, 2010

Dear Family,

This has been one crazy week. I think I mentioned last week in my e-mail that I woke up not feeling very well. Well it never really went away. Today I feel the best I have felt since I got sick, so I am hoping this whole thing passes. I called up the guy in charge of missionary medical stuff, but he is kind of crazy and just told me to take a bunch of medicine and stay inside for 48 hours. There was no way I could just sit around inside for 2 days…even if my health did get better, I would probably be mentally insane. Plus it wasn’t so bad, so we kept working.

So with that in mind, here are some of the things we had to get done this week. First, we had to plan, prepare, and do a Zone Meeting, which is basically a meeting where all the missionaries in the zone come to and we have to train them and put on this whole program. So we had to plan out the whole meeting and prepare our training. It actually turned out really well. We trained on the L. Tom Perry Plan, also called the Ward Mission Process, which is basically where the auxiliary groups are supposed to give us names of 5 people to visit. That hasn’t really been happening in any ward in the mission except for the League City ward, which is where Elder Roberts and I are serving. So we trained the missionaries on how to help their ward get that started. A lot of missionaries called us up afterwards and told us of a lot of good experiences that came from the things we trained them on. I am pretty happy about how it all went.

The next huge task was that we had to prepare for stake correlation, which is that meeting where we meet with the stake presidency, the high councilor over missionary work, and with our mission president and we talk about how all the wards are doing. We have to fill out these long tedious reports for each ward and we have 9 of them in our zone/stake, so you can only imagine how long that took. That meeting ended up going very well too. The whole Ward Mission Process came up into conversation and they decided that they wanted to train all the ward leaders on this whole thing and teach them how to get it started. That is exactly what we wanted to have happen, so we’re excited to have that happen. After this meeting and after all this gets running, there is going to be a big difference in the work here.

The NEXT thing is that we had to move on Thursday and help 2 other companionships move. We moved in with members. They are named the Seely’s. I’m not sure how to spell it. They are probably about 50 and their youngest daughter just moved out of the house to go to college. They are a pretty cool family. We live upstairs where we have our own room and study area and everything. Its definitely not as big and spacious as the Randall’s home in Richmond, but not very many people’s houses are that big. So we did all that on Thursday.

Then we just had all the normal missionary work stuff. In the mission we have recently been stressing how every missionary needs to get 10 OYMs a day. OYM = Open Your Mouth…so in other words, you need to talk to 10 people a day. It is actually a lot harder than it sounds. You just don’t see 20 people(for both companionships to get 10 OYMs) in your path each day, so we’ve had to go to shopping center parking lots to try to find people to talk to. We have not had much luck at all yet. Its so interesting to see how all the different cultures are. I could get rejected by 10 American white people in a row, then if I go up and talk to a Hispanic person in Spanish they always sit and listen and they always say you can come back and teach them. Of course a lot of the time they really aren’t very interested and they really don’t want you to come back, but they are too nice to tell you no. I think that a lot of the people who have grown up here just have it trained into their minds not to let anybody take advantage of you. They see 2 20 year old kids walking around in nice clothes, and naturally you think they must be getting something out of it and they must have some hidden motives. The good thing is that when you find someone who says you can come back, they are serious and they are usually really good investigators, so in the end it all ends up the same. We just have to keep looking!

The Keichler’s, who Mom got that knitted thing from, are an older couple who have had missionaries in their home for like 2 ½ years. The missionaries finally moved out into a different place. They live in our ward. So of course they love the missionaries and I guess she sends one of those things to all the missionaries who come into the ward. They are nice people.

So that was my week. Somehow we made it through all that and we got everything done on time and we had a decent week in terms of missionary work. This week will be much more relaxing.
In response to news at home and Mom’s e-mail…Bub you are the man. As long as you get a decent GPA you are pretty set. Of course if you think you can do even better, it never hurts to take it again, but a 30 is very good.

I think church at 11 is the perfect starting time. Our ward currently starts at 8:30 and it is way too early, especially when you have early morning meetings. We might have to cover another ward, which means we would have 6 hours of church plus at least another hour or 2 for meetings. That does not sound fun.

Alright I think that’s about it for this week. Ohh yeah..I realized yesterday that I hit my 18 month mark on Saturday! That is kind of exciting. I was gone on exchanges in Sugar Land with the assistants that day. I was with Elder Schwarz who is one of my good friends in the mission, so we had a really good time. It didn’t even cross my mind all day until Sunday in one of our meetings I saw the date was the 10th and remembered that the 9th is always another month mark. Oh yeah and one more thing. I don’t know how often they have you go and give a missionary report in sacrament meeting, but in your next one could you please tell everyone how grateful I am for all the letters and stuff they sent me at Christmas time. I don’t think I’m going to have enough time to write everyone back, but I don’t want anyone to go unthanked.

Oh and the other last thing is that it has been FREEZING here again. It was down in the 20s on Thursday and Friday, then it was in the 30s on Saturday and now today its warming back up and it will be warm again. We didn’t get any snow…the skies were all clear, but all the water puddles and everything did freeze over. I wont be surprised if it is in the 70s this week. There is a saying in Texas where they say, If you don’t like the weather, wait a couple minutes. Obviously referring to how frequently the weather changes.

Ok have a great week, I love you all!!!

Love,
Chase