Dear Family,
Wow...I got a lot of e-mails today...that was nice. Yes I got the cookies and the package and I did open them. I was surprised at how good the box-o-plenty was! I haven't had anything at all in my mind that I wanted, but all the little things in the box-o-plenty were great. The new socks and pens were great. Unfortunately I am not allowed to wear any of the socks Mom sent me at Christmas time. That was one of the many rules that has been clarified within the past few months. Our socks have to be dark, and conservative, meaning they have to be a solid color. That just means I'll have plenty of socks for when I get home.
As always, it has been a pretty crazy week. Our mission is now moving over to a monthly schedule, rather than a transfer schedule. In other words were doing everything by months now instead of 6-week periods. We have monthly zone conferences and zone meetings and zone leader councils. So this week we had zone conference again, so we were in Sugar Land all day Wednesday, then Thursday we went back to Sugar Land all day for zone leader council, then Saturday and Sunday we of course had general conference. So that is pretty much 4 days taken out of our week, but we still had to hit all our goals and have a good week. It was a good one though. When you are doing absolutely everything you can, but you just don't have enough time, God provides you with miracles. I've learned to pretty much expect it, and we saw that happen this week. A lot of things came together and worked out. It still amazes me how our area has grown so much in the past couple transfers. We are never wondering what we should do next, because we always have so many people to see. We have 4 people with baptismal dates right now, but we home to get 3 more this next week.
I cant believe we are already in week 5 of the transfer! In 2 weeks we'll get transfer calls and I'll find out where I'll be for the last 2 transfers of my mission. Its either going to be here, or in a Spanish area somewhere in the mission. In the mission, when you have been out for 20 months or so, the mission office sends you out these papers that have been deemed the "trunky papers." Dad and Christopher and Steven I'm sure are all familiar with the term trunky. Anyway, these trunky papers are basically a letter from President Saylin encouraging you to work your hardest for this last part of your mission, and there is also a paper you have to turn in asking for your plans on transportation home. My release date is July 13. I just checked return home on the airplane like normal. It was a weird feeling to get the infamous trunky papers.
One goal that Elder Mulitalo and I have made this transfer is to focus on helping several of the areas in our zone that are weak and having problems seeing any success. What we've been doing is that we will wake up and go buy donuts (my idea of course), then show up at their apartment without notice at 8:00 when their studies should be starting. Now normally this might scare or offend or make some missionaries not like you, but that is the purpose of the donuts, so it all works out. Plus we tell them we are going around to everyone to study with them and get their input on things we could do better in the zone. Basically we make a real smooth visit so they don't realize whats happening. Sometimes it is a nerve-wracking because if you do things the wrong way you're just going to make the missionaries not like you. Luckily they have all been very successful and everyone has seen it as an act of love and us trying to help and get their input as well. I still think the key is the donuts.
But as a result of having to drive all the way to sugar land for zone conference and ZLC, then making some of these visits to missionaries in the morning, we have had some early mornings. The worst was on Thursday when the seminary teacher asked us to teach her class. We had to wake up at 5:00am. Not fun. I think for the first time in my mission today I was excited to be able to wake up at 6:30, because it feels like sleeping in compared to our other days this week.
Here's and interesting piece of information. You may not have noticed during conference that one of the new area authorities they announced was S. Gifford Nielson, which is the BYU quarterback Gifford Nielson, who is also the stake president in the Houston South Stake here in our mission. When they announced his name my companion and I looked at each other wondering if we heard that right. We did. He retired from being a sports caster a couple months ago and people were wondering why he decided to retire so young. Now we know! The rest of conference was of course awesome. General Conference for missionaries is like the same thing for a kid that is about to go to Disney Land. It is a very exciting time. I think my 3 favorite speakers are President Uchtdorf, Elder Bednar, and Elder Holland. They are always awesome.
Well that's about all for this week. We'll probably go play some tennis today and throw a football around. I need to go out and do something physical before I go crazy. We'll see. Alright, thank you everyone for the e-mails and enjoy your spring break. I love you all!
Love,
Chase
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