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