Received Mon March 22, 2010

Dear Family,

Everyone has told me all week about the 4.4 earthquake is Los Angeles. I guessed that only half our family would half even felt it...it sounds like I was right. The earthquakes usually just create a massage effect which makes you relax even more and fall into a deeper sleep.
The Mormonism 101 meeting thing sounds like it is a pretty good idea. We had our Investigator fireside again yesterday, where people who have recently been baptized bear their testimonies, but this time it turned out to be a disaster. Luckily we weren't the ones in charge of it though. Right at 7 when the meeting was supposed to start, we got a phone call that at the last minute none of the speakers were able to come. What a disaster...I'm glad I didn't have to deal with that one.

It has been spring break around here so a lot of our investigators and people have been out of town. One of our investigators, Keith Greear, the one who has almost died a million times and has a messed up back, actually tore his ACL. What a sad story...so he is down trying to recover from that. So basically we only taught lessons to 2-3 different investigators this week. Then we had to make up the rest to hit our 20 lessons per week by visiting less active and active members. We did hit our goal. This was the first time in a long time that my companion has hit the 20 sit down lesson goal. He came from a pretty rough area. So that was good. But even better, those 2 investigators came to church. One of them is a part member family and their 8 year old daughter actually just got baptized last night. It was a really good baptismal service and after the meeting Chrissy, the mom who is not a member said, "I want that...I am next." She is struggling to get over smoking. It also had a big effect on her husband who is less active and smokes as well. It seems like he might actually have a desire to support his wife trying to prepare for baptism and he might want to come to church on his own free will. I hope so.

Our other investigator is named Jason. He is 27 years old (I may have talked to you about him before) and he questions everything, which I love. His main problem with religion has been how it all seems fake and even when he does live the commandments he feels like he's gotten nothing out of it. He's got the whole nice guys finish last mentality. He has had some really good experience and some little miracles that were answers to his prayers and he finally decided to come to church and he had a great experience. Our ward mission leader is amazing. When we sat down with Jason, our ward mission leader sent everyone over to meet him and to say hi. I haven't talked very much about our ward mission leader but he is probably the best ward mission leader I've ever seen. He actually served his mission here in this mission like 8 years ago and he even served here in the League City ward. Jason is deciding if he should get baptized too.

We also had another lesson with a part member family that moved in where the husband is 100% unmotivated to come back to church right now, but he wants his wife to start going to church so that when he's "ready" to come back, they can come together. We made some good progress with them and it seems like they might actually make some good progress.

Then we ran into another lady a week or 2 ago who has 7 kids and she's had a past with learning from the missionaries and she has a lot of Mormon friends. Hopefully that one works out too. But that's what we've got goin on right now. There is a lot of potential, but we need to turn it into real success.

Last week I forgot to write about our P-day. We got to do a VIP tour of NASA. A member here works at NASA and he took us and the 4 Spanish missionaries here on a VIP tour. He had to submit our names and go through some security clearance or something, but we got these purple tags we had to wear to show that we had access to all the areas in NASA. The tram tour that I took before, we could see everything through glass, but in this tour we actually went down on the floor around where all the astronauts get trained. It was pretty awesome. I took about a million useless pictures, but that just made it more fun. I got some good pictures in the mission control room too where they successfully directed the first flight to the moon. It was all pretty interesting.

And lastly, I got the valentines day package! When I opened the thing full of chocolates they were all completely smashed and smeared around. I thought it was kind of funny. Then I started to eat them and they were all delicious. I think I got every morsel out of that thing. Thank you for the package.

I also got a letter from Bumpa for the 2nd time in 2 weeks...that was nice.

Alright well that's about it for this week. This Friday we get to go to the temple, so we are pretty excited about that. Ok, I love you all!! Have a good week!

Love,
Chase