Received, Mon March 1, 2010

Dear Family,

We did hear about the Chilean tsunami & earthquake. We get kept pretty up to date living with members. I thought the Griffin trying to find Vinny's house story was hilarious. I probably go and knock on the wrong door about once a week on my mission. People will give us fake addresses all the time. This last Wednesday that happened when I was on an exchange with a member and he thought it was funny how when I found out we had gotten a bad address I just started talking to them about what we do and got ourselves a return appointment. It doesn't really phase much anymore. Missionary life is so weird...we go around knocking on random doors just talking to every random person throughout the day.

We have had a pretty crazy week, as usual. I'll tell you about Thursday first, which was our Zone Conference day when Elder Zwick came. We woke up at like 5:30am, got ready, drove to Sugar Land and made it there by about 8:00am. President Saylin went over the program with me before hand to make sure I had everything down (since I had to conduct it), but he basically told me that this meeting was Elder Zwick's and he could change anything at any time, so I just had to ask him what he wanted me to do and follow his lead. I was pretty nervous. Elder Zwick asked to sit right next to me so that he could give me instructions as we went through the meeting. Well it all turned out alright of course. When I started I had only been standing up there for about 10 seconds before I got up and wanted to add something. When I saw him stand up I was like, ohh great what did I mess up on already. He just wanted to point out how his son-in-law, named John Eyring, is President Eyring's son. So I guess I wasn't expected to know to announce that. As we went through the whole meeting he changed a lot of things around, but I just did what he said, so it all went well.

He started out by talking about Christlike Attributes, like Chapter 6 in PMG, and he asked people to stand up and say a good attribute about Sister Saylin, then he went and did it for President Saylin too. They each got like 15-20 different attributes fired off pretty quickly. It made them cry. That was nice for them...they really devote every second to missionary work.
Then he had 4 different companionships come up in front of everyone and teach a principle out of PMG. That had to be nerve wracking for them. They all did good though. Anyway, then we had lunch, then we had our meeting for another couple of hours. Throughout the meeting Elder Zwick would lean over and whisper random quotes about whatever the speaker who was up there was talking about. He would say like "President Packer always says...." or "Elder Bednar once said...." It was pretty funny. Lots of people asked me what he was always whispering to me about.

So to fast forward, after the meeting everyone left, except for all the zone leaders and we set up for dinner. The dinner was delicious. We had some fat steaks, sausage, some good salad, and a bunch of other side dish. The rolls were delicious too. Then after that he gave us another little lesson and invited to stay and sing at a meeting where he invited all the ward councils from the 7 stakes in our mission. That was another good meeting...he got everyone pumped up to do missionary work. Singing was actually a really good experience too. We stood up at the front and sang the first verse of Called to Serve, then the congregation stood and joined us for the second verse. You can imagine how loud that was to have a stake center filled with people to join you for the second verse. I thought it was cool how symbolic it was. How we started the song by ourselves and it sounded pretty good, but then the hundreds of members in the room joined in on the second verse and it blew everything out of the water. And that is the whole purpose of member missionary work. It is much more effective to work with the members rather than just trying to do everything yourself.

That meeting was also cool because when I walked into the room I saw all 7 stake presidents up on the stand and I realized that I have worked with 5 of those 7 stake presidents and as I looked around the room I realized how many of those people I have met before. I probably knew about 100 people in there. It was fun to see them all again. By the time the meeting ended and we finally got home, it was about 10:00pm. What a looong day. But it was a full, good one.
The Zwick's both told some pretty cool stories. One of the ones I loved hearing about was how they were invited to go to a temple dedication with President Hinckley. They had to wake up reeeally early in the morning and they met up with President Hinckley and everyone at the jet they were taking to the temple dedication. Everyone was exhausted of course, as when the plane took off everyone put their heads back to try to get some sleep before their long day. Well, as soon as the plane leveled off in the air and the seatbelt sign turned off, President Hinckley threw his seat belt off, stood up, and said, "Well, its time to do some exercise!" And he pulled out one of those elastic band things and walked up and down the plane using that thing to stretch and to work out. I thought that was hilarious...I could totally see him doing that. Then after doing 4 sessions of the temple dedication, they were all exhausted again and were getting ready to head back, but President Hinckley told them they could go back to the plane and wait for him, but he was going to go shake some hands with the people outside of the temple. Well 4 hours and 2000 hands later, President Hinckley had shaken hands with all the people out there and then he was finally ready to leave. Pretty amazing. It was Sister Zwick telling this story (shes a good speaker by the way), then she said, "So every time you feel too cold, too hot, or too tired, just think of President Hinckley."

It was a long day, but a very good day too. I also went on exchanges with Galveston earlier in the week. I always love going back there. This time though, a cold front came in and it was FREEZING cold, and of course I didn't expect that so I didn't bring anything that warm. I had a little rain coat to keep my dry, but that's about it. It was pretty cold and we were on bikes. It was raining half the day too. Despite all that we were still able to talk to a lot of good people. We got to eat dinner with one of the members who I use to always eat dinner with when I was on Galveston. While I was there I kept thinking about how one day I would love to go back there and go visit all the less active, investigators and anyone I worked with and try to get them all to come to church with me. That would be fun.

One of the quotes that the Zwick's used a couple times that I liked a lot was something along the lines of, "Don't limit yourself by what you believe your capacities are, allow the Lord to expand your capacities to what he knows they can be. And he will." We saw that happen this week. After not being able to go out on Thursday and having a slower week to start out with, we did not think we were going to reach the 20 lesson a week goal, nor our talk to 10 person a day average. Somehow we made it happen. That was a miracle.

I can't believe we are in week 6 already! We will find out about transfers next Monday. There is a pretty good chance Elder McFadyen is getting moved because there are 2 new Chinese speaking missionaries coming in and Elder McFadyen will need to train one of them. There are other Chinese speaking missionaries, but theyre having some problems, so Elder McFadyen is pretty much the only other choice. We'll see what happens.

I have still be able to talk to Spanish people about once every day or so, so I am happy about that. I just have to pray for the gift of tongues every day so that even though I'm in an English area I can still keep improving my Spanish. It has been pretty good.

Ok, well that's about all this week. Have a safe ride home Mom and Dad! I love you all!

Love,
Chase