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