Dear Family,
It just never seems to slow down!! I've had some days in my mission that have been really really busy, but I've never had a period like this where every second of my time has been consumed for 3 weeks. I havent had any time to write in my journal or have a night time snack before bed. Being busy is always a good thing though. I've learned to just enjoy it, because if your life has to be consumed by work, this is the best kind of work to do it.
Anyway, last week on our P-day we were pretty excited for a day where we would finally be able to breathe for a few hours, then we get a phone call and a less active lady's daughter needs a blessing and she didnt know who else to call. Then a wrench was thrown into the mess because it was just the lady and her daughter at home and we cant enter the home unless another man is present. Anyway, it all worked out and we were able to bring somebody with us. Meanwhile our district went to the NASA space center again, since we have new people in our district who have never been. By the time we finished everything it was like 3 and we sped over to NASA and got there just in time to catch the last tram tour with our district. So we finally got to relax our minds for 3 hours until our P-day ended. It was pretty fun.
I'm not sure what we'll do today. I got my haircut, after this we'll go shop, and we'll probably just end up staying at home. I have a few letters to respond to that have been sitting on my desk for a few months. Tony and Jake both wrote me. They are both doing really well. Then a random girl from BYU decided to write me again. My mail flow has pretty much boiled down to an occasional letter from Tony or Jake, then every long once in a while a random person from BYU will write me. I was getting mail pretty frequently for a long time on my mission...so I havent done too bad. But, the letter with pictures and address labels will be grately appreciated. I am excited for that one.
This week we had the correlation meeting with our stake president and our mission president and a couple other stake leaders. That means we had to fill out reports for all the units in our stake (there are 9). That is what took up a lot of our time this week. I am happy that is all done and taken care of.
We went on exchanges this week with some missionaries in our zone...that went well. While I was there I got to do a baptismal interview for 2 hispanic people who got baptized this weekend. Our zone is doing pretty well so far. We have had 10 baptisms and 10 confirmations in this transfer so far (we just ended week 3). I am excited about that.
In other exciting news, were having a baptism this Saturday! Anthony, the 10 year old kid, is going to get baptized. I was really sad that his whole family didnt come to church with them this Sunday. Surprisingly one of the biggest obstacles that I have come across that is the hardest for people to overcome is pure laziness. This family really has desires to support their son and to come to church, but every Sunday morning they just feel tired and it is easier to stay in bed. It takes a 10 year old kid without any family support to be the strong one to get up and come to church. He is doing really well though. We got him to a family home evening last week with one of the kids family who he has made friends with at church. He loved it and begged us to let him go to another one of those. We also get him to cub scouts every Tuesday, then to church every Sunday. It is amazing how much cub scouts can do for a boy like this. Involving him in something like that and teaching him skills that his parents dont teach him, then giving him merit badges to show him he can accomplish things is just huge for him. I hope we can keep this fire he's got and help him stay a strong member. I am excited for this baptism though. For one, because I am happy to see Anthony make this huge choice in the right direction, and for 2, this will be my companion's first baptism. That was one of my hugest goals this transfer. A missionary as good as him who has been out as long as him needs to have a baptism, so I am excited to see that happen.
This next week should be a good one. We dont have any huge projects to get done or anything problems as of right now to work out. Hopefully it wont be as hectic as the past few weeks have been. You go through everything for a reason though. I've learned how to prioritize and how to work under pressure and how to stay calm and just work when you have a mountain of work ahead of you.
Ok, thats about all for this week. Happy Valentines day yesterday! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Received, Mon Feb 8, 2010
Dear Family,
This has been one hectic week. First, we kind of had a wasted P-day. My companion had to go and get a library card, then we had to wait forever for computers to open (we can only use the computers if we can sit side by side so sometimes it takes forever for 2 to open up side by side, then we had to go shopping and my companion had to get everything he needed since he just barely got here. By the time all was said and done it was like 3:30 and our p-day was pretty much over.
On Tuesday we went on exchanges with a companionship who is struggling a little bit. I was with Elder ---. He is a pretty weird guy. There's not really a nice way to say it, but he is a stereotypical geeky person. At home all he did was read sci-fi books and watch sci-fi movies, especially star trek. He just has sooo many weird quirks about him. I kind of like to go on exchanges with these missionaries though, just to get to know them and try to figure out where they are coming from. I definitely respect him a lot though. He has absolutely no social skills and he doesn’t know how to talk to people and it is very awkward every time, but he still has the courage to stay out here. I had made plans, back-up plans, and even back-up plans for our back-up plans, but they alllll fell through. I think God just wanted us to spend time outside talking to people to help Elder Kropp over come his fear of people. So that’s what we did for a lot of the time. Whenever we would walk up to people, he wouldn’t say anything, so I would end up talking to everyone. Well I wasn’t about ready to let us get through the day without him hitting our mission wide goal of talking to 10 people a day. So what we did was I would say hi and get the person to stop and start paying attention to us, then Elder --- would take over and ask if we could come share a message with him. It got him talking and he hit the 10 person goal! That’s probably one of the first times in his mission he’s hit that. We were pretty happy about that.
In the next couple days we had interviews with President Saylin, we had to do our zone meeting, where we train all the missionaries in our zone, and we had a bunch of other problems come up in the zone that we had to take care of. It turns out Mardi Gras is this weekend on Galveston, and it take a week sooner than we expected, so we had to figure out what to do with those missionaries. They all got shipped off the island to spend the weekend in struggling areas. That was probably fun for them.
We have had almost 0 open time this week from the time we wake up til the time we get into bed. I hope this week will be a little more relaxed.
Here is a funny story. One night Elder McFadyen and I were out talking to people in a grocery store parking lot to hit our talk to 10 person goal for the day. Usually when we do this, we split up but we always stay within sight and earshot of each other. While he was talking to one person, I started talking to this one woman. She seemed fairly interested and a lot of her high school friends were mormons, so I talked with her as she walked up to a liquor store which is next to the grocery store. We stopped outside the entrance as I gave her a pass along card (she turned out not to be interested) and as she walked away, the high priest group leader from our ward walked up behind me. He said that he pulled into the parking lot and saw me walking with a woman by myself towards a liquor store so he ran out to save me. It was pretty funny. That’s how rumors start though…from his point of view it looked just like that’s what I was doing. Luckily I was able to clear that up with him.
Now onto the worldly stuff…I am glad the Saints won the superbowl, they were the team I was going for. As I mentioned before, the Saints are my 2nd favorite team and the Colts are 3rd. I’m glad the Saints finally won a superbowl. Zak is smart to start worrying about the next fantasy football season, because I will be there this time to dominate it.
I just realized that tomorrow is my 19th month mark! That sounds so weird for me to say that. In my interview with president saylin I mentioned that I wanted to go back to Spanish for the last part of my mission. I don’t know if I mentioned, but President Saylin is taking a lot of the leaders in the mission and letting them be normal missionaries for the last 2 transfers and he’ll usually put them in dead areas or have them train. I’m hoping I get to do that and be in a Spanish area. He just kind of smiled and laughed when I said that, probably because I always mention that, and he told me to get this area up and running and make it a strong area and we’ll see what happens. So no promises, but I hope that’s what happens.
My companion has never baptized in his mission before, which is weird because he is a really good missionary and he's been out 15 months, so president really wants us to baptize this transfer. We should have a baptism next Saturday. It will probably be Anthony Castellanos, that 10 year old kid who lives in the dirty old motel. It has been awesome to see him change and to break that chain of poverty and just messed up thinking that has been going through his family. If he keeps it up, he’ll not only change his life forever, but a lot of over peoples lives too. His situation is just so fragile though, since he’s a 10 year old kid with no family support (they are all members though and they want him to go to church, but they are just way too lazy to get out of bed). Hopefully that goes through.
We have someone else with a baptismal date for March 14th, which is next transfer but we have high hopes for her too. Then we have Keith Greear, which is the guy that we just found who has the messed up back. He has a lot of potential too. He could potentially get baptized in 3 weeks, but he’d have to come to church every one of those weeks.
Ok, well that’s about it for this week. I hope everyone at home has a good week! I love you all!!
Love,
Chase
This has been one hectic week. First, we kind of had a wasted P-day. My companion had to go and get a library card, then we had to wait forever for computers to open (we can only use the computers if we can sit side by side so sometimes it takes forever for 2 to open up side by side, then we had to go shopping and my companion had to get everything he needed since he just barely got here. By the time all was said and done it was like 3:30 and our p-day was pretty much over.
On Tuesday we went on exchanges with a companionship who is struggling a little bit. I was with Elder ---. He is a pretty weird guy. There's not really a nice way to say it, but he is a stereotypical geeky person. At home all he did was read sci-fi books and watch sci-fi movies, especially star trek. He just has sooo many weird quirks about him. I kind of like to go on exchanges with these missionaries though, just to get to know them and try to figure out where they are coming from. I definitely respect him a lot though. He has absolutely no social skills and he doesn’t know how to talk to people and it is very awkward every time, but he still has the courage to stay out here. I had made plans, back-up plans, and even back-up plans for our back-up plans, but they alllll fell through. I think God just wanted us to spend time outside talking to people to help Elder Kropp over come his fear of people. So that’s what we did for a lot of the time. Whenever we would walk up to people, he wouldn’t say anything, so I would end up talking to everyone. Well I wasn’t about ready to let us get through the day without him hitting our mission wide goal of talking to 10 people a day. So what we did was I would say hi and get the person to stop and start paying attention to us, then Elder --- would take over and ask if we could come share a message with him. It got him talking and he hit the 10 person goal! That’s probably one of the first times in his mission he’s hit that. We were pretty happy about that.
In the next couple days we had interviews with President Saylin, we had to do our zone meeting, where we train all the missionaries in our zone, and we had a bunch of other problems come up in the zone that we had to take care of. It turns out Mardi Gras is this weekend on Galveston, and it take a week sooner than we expected, so we had to figure out what to do with those missionaries. They all got shipped off the island to spend the weekend in struggling areas. That was probably fun for them.
We have had almost 0 open time this week from the time we wake up til the time we get into bed. I hope this week will be a little more relaxed.
Here is a funny story. One night Elder McFadyen and I were out talking to people in a grocery store parking lot to hit our talk to 10 person goal for the day. Usually when we do this, we split up but we always stay within sight and earshot of each other. While he was talking to one person, I started talking to this one woman. She seemed fairly interested and a lot of her high school friends were mormons, so I talked with her as she walked up to a liquor store which is next to the grocery store. We stopped outside the entrance as I gave her a pass along card (she turned out not to be interested) and as she walked away, the high priest group leader from our ward walked up behind me. He said that he pulled into the parking lot and saw me walking with a woman by myself towards a liquor store so he ran out to save me. It was pretty funny. That’s how rumors start though…from his point of view it looked just like that’s what I was doing. Luckily I was able to clear that up with him.
Now onto the worldly stuff…I am glad the Saints won the superbowl, they were the team I was going for. As I mentioned before, the Saints are my 2nd favorite team and the Colts are 3rd. I’m glad the Saints finally won a superbowl. Zak is smart to start worrying about the next fantasy football season, because I will be there this time to dominate it.
I just realized that tomorrow is my 19th month mark! That sounds so weird for me to say that. In my interview with president saylin I mentioned that I wanted to go back to Spanish for the last part of my mission. I don’t know if I mentioned, but President Saylin is taking a lot of the leaders in the mission and letting them be normal missionaries for the last 2 transfers and he’ll usually put them in dead areas or have them train. I’m hoping I get to do that and be in a Spanish area. He just kind of smiled and laughed when I said that, probably because I always mention that, and he told me to get this area up and running and make it a strong area and we’ll see what happens. So no promises, but I hope that’s what happens.
My companion has never baptized in his mission before, which is weird because he is a really good missionary and he's been out 15 months, so president really wants us to baptize this transfer. We should have a baptism next Saturday. It will probably be Anthony Castellanos, that 10 year old kid who lives in the dirty old motel. It has been awesome to see him change and to break that chain of poverty and just messed up thinking that has been going through his family. If he keeps it up, he’ll not only change his life forever, but a lot of over peoples lives too. His situation is just so fragile though, since he’s a 10 year old kid with no family support (they are all members though and they want him to go to church, but they are just way too lazy to get out of bed). Hopefully that goes through.
We have someone else with a baptismal date for March 14th, which is next transfer but we have high hopes for her too. Then we have Keith Greear, which is the guy that we just found who has the messed up back. He has a lot of potential too. He could potentially get baptized in 3 weeks, but he’d have to come to church every one of those weeks.
Ok, well that’s about it for this week. I hope everyone at home has a good week! I love you all!!
Love,
Chase
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Received, Mon Feb 1, 2010
Dear Family,
This has been one crazy week. I feel like I’ve been on the phone from Wednesday til today. We haven’t had a chance to do full morning studies since Wednesday either. So, here is the news. My new companion is Elder McFadyen. He is from Roseville, California. Hes been out for about 15 months and he is actually a Chinese speaking missionary. He became a zone leader a transfer or 2 ago. I think he is definitely going to be one of my favorite companions. There are some people that you just seem to click with and you're always on the same page about missionaries and there are other missionaries where you wonder where the heck they are coming from. Elder McFadyen fits into the first category and as much as I liked Elder Roberts, he definitely had his own idea about how missionary work should be done. Elder McFadyen and I will hopefully be able to correct a lot of things that have gone on here in the past and get this area up and running.
In the few days that we’ve been together we have already seen some pretty amazing things happen. One of the coolest things is that we found a new investigator and gave him a baptismal date. Here is the story:
So a week or 2 ago the Spanish Elders gave us a referral for a guy named Keith Greear. Elder Roberts and I set up an appointment, but when we got there he wasn’t there because apparently his grandson fell down and broke his arm. So on Friday last week Elder McFadyen and I decided to stop by and see if we could at least set up another appointment. Well when we stopped by he miraculously let us in. He walks around with 2 canes because he has some back problems from when he broke his back in 8 places from falling out of a massive tree. Then some time after that he got hit by a car while he was riding on his motorcycle and messed it up again. He was also standing by a tank of napalm that exploded when he was on a boat and somehow managed to survive. So anyway, he has a pretty crazy story. We told him he was probably being kept alive for a reason. He strongly agreed with that and started talking about how ever since he has been bedridden he has had a hunger to learn about God, so he has read “all the bibles, even the Book of the Mormon.” He got his hands on all sorts of crazy religion books. Well we taught him about the restoration and he actually understood everything really well and definitely felt the spirit and accepted a baptismal date. We taught him for a 2nd time yesterday and taught him about the Book of Mormon, or Book of the Mormon as he calls it, and he thought that was fascinating. He just so happened to be studying all about the American Indians before we got there. He was pretty excited to research about these Lamanite people.
We have also found an unusually large amount of people who have been receptive to us this week. On Sunday our whole district also fasted so that we could all find more people to teach. This has been a pretty tough area for a long time, so hopefully this will help.
On Thursday, after our transfer meeting on Wednesday, we had our big long meeting down in Sugar Land, but this time it was a mission wide leadership meeting rather than a meeting just for the Zone Leaders. All the zone leaders did have to get there an hour early and stay a few hours after though. I think we got out of our meeting at like 6 and finally got back to our area at 7:45, and we left at like 7 in the morning. For a big part of the meeting President talked a lot about obedience and how after we had a big push for obedience when he first got here, people started to get a little lax and that we need to make another push. So a LOT of little rules were clarified and he strongly encouraged us to follow them. I am definitely not a fan of a whole bunch of little rules for everything, but unfortunately there are a lot of people out there who don’t have common sense and they think that if there's no specific rule against a specific action, it is ok. I prefer to just be a missionary and do what a could missionary would do and use common sense to know what we should be doing, but like I said, unfortunately we cant do that. So we are fixing a lot of little things that haven’t been done correctly here in League City. Oh that reminds me of a story. So one of the rules is that we are not supposed to have dinner appointments on P-days because we are supposed to be out and proselyting when our P-day ends at 6:00pm. Well there is this one lady in our ward. She is a very good person and does a lot of good for people. So, she has told the missionaries that the only possible day that she can have the missionaries over for dinner is on Mondays. We had to go try to tactfully correct this problem, so we went up to her and told her about this “new rule” and told her we cant do that anymore, but we said that we would be willing to end our P-day an hour early and go over to eat at 5 instead of 6. She started to get all emotional and said that there was no way her husband could get home in time and all this other stuff. We told her we would be willing to do breakfast lunch or dinner any day of the week, or come over after church or any time they were open, but she said that it would never work, then she stormed down the end of the hallway crying, then stormed back past us and we told her that we would try to see if we could work something out, but she just screamed, “NO, I don’t want to be the cause of your disobedience.” And stormed out of the church. I was half expecting something like that to happen just because that is kind of how this lady is, but my companion was totally blown away. That was his welcome to League City moment.
We also had a really good lesson with a lady named Chrissy Ross. Her husband is a member and they have an 8 year old daughter who they want to have be baptized on March 14, when the husband’s mother will be in town so she can see the baptism. Chrissy wants to be baptized too. We haven’t been able to get in contact with her for a long time, so we haven’t taught her much at all, but we finally got in and brought a member with us and taught her the Word of Wisdom, because she smokes. Shes been smoking for like 24 years. It was a pretty powerful lesson though and she is determined to stop so she can get baptized.
Oh yeah, I spoke in sacrament meeting yesterday. I don’t mind speaking in sacrament meeting, especially on my mission, but this time the topic was not the greatest. The theme for the sacrament meeting was the standard works, so the 2nd counselor called me and asked me to speak on “which of the standard works do the missionaries use when they teach.” Well the answer is all of them. There's not a whole lot to talk about that. So I answered that question at the beginning of the talk and kind of took my own route and talked about other things that were more interesting. It went pretty good, but I only had like 20 minutes to prepare it because we have had absolutely no free time.
Well that’s about all for this week. We still have a big huge To Do list, so its going to be another busy week. Busy is good though. I hope you all have a good week and good luck at the doctor’s office today. I love you all!
Love,
Chase
This has been one crazy week. I feel like I’ve been on the phone from Wednesday til today. We haven’t had a chance to do full morning studies since Wednesday either. So, here is the news. My new companion is Elder McFadyen. He is from Roseville, California. Hes been out for about 15 months and he is actually a Chinese speaking missionary. He became a zone leader a transfer or 2 ago. I think he is definitely going to be one of my favorite companions. There are some people that you just seem to click with and you're always on the same page about missionaries and there are other missionaries where you wonder where the heck they are coming from. Elder McFadyen fits into the first category and as much as I liked Elder Roberts, he definitely had his own idea about how missionary work should be done. Elder McFadyen and I will hopefully be able to correct a lot of things that have gone on here in the past and get this area up and running.
In the few days that we’ve been together we have already seen some pretty amazing things happen. One of the coolest things is that we found a new investigator and gave him a baptismal date. Here is the story:
So a week or 2 ago the Spanish Elders gave us a referral for a guy named Keith Greear. Elder Roberts and I set up an appointment, but when we got there he wasn’t there because apparently his grandson fell down and broke his arm. So on Friday last week Elder McFadyen and I decided to stop by and see if we could at least set up another appointment. Well when we stopped by he miraculously let us in. He walks around with 2 canes because he has some back problems from when he broke his back in 8 places from falling out of a massive tree. Then some time after that he got hit by a car while he was riding on his motorcycle and messed it up again. He was also standing by a tank of napalm that exploded when he was on a boat and somehow managed to survive. So anyway, he has a pretty crazy story. We told him he was probably being kept alive for a reason. He strongly agreed with that and started talking about how ever since he has been bedridden he has had a hunger to learn about God, so he has read “all the bibles, even the Book of the Mormon.” He got his hands on all sorts of crazy religion books. Well we taught him about the restoration and he actually understood everything really well and definitely felt the spirit and accepted a baptismal date. We taught him for a 2nd time yesterday and taught him about the Book of Mormon, or Book of the Mormon as he calls it, and he thought that was fascinating. He just so happened to be studying all about the American Indians before we got there. He was pretty excited to research about these Lamanite people.
We have also found an unusually large amount of people who have been receptive to us this week. On Sunday our whole district also fasted so that we could all find more people to teach. This has been a pretty tough area for a long time, so hopefully this will help.
On Thursday, after our transfer meeting on Wednesday, we had our big long meeting down in Sugar Land, but this time it was a mission wide leadership meeting rather than a meeting just for the Zone Leaders. All the zone leaders did have to get there an hour early and stay a few hours after though. I think we got out of our meeting at like 6 and finally got back to our area at 7:45, and we left at like 7 in the morning. For a big part of the meeting President talked a lot about obedience and how after we had a big push for obedience when he first got here, people started to get a little lax and that we need to make another push. So a LOT of little rules were clarified and he strongly encouraged us to follow them. I am definitely not a fan of a whole bunch of little rules for everything, but unfortunately there are a lot of people out there who don’t have common sense and they think that if there's no specific rule against a specific action, it is ok. I prefer to just be a missionary and do what a could missionary would do and use common sense to know what we should be doing, but like I said, unfortunately we cant do that. So we are fixing a lot of little things that haven’t been done correctly here in League City. Oh that reminds me of a story. So one of the rules is that we are not supposed to have dinner appointments on P-days because we are supposed to be out and proselyting when our P-day ends at 6:00pm. Well there is this one lady in our ward. She is a very good person and does a lot of good for people. So, she has told the missionaries that the only possible day that she can have the missionaries over for dinner is on Mondays. We had to go try to tactfully correct this problem, so we went up to her and told her about this “new rule” and told her we cant do that anymore, but we said that we would be willing to end our P-day an hour early and go over to eat at 5 instead of 6. She started to get all emotional and said that there was no way her husband could get home in time and all this other stuff. We told her we would be willing to do breakfast lunch or dinner any day of the week, or come over after church or any time they were open, but she said that it would never work, then she stormed down the end of the hallway crying, then stormed back past us and we told her that we would try to see if we could work something out, but she just screamed, “NO, I don’t want to be the cause of your disobedience.” And stormed out of the church. I was half expecting something like that to happen just because that is kind of how this lady is, but my companion was totally blown away. That was his welcome to League City moment.
We also had a really good lesson with a lady named Chrissy Ross. Her husband is a member and they have an 8 year old daughter who they want to have be baptized on March 14, when the husband’s mother will be in town so she can see the baptism. Chrissy wants to be baptized too. We haven’t been able to get in contact with her for a long time, so we haven’t taught her much at all, but we finally got in and brought a member with us and taught her the Word of Wisdom, because she smokes. Shes been smoking for like 24 years. It was a pretty powerful lesson though and she is determined to stop so she can get baptized.
Oh yeah, I spoke in sacrament meeting yesterday. I don’t mind speaking in sacrament meeting, especially on my mission, but this time the topic was not the greatest. The theme for the sacrament meeting was the standard works, so the 2nd counselor called me and asked me to speak on “which of the standard works do the missionaries use when they teach.” Well the answer is all of them. There's not a whole lot to talk about that. So I answered that question at the beginning of the talk and kind of took my own route and talked about other things that were more interesting. It went pretty good, but I only had like 20 minutes to prepare it because we have had absolutely no free time.
Well that’s about all for this week. We still have a big huge To Do list, so its going to be another busy week. Busy is good though. I hope you all have a good week and good luck at the doctor’s office today. I love you all!
Love,
Chase
Received, Mon Jan 25, 2010
Dear Family,
When you live with members, you get to hear a little bit more than normal about whats going on in the news and whats going on in the world. They’ve been telling us about all this huge flooding and mudslides that have been going on in Southern California. I’ve had a couple other people tell me the same thing and I’ve seen a few pictures. Then in Mom’s e-mail I just hear there was a little rain storm then it was sunny all day. I thought that was funny. I was disappointed that I was missing out on some awesome rain storms. I knew it couldn’t be very bad, but I imagined that there would be like a river going down Highland Oaks dr, like there has been in other huge storms. Our house is in a pretty ideal location, up on a little hill, so even if there was a lot of flooding, it couldn’t touch us.
Ok, here is the transfer news. My companion, Elder Roberts, is getting transferred! There is going to be a change in every zone leader companionship this transfer. There have been a lot of changes and moving around lately. I am pretty excited for it though. My companion is an awesome guy, but he’s been in this area forever and he is a pretty strong headed guy, so he naturally tries to do everything by himself. It has gotten a lot better since the start of the transfer though. My guess is that I will probably get a pretty new, if not brand new zone leader. You never know though. I’ll find out on Wednesday.
Elder Pedersen and Elder Campbell, 2 of my companions are going home tomorrow. A couple other of my friends in the mission are going home too. I think the weirdest thing though is that all the sister missionaries who came out with me are going home tomorrow too. I don’t think I would be able to be satisfied if I already went home. I know these next couple months are going to flyyy by…time always seems to be going faster and faster and faster in the mission. That’s why you just have to do everything you can, while you can and not take a single day for granted.
This week I got to on 2 exchanges. The first one was to a Spanish area that covers the north part of my area. I was with Elder Carroll, who I have served around a lot in my mission, so it was fun to be with him again. It was also fun to be in a full Spanish area again. I loved it. One thing I noticed is how my Spanish has not gotten rusty at all. If anything it has just gotten better. It feels good to be at a very comfortable level of speaking the language. In my area I still run into a couple Hispanic people a week. This week I ran into a Hispanic guy and he told me he was from Bolivia, then I mentioned that I knew some people from Bolivia and that I had tried Peanut Soup, which is a popular thing to eat in Bolivia, and he was really surprised and opened up and started talking to me about everything. Then we talked about he church and he said the church was all over in Bolivia, then he said, “So when are you coming over to visit me?” I love Hispanic people. I didn’t even have to ask him. I gave that referral over to the Spanish elders…hopefully something good comes from it. It is amazing how I talk to 70 people a week and maybe 1 or 2 says I can come by sometime and if I am extremely lucky, maybe they’ll even set up an appointment, and if I’m unbelievably lucky, they might actually be there when we show up for the appointment. Then probably around half the Hispanic people I talk to say that we can come back and teach them. I hope I get to end my mission in a Spanish area…we’ll see.
I also got to go on exchanges to Galveston Island this week. This was the first time in almost a year I have been there. They are rebuilding all the piers at the beach and all sorts of stuff. It was way fun to go back there. It was a good day too, just like how I remembered it. Like 72 degrees with a nice ocean breeze. I think the coolest thing that happened though is that I ran into this lady who I taught my very first lesson to. We gave her and her 2 daughters baptismal dates, but then they disappeared with all the hurricane stuff. Well, I ran into her again and the missionaries are going to go back there and start teaching them again. I am excited about that.
In our area we still don’t have a whole lot going on right now, but we are working with a 10 year old kid named Anthony. He is living in a pretty bad situation. He lives with his mom and dad, who is almost never home, and his brother and his cousin. They live in this nasty little motel room. The mom is way too overweight, so she cant really move around a whole lot, so the place is just gross. All the kids do all day long is sit there and play video games. They have had pretty rough lives as you can imagine. All of them are members except for Anthony, but all of them are inactive. Anthony has started coming to church and he asks us every week if he can get baptized. Unfortunately we cant baptize him if he has absolutely no family support, because there isn’t very much of a chance he will be able to stay active. We have made a ton of progress with him in the past couple weeks though. He is now involved in scouts which he absolutely loves, which also helped him make a bunch of friends and people are available to give him rides to church and scouts every week. Elder Roberts and I are like big brothers to Anthony. We look out for him and make sure he does his homework and we reward him when he does something good. It has been neat to see him start to take responsibility and want to start to do good things as we reward him and help him see why it is good. Hopefully he will be able to get baptized.
We have had pretty good weeks these past 2 weeks. This week we taught 26 sit down lessons, which are lessons where we actually go into a home, say a prayer, have a full lesson, end a prayer, and leave. Elder Perry came and he challenged all of us to get 20 sit down lessons per week. We have been doing really well at that. We’ve also each been hitting our talk to 10 people each day goals as well. Hopefully we’ll start to see more good things happening. We have been seeing a lot of the less active people we teach start coming to church and progressing, which is awesome, but I hope we can start to see some results with non members too.
This should be an interesting week with Transfer meeting coming up, then Zone Leader Council, which is that loooong meeting we have with all the zone leaders once a transfer. I always have to bring candy to keep myself entertained and awake. I am not a fan of meetings. This meeting is always an awesome one though. Today we are planning on going to NASA to take a tour. That will be cool. Speaking of cool, enjoy that Cool Whip Delight…that stuff is delicious.
Ok, have a good week! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
PS. I also got a letter from Tony this week...he is doing well. I think he had a pretty difficult companion to start out with, but all is well now and it sounds like hes enjoying it a lot.
When you live with members, you get to hear a little bit more than normal about whats going on in the news and whats going on in the world. They’ve been telling us about all this huge flooding and mudslides that have been going on in Southern California. I’ve had a couple other people tell me the same thing and I’ve seen a few pictures. Then in Mom’s e-mail I just hear there was a little rain storm then it was sunny all day. I thought that was funny. I was disappointed that I was missing out on some awesome rain storms. I knew it couldn’t be very bad, but I imagined that there would be like a river going down Highland Oaks dr, like there has been in other huge storms. Our house is in a pretty ideal location, up on a little hill, so even if there was a lot of flooding, it couldn’t touch us.
Ok, here is the transfer news. My companion, Elder Roberts, is getting transferred! There is going to be a change in every zone leader companionship this transfer. There have been a lot of changes and moving around lately. I am pretty excited for it though. My companion is an awesome guy, but he’s been in this area forever and he is a pretty strong headed guy, so he naturally tries to do everything by himself. It has gotten a lot better since the start of the transfer though. My guess is that I will probably get a pretty new, if not brand new zone leader. You never know though. I’ll find out on Wednesday.
Elder Pedersen and Elder Campbell, 2 of my companions are going home tomorrow. A couple other of my friends in the mission are going home too. I think the weirdest thing though is that all the sister missionaries who came out with me are going home tomorrow too. I don’t think I would be able to be satisfied if I already went home. I know these next couple months are going to flyyy by…time always seems to be going faster and faster and faster in the mission. That’s why you just have to do everything you can, while you can and not take a single day for granted.
This week I got to on 2 exchanges. The first one was to a Spanish area that covers the north part of my area. I was with Elder Carroll, who I have served around a lot in my mission, so it was fun to be with him again. It was also fun to be in a full Spanish area again. I loved it. One thing I noticed is how my Spanish has not gotten rusty at all. If anything it has just gotten better. It feels good to be at a very comfortable level of speaking the language. In my area I still run into a couple Hispanic people a week. This week I ran into a Hispanic guy and he told me he was from Bolivia, then I mentioned that I knew some people from Bolivia and that I had tried Peanut Soup, which is a popular thing to eat in Bolivia, and he was really surprised and opened up and started talking to me about everything. Then we talked about he church and he said the church was all over in Bolivia, then he said, “So when are you coming over to visit me?” I love Hispanic people. I didn’t even have to ask him. I gave that referral over to the Spanish elders…hopefully something good comes from it. It is amazing how I talk to 70 people a week and maybe 1 or 2 says I can come by sometime and if I am extremely lucky, maybe they’ll even set up an appointment, and if I’m unbelievably lucky, they might actually be there when we show up for the appointment. Then probably around half the Hispanic people I talk to say that we can come back and teach them. I hope I get to end my mission in a Spanish area…we’ll see.
I also got to go on exchanges to Galveston Island this week. This was the first time in almost a year I have been there. They are rebuilding all the piers at the beach and all sorts of stuff. It was way fun to go back there. It was a good day too, just like how I remembered it. Like 72 degrees with a nice ocean breeze. I think the coolest thing that happened though is that I ran into this lady who I taught my very first lesson to. We gave her and her 2 daughters baptismal dates, but then they disappeared with all the hurricane stuff. Well, I ran into her again and the missionaries are going to go back there and start teaching them again. I am excited about that.
In our area we still don’t have a whole lot going on right now, but we are working with a 10 year old kid named Anthony. He is living in a pretty bad situation. He lives with his mom and dad, who is almost never home, and his brother and his cousin. They live in this nasty little motel room. The mom is way too overweight, so she cant really move around a whole lot, so the place is just gross. All the kids do all day long is sit there and play video games. They have had pretty rough lives as you can imagine. All of them are members except for Anthony, but all of them are inactive. Anthony has started coming to church and he asks us every week if he can get baptized. Unfortunately we cant baptize him if he has absolutely no family support, because there isn’t very much of a chance he will be able to stay active. We have made a ton of progress with him in the past couple weeks though. He is now involved in scouts which he absolutely loves, which also helped him make a bunch of friends and people are available to give him rides to church and scouts every week. Elder Roberts and I are like big brothers to Anthony. We look out for him and make sure he does his homework and we reward him when he does something good. It has been neat to see him start to take responsibility and want to start to do good things as we reward him and help him see why it is good. Hopefully he will be able to get baptized.
We have had pretty good weeks these past 2 weeks. This week we taught 26 sit down lessons, which are lessons where we actually go into a home, say a prayer, have a full lesson, end a prayer, and leave. Elder Perry came and he challenged all of us to get 20 sit down lessons per week. We have been doing really well at that. We’ve also each been hitting our talk to 10 people each day goals as well. Hopefully we’ll start to see more good things happening. We have been seeing a lot of the less active people we teach start coming to church and progressing, which is awesome, but I hope we can start to see some results with non members too.
This should be an interesting week with Transfer meeting coming up, then Zone Leader Council, which is that loooong meeting we have with all the zone leaders once a transfer. I always have to bring candy to keep myself entertained and awake. I am not a fan of meetings. This meeting is always an awesome one though. Today we are planning on going to NASA to take a tour. That will be cool. Speaking of cool, enjoy that Cool Whip Delight…that stuff is delicious.
Ok, have a good week! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
PS. I also got a letter from Tony this week...he is doing well. I think he had a pretty difficult companion to start out with, but all is well now and it sounds like hes enjoying it a lot.
Received Tue, Jan 19, 2010
Dear Family,
I’ll start off with the whole driver’s license thing. I’m glad you remembered because I totally forgot about all that stuff. If I do get something in the mail, maybe it would just be easier if one of you signed my name on the paper for me and sent it in. I don’t know how that would work or if it would work, but I thought I’d throw it out there.
I only have a couple things written down for this week. Its been mostly the same stuff going on. But I do have a couple things. The first one is about the show Extreme Home Makeover…I think that’s what its called. I know you know what it is. Well they are doing one of those houses here in Kemah, which is right by League City. I guess there is some family here and they take in all these foster kids. They’ve had like 20 something kids go through their home and they’ve adopted a lot of them…like 8 or 9. Several of them have disabilities too. Their house got destroyed last year by the hurricane and they haven’t had any money to fix it, so they have been living in FEMA trailers. So Extreme Home Makeover came in and built a massive house for them. It is the biggest house they’ve built on the show. Its something like 8 bedrooms and they have an elevator in the middle of the house so the kids with disabilities can go up and down. We stopped by to see the house. There were toooons and tons of volunteers there. I’d say probably 80% of them were standing around and they’d pick something up every once in a while and give it to one of the few contract workers who knew what they were doing. They really did work on it 24 hours a day though. I think that episode goes on the air in March or something.
You will never guess what I did for some service this week. We mucked out a house! I never thought that over a year after the hurricane I would muck out another house. Apparently some lady finally got cleared by her insurance to muck everything out, so I guess she knew a member and the member sent us to go help her. It was a lot more fun when everything wasn’t saturated in sewage water. The insulation was nasty though…I did not go near that stuff. It was black. It was fun to smash in the walls and tear everything apart though. It brought back a lot of memories.
The only other really eventful, out of the ordinary thing I remember from this week is that on Sunday I got to interview a family of 4 for baptism. Baptismal interviews are always fun to do. You get to hear first hand about all these people’s conversions. All of them are amazing too. Everyone had to overcome some pretty significant things whether it be family issues, friends, word of wisdom issues, or whatever else. Its probably one of my favorite parts in the mission.
I bought myself a little Christmas present yesterday. I’ve started to try to do exercises in the morning again and I decided that I’m just going to do pushups in the morning. I want to do 100 push ups every morning. I honestly didn’t think I would be able to do more than 15 pushups without stopping right now, but I was and I did a couple sets of 20. I’ve been doing about 85 pushups in the morning. Anyway, sometimes it hurts my wrists to do pushups on the ground and some missionaries have these things called Perfect Pushups that they use and I’ve used them before and I liked them, so I decided to use some Christmas money to buy them. They are those things you see ads for on the TV that were designed by some navy seal or something and basically all it is, is that you spin your wrists 90 degrees as you do the pushup and it works more muscles and takes the stress off you tendons. We’ll see how those work. They are small so it will be easy to just throw in my suit case.
This is the last week of the transfer! So that means next week I will have transfer news. Now I will be veeery surprised if I get transferred, but you never know. Everyone has been moving around a lot lately. My companion has been in this area for like 6 months, so he could go at any time. I am pretty sure I will go back to Spanish sometime, but my guess is that will be in 2 more transfers. Speaking of that, it has been really cool to see how my Spanish has not gotten worse at all. If anything it has gotten better. I see Spanish people throughout the week, so I always take the opportunity to go talk to them. It doesn’t feel like I’m rusty at all. Plus I’ve been handing out about an average of 1-2 referrals to the Spanish Elders every week, so that makes them happy. And today I am on exchanges in one of the Spanish areas, so that is fun. And all the interviews I do are in Spanish. I’ve done about 6-7 interviews this transfer, so that is always fun.
We are still searching for people to teach in our area. We have been hitting our goal of each talking to at least 10 people every day and we finally found a person or 2 who actually might be interested. We have return appointments this week, so we’ll see how it goes.
Well, as always it was awesome to hear the updates from home. And yes I am back to full health. And I bought some hand sanitizer, so I need to start using that stuff again. It always seems like there is something going around in every house we go into. And Bub, you should start that Driver’s Ed. You should just do it online like I did. I would just put on some music and read through that stuff on the weekends and I got done with it pretty fast.
Ok have a good week!! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
I’ll start off with the whole driver’s license thing. I’m glad you remembered because I totally forgot about all that stuff. If I do get something in the mail, maybe it would just be easier if one of you signed my name on the paper for me and sent it in. I don’t know how that would work or if it would work, but I thought I’d throw it out there.
I only have a couple things written down for this week. Its been mostly the same stuff going on. But I do have a couple things. The first one is about the show Extreme Home Makeover…I think that’s what its called. I know you know what it is. Well they are doing one of those houses here in Kemah, which is right by League City. I guess there is some family here and they take in all these foster kids. They’ve had like 20 something kids go through their home and they’ve adopted a lot of them…like 8 or 9. Several of them have disabilities too. Their house got destroyed last year by the hurricane and they haven’t had any money to fix it, so they have been living in FEMA trailers. So Extreme Home Makeover came in and built a massive house for them. It is the biggest house they’ve built on the show. Its something like 8 bedrooms and they have an elevator in the middle of the house so the kids with disabilities can go up and down. We stopped by to see the house. There were toooons and tons of volunteers there. I’d say probably 80% of them were standing around and they’d pick something up every once in a while and give it to one of the few contract workers who knew what they were doing. They really did work on it 24 hours a day though. I think that episode goes on the air in March or something.
You will never guess what I did for some service this week. We mucked out a house! I never thought that over a year after the hurricane I would muck out another house. Apparently some lady finally got cleared by her insurance to muck everything out, so I guess she knew a member and the member sent us to go help her. It was a lot more fun when everything wasn’t saturated in sewage water. The insulation was nasty though…I did not go near that stuff. It was black. It was fun to smash in the walls and tear everything apart though. It brought back a lot of memories.
The only other really eventful, out of the ordinary thing I remember from this week is that on Sunday I got to interview a family of 4 for baptism. Baptismal interviews are always fun to do. You get to hear first hand about all these people’s conversions. All of them are amazing too. Everyone had to overcome some pretty significant things whether it be family issues, friends, word of wisdom issues, or whatever else. Its probably one of my favorite parts in the mission.
I bought myself a little Christmas present yesterday. I’ve started to try to do exercises in the morning again and I decided that I’m just going to do pushups in the morning. I want to do 100 push ups every morning. I honestly didn’t think I would be able to do more than 15 pushups without stopping right now, but I was and I did a couple sets of 20. I’ve been doing about 85 pushups in the morning. Anyway, sometimes it hurts my wrists to do pushups on the ground and some missionaries have these things called Perfect Pushups that they use and I’ve used them before and I liked them, so I decided to use some Christmas money to buy them. They are those things you see ads for on the TV that were designed by some navy seal or something and basically all it is, is that you spin your wrists 90 degrees as you do the pushup and it works more muscles and takes the stress off you tendons. We’ll see how those work. They are small so it will be easy to just throw in my suit case.
This is the last week of the transfer! So that means next week I will have transfer news. Now I will be veeery surprised if I get transferred, but you never know. Everyone has been moving around a lot lately. My companion has been in this area for like 6 months, so he could go at any time. I am pretty sure I will go back to Spanish sometime, but my guess is that will be in 2 more transfers. Speaking of that, it has been really cool to see how my Spanish has not gotten worse at all. If anything it has gotten better. I see Spanish people throughout the week, so I always take the opportunity to go talk to them. It doesn’t feel like I’m rusty at all. Plus I’ve been handing out about an average of 1-2 referrals to the Spanish Elders every week, so that makes them happy. And today I am on exchanges in one of the Spanish areas, so that is fun. And all the interviews I do are in Spanish. I’ve done about 6-7 interviews this transfer, so that is always fun.
We are still searching for people to teach in our area. We have been hitting our goal of each talking to at least 10 people every day and we finally found a person or 2 who actually might be interested. We have return appointments this week, so we’ll see how it goes.
Well, as always it was awesome to hear the updates from home. And yes I am back to full health. And I bought some hand sanitizer, so I need to start using that stuff again. It always seems like there is something going around in every house we go into. And Bub, you should start that Driver’s Ed. You should just do it online like I did. I would just put on some music and read through that stuff on the weekends and I got done with it pretty fast.
Ok have a good week!! I love you all!
Love,
Chase
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