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.