Elder Chase Cole

Recieved Tue July 6, 2010

2010-07-06T14:02:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

This is kind of a weird e-mailing session knowing it will be my last and by next week I'll by flying on an airplane at this time on my way home. I of course have mixed feelings...it is weird to stop doing what you've been doing for 2 years, but I am of course excited to be back home. I bet by the time I am on my way home my mixed feelings will all just be happy feelings. We are going to have a good week this week still though.

No, we did not sing any patriotic songs in sacrament meeting. I thought it was weird. We did have a combined activity with the English ward yesterday to celebrate the fourth of July. Since it was on Monday, our P-day, we actually got to go. We had a pancake breakfast, then we played soccer for like 2-3 hours on a nearby field. It was awesome. It was a good P-day. I did get a little bit of a sunburn. I've got myself a pretty good collar tan on my neck, and since I was wearing a t-shirt, all that white skin was exposed to the sun and it got scorched. Its not that bad though. It is pretty funny to see like a 3 inch line around my neck of sunburn and nowhere else. It was a good P-day. It was my last one too. Next P-day I'll just be going to the mission home and we'll have an interview, testimony meeting and a dinner. Then the next day I'm not sure whats happening other than going to the airport. I got my flight plans in the mail...I think I'm arriving in the afternoon sometime? I'm not sure...I'm assuming you got a copy of that too. If not, just call the mission office to get all that information because I didn't think to bring it.

This weekend the Mendez family will be getting baptized. I am pretty excited about that. The best thing about them is that they've had a full social conversion as well as a spiritual conversion. They go to all the activities, Jesus, the father, has volunteered to go help out with service when they needed it. We did an FHE with another family nearby. They will be a new strong family to help out the ward.

Sunday was a good day in church. We had several different less actives who are in the process of reactivating come and bring their kids. There were a lot of good testimonies, including one other family who just got baptized last week. They all got up, even the 6 year old, to bear their testimonies. It was awesome. They are a good example to the Mendez family. One family who is reactivating also came and had their baby get blessed. They are from the Dominican Republic and they are definitely one of my favorite families in the ward. He is a chauffeur. He has a really nice Lincoln that he drives around and picks up rich people and drives them around the city. Anyway, their parents just moved in with them and they are really active. The dad who just moved in blessed the baby and I got to stand in the circle with the bishop and him. It was a good experience. It was a good Sunday.

Good things are happening, good things will keep happening and that's pretty much the story of this area. I really hope something clicks in my companion's head and he can start remembering where stuff is, because he's got to take over the area next week. That will be one of our focuses this week.

It sounds like everyone at home is doing well. Thank you Mom for the full update. Happy anniversary Mom and Dad! That day is my 24 month mark and I will be going to the temple here in Houston one last time on that day. That is a good way to celebrate it. I love you all and I will see you next week!!!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon, June 28, 2010

2010-06-29T12:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

I am going to start this week by answering all of Mom's questions to make sure I don't forget any. I realized last week after we left that I forgot to say what I was planning to do with my bike. My bike is pretty thrashed and I think I am just going to leave it here. It costs like over $100 to take it home, so I don't think its worth it especially because I have my own bike at home still.

The rain: We had a HUGE thunderstorm come through here this week. You probably remember from my e-mails that the thunderstorms here are pretty crazy. The thunder is so strong it sets off car alarms all over the place. Well one of those storms rolled through here on Wednesday last week and we were trying our best to stay dry, but after a while we got so soaked that we just stopped caring and pretended like it was perfect weather. We walked through this one complex that was completely flooded, and we walked through water that was up to our knees. We also walked up and down the streets trying to talk to people who were standing outside of stores too afraid to go to their cars. It was a good way to start a conversation. Hopefully people didn't think that we were just crazy.

The temperature: It has also been really hot all week. Its been in the upper 90s, including the days that it rains. We are always wet from either the rain or sweat, or both.

Watch Tan: Its almost gone now because for some reason I started to get that itchy rash thing that metal sometimes causes for me, so I took my watch off for 5-6 days. Now its pretty hard to see. I definitely still have a pretty hardcore collar tan on my neck and a farmers tan and a white legs tan/lack-of-tan.

I think those are all the questions! On to my week. Things are still going really well. The Mendez's are still planning on getting baptized on July 10th and were still hoping to get at least one more person on that weekend. There are a couple potential people...we'll see what happens.

I've heard all about the world cup too. That's the reason why so few people showed up to church. And that's the reason why so many people decided to drink the night away on Sunday night.

This week we've been running into tons of people from Colombia. Most of the people in our area are from Guatemala...I think I've written about the part of our area we call Guatville which is just packed full of thousands and thousands of Guatemalans. But whenever we're out of guatville we run into people from everywhere. This week we've found like 6 new Colombian investigators. I love teaching people from South America, because since its so far away, only some people make it all the way up here, and generally they are a lot easier to work with. My companion is pretty funny. Whenever he talks to people he always tries to copy their accents, but we talk to people from all over the place so hes constantly talking in random different accents, but hes barely starting to learn Spanish so he has a pretty thick gringo accent, then when he tries to mimic other accents it turns out to be some pretty creative Spanish. It is pretty funny.

It has been a weird past couple of weeks knowing that these are my last weeks here. I usually don't think about it very much. I think my companion thinks about what I'm going to do after the mission more than I do. It definitely makes things pretty stressful knowing that this big change is going to happen soon and its constantly coming closer and closer and closer. I am of course excited, but hopefully I'll have some really good last couple weeks here.

That is all I can think of to write about. Last P-day we had an awesome P-day. We played volleyball and soccer against the English district, which was awesome. I scored a double hat trick when we played soccer, so I obviously enjoyed that a lot too. I like played pretty much every sport, except for basketball. It was a good P-day. Next Monday we are going to go to an activity with our ward, combined with the English ward, where we will have a 5th of July breakfast, then play baseball and soccer. I am excited for that one.

It sounds like everyone is doing really well. I love you all and hope you have a great week!!!

Love,
Chase

Recieved Monday, June 21, 2010

2010-06-21T15:15:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

My first story for this week will start with what is going on right now. There is a crazy guy sitting a couple computers away and every couple of minutes he turns around and says something that makes no sense like "I'm a level 3 italian, the michael angelo theory is the only true theory. So what about them JEhova witnesses?" He is absolutely crazy. It is some good entertainment as I write my e-mail.

Its been another good week as normal. Our people are progressing, the Mendez family is still progressing well to their baptismal date of July 10th. We've got 2-3 other really good people as well. Oh and a guy who hasn't been to church for 12 years showed up last fast Sunday and got up and bore his testimony and said he's ready to come back and be an active member again. We only visited him once or twice, and I guess that little push was all that he needed to help him make that step to come back. That was good to see.

I'm looking through my planner to see if anything else particularly newsworthy happened this week. There is one lesson that sticks out in my mind. We got out of the car one day in this parking lot and I started talking to this guy, and this emo kid with his hood up and his hair across his face walked past as he was listening to his ipod. When I finished talked to the guy I turned around to see if the emo kid was too far away to talk to, and he turned around and just stared at me, so I went up and started talking to him. When I talked to him he just stared at me in silence for a good 15 seconds, then he began to make deliver a speech to me on a bunch of 100% random topics. But the funniest part was that he was trying to talk all biblical. After his random speech I asked him if he would be open to having missionaries come over and share a message. He said he could listen right then, so we sat down on the curb and said a prayer and started teaching him. He was like 18 years old and he had dropped out of high school and he was basically just wandering around in life. I think he was trying to be a philosopher or something and that's why he talks strange and constantly tries to say profound things. It was a pretty funny lesson, I wish I could remember some of his sayings he said. Unfortunately it didn't really go anywhere, so we just ended it and left. Hopefully we left a good impression on him and he listens to missionaries when he gets past this emo philosophical phase.

Training has been going good. I've definitely been learning a lot. It takes a LOT of patience. Its definitely built up a lot of stress too. My companion is very excited, which is good, but were still working on the importance of planning, instead of just wandering around the streets aimlessly. I'm also still trying to convince my companion that it IS necessary to wash your hands after you go to the bathroom. I think its gross, but apparently its just an urban myth.

That is a funny story about Zak fainting after giving blood. I don't think I've ever fainted before. One time playing miniature golf I started seeing spots and I almost passed out, but I sat down and drank water. Then there was the time I was going to get lung surgery the first time and they put the IV in and it squirted blood all over me, I almost passed out that time too. Definitely not a good feeling. That is good it all went well though.

Well, I cant really think about anything else to write about for this week. Things are still going good. Its been reeeeally hot recently. We drink tons of water every day. I am glad things are going well at home. I love you all and hope you have a great week!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon June 14, 2010

2010-06-14T20:51:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

It has been a great week this week. One of the few things I remember President Saylin told us in our trainer's meeting is that the new missionaries always have really high expectations and dreams. He said that we can help them learn little by little to be realistic, but don't crush their dreams. I know I've mentioned before that we have a goal in the mission for each missionary to talk to 70 people a week (10 a day). Well Elder Bunch said that he heard a quote by Elder L Tom Perry and he said that if we double the number of people we talk to, we double our baptisms. He said he thought we should shoot for 140 people a week. So I said ok. We talked to people every second we had open, and we miraculously hit our goal. Ive never heard of anyone getting anywhere close to 140 OYMs. We found a lot of new people to teach and we taught a lot of lessons.

Here is the highlight of the week. We have been teaching this family, called the Mendez family. I've probably talked about them before. The husband was baptized in Mexico 8 years ago, but his wife wasn't. We randomly OYM'd them in their driveway last transfer, and at first Jesus, the husband, was almost upset to see us, but we got him to let us come back, and we've been teaching him, his wife, and his 2 kids. On Sunday our lesson was on baptism and I talked to them about how the mom and the 3 kids could all get baptized together. It just so happened that there was another family getting baptized that night, so we invited them to that. They had a really good experience at church, then at the baptismal service, and we extended baptismal dates to them and they accepted! Their youngest son is 7, but he turns 8 on July 5th, so the Saturday after that, the 10th, they will all get baptized together. They are very excited about it and so am I.

Training has been a good experience. There are a lot of different challenges that I didn't expect. I've started to see how much missionaries learn from being on a mission for 2 years. My companion is just starting that process. I not only need to teach him good missionary skills, but also good social skills, etc. Like, don't leave your shopping cart blocking the entire aisle. Or, you need to wash your hands with soap, not just water after you go to the bathroom. Or, don't just rinse off our dishes in water, use soap to clean them (we don't have a dishwasher). And the list goes on. It has been a good experience though. I'm glad hes still excited.

Here's my next story. We talking to random people in the street one day as we waited for a member to show up to an appointment we had with investigators and this lady leaned out of her car and yelled something to us, so we came over to talk to her. She said her family was going through some really tough times and shes been praying to God to help her, and she recognized us as servants of God who could help her. Well, it turns out her son killed somebody a few days ago. We don't know all the details because obviously its a sensitive situation and we didn't want to pry, but apparently he was in his apartment and this other guy was in there and was threatening him, so he went into his room and came out with a gun and shot the guy. The son is completely falling apart right now. He's caught up in a lot of other things too. You could just see how apparent it is that sin never leads to happiness and how Satan really does just try to drag people down and he will if you let him. So he is a big work in progress. The mom is awesome though. They are from Colombia. They are really wealthy too. They live right in downtown Houston in the Galleria (huge famous shopping center) area. They actually live across the street from the Williams tower, which I'm like 90% sure that's the tower CJ was talking about that is the tallest tower in Houston. They live right across from that thing in these high rise apartments in the penthouse/top floor. We taught the Mom 1 time, she read in the book of Mormon, prayed, got an answer, and accepted a baptismal date. We are really excited about her. She is pretty stressed out about her son though.

I have heard alll about the World Cup. A lot of people here take work off for a lot of the World Cup so they can watch every game. Its pretty much their life right now. So I've heard most of the results of the games. Keep me updated anyway though.

I am glad that everyone is getting involved in active things this summer. There is a young family here where the dad loooves to play video games whenever he can. They have a 6 year old daughter and I asked them what they were going to do with her during summer to keep her occupied, thinking along the lines of swimming lessons, sports, etc. The dad goes, "Well I'm not sure yet, I cant decide. I'm trying to decide between getting her the Wii or the Nintendo DS." He didn't even think for a second about anything outside of video games! I thought it was pretty funny, but sad at the same time.

Today we are going to have a zone activity. We are going to go to a big park and play sports and eat ice cream. It should be fun. Last week we played basketball at the church, and I ran around a lot. It still definitely feels like my left lung is a lot weaker than my right lung. My right lung feels 100% normal, but my left lung still gets irritated when I run a lot or breathe hard. I guess the doctors down in California just did a better job than those ones in Utah. I'm not sure, but at least I can still run around an have fun.

Here's my last gross story for you. One night this week I was sleeping good and in my sleep I went to scratch my neck, and when I went to scratch it, I grabbed a big bug that was crawling across me. I threw it as hard as I could at the wall across the room and hopefully killed it. I'm not sure what it was, but it felt like a cockroach. There are tons of cockroaches around here. Thankfully when I wake up I'm always really drowsy and I fall back to sleep easy. For the next couple minutes I slapped at everything that felt like a bug, but eventually I fell back to sleep.

Last news update: Sadly the chickens didn't hatch! (Remember Lars bought an incubator and 4 chicken eggs). They were supposed to hatch on Saturday, but they didn't. Lars is going to buy some new ones. It takes usually takes 21 days for them to hatch, so hopefully I get to see them. He is also planning on eventually buying some rabbits and he's going to start raising those too. He would get a cow, but its illegal in Houston and cows are too hard to hide.

Alright, well that's about all for this week. Happy Fathers Day on Sunday Dad!! I love you all and hope you have a good week!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon June 7, 2010

2010-06-07T15:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

It sounds like you had quite the Sunday yesterday. Believe it or not, I actually got sick this week too and it was pretty bad, and it was bad timing. On Wednesday morning (our transfer day) I woke up and it felt like someone was wringing out my intestines, then I started to get nauseated and I think I threw up 7 times by the end of the day. I still managed to get to transfer meeting though. I just brought a bag with me in the car, which I used. Then I went into our trainers meeting where President Saylin trains all the trainers. I had to leave twice to throw up in that 40 min meeting. After a while I just went to go lay down on the couch. I'm not sure what I had, but it wasn't good. The next couple days I started feeling better, but my stomach still hurt and about 15 minutes after I ate I would always have to run to the bathroom (not to throw up). I feel pretty good today, but I'm not sure if its totally gone.

My new companion is Elder Bunch. He is from northern California. He is a very very very excited missionary. It is pretty funny. He is pretty much exactly what you imagine when you imagine a greenie. Except he has absolutely NO fear, unlike most new missionaries. He loves to belt out hymns as we walk down the street and his absolute favorite thing to do is to talk to people in the streets. He literally runs after people yelling "HERMANO HERMANO! TENEMOS UN MENSAJE PARA USTED!!" It is hilarious. One day in the morning we opened up the front door and it was raining pretty good, and Elder Bunch paused for a second, then he ran outside singing some song about rain drops or something. The best thing about him is that he speaks Spanish almost 100% of the time, so he is picking it up pretty fast. He knew 0 (zero) Spanish before the mission, so he doesn't have a whole lot of background, but he's learning quick because we talk to each other in Spanish pretty much all the time. He is going to be a great missionary.

Ok, time to answer Mom's random questions:

Yes I have heard of the P90X workout. That is what all the guys in the movie 300 used to get ripped. It sounds pretty intense.

People yell stuff at us every single day, usually several times. They are usually all pretty funny. People try to think of creative things to try to offend us, but it just turns out sounding ridiculous. We had someone this last week stick his head out the window and yell out "GET A JOB!" that's one I never heard before...I thought it was pretty funny. We get a lot of fan honks too though. The nice people usually don't yell at us, they'll just honk and wave, which I think is the best. Sometimes people will pull over and talk to us, but that just uses a bunch of time and we always end up being late to wherever were going.

We are allowed to teach pretty much anyone. Muslims are the only ones that I know of that are that extreme and I've taught a couple different Muslims in my mission. Basically the rule is to just be careful. I ate dinner at a members home before and they grew up in Iran, where most people are Muslims. Even though they've tried to keep it a secret that they joined the LDS church, they are sure someone found out and they are probably black listed. They said if they tried to go home to Iran, as soon as they got off the plane, some government CIA type guys would go take them to a car, and they would drive off in the car and they would never be heard from again. It is pretty crazy.

I have a couple last questions for you now. I was wondering what the possibilities of finding some place to give me a scholarship for school. I might have to look for myself when I get back, but I hear people all the time talking about how they go and apply to all sorts of different scholarships and sometimes they'll get accepted. That would be awesome. I wonder if CJ or ST know anything about that.

And yes, I did get my contacts and my memory card. Thank you very much.

One last questions for you. I don't know if its possible, or even worth it, but I was wondering if there would be an easy way to burn the EFY 2010 CD so I could enjoy that for the last couple weeks here. Like I said, I don't know if it would even be worth it, but if there is an easy way, I figure you might as well.

And last but not least, Happy Birthday Mom!! I always forget that I only e-mail once a week so I have to say all my happy birthdays the Monday before. I've got Mom's birthday written on my calendar and I knew it was coming up, and I hope you have a fabulous birthday Mom, and I hope you enjoy the P90X DVDs.

I love you all and hope you have a great week!!!

Love,
Chase

Received Tue June 1, 2010

2010-06-01T10:29:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

Here is the transfer news! Elder Johnson is getting transferred and I will be training a new missionary. I am sad to see Elder Johnson go, but I am also pretty excited to train. Elder Johnson and I will hang out after the mission since he only lives a couple minutes away and were going to the same college. All the transfer changes will happen tomorrow, so I'll let you know who I've got next week.

It is a weird feeling knowing that this is my very last transfer. I don't really think about it very much, and I probably wont until it actually happens. I tell all the members and everyone that I've been out around a year and a half. The last thing I want is to have people bothering me about that. I'm hoping to have a really good transfer this transfer though.

This week was pretty good. We hit all out sit-down lesson goals and our OYM goals again. Elder Johnson and I went an entire transfer without getting less than 20 sit downs and an average of 10 oyms a day. We were pretty excited about that. Hopefully we can do the same this next transfer.

We have got several people who are right on the verge of baptism right now. There is this one lady in particular named Rosy Vasquez who knows she needs to be baptized, her husband is a member and is supporting her, but she is afraid that she is going to fall after her baptism. We have 1 or 2 other people who have that same fear. We have had a lot of good lessons on replacing fear with faith and the Holy Ghost and other things like that. They are very close.

I got news from the missionaries in League City that one of the people I taught back there got baptized on Sunday. That was awesome news. It was Bri Wells. I'm sure I wrote about them before. They were the ones where the husband is a member, but less active and doesn't ever want to go to church. They came from Washington and over there the missionaries played video games and wasted time with them. We started off really slow with this family and it was a big accomplishment to just get inside, then we slowly started teaching, then we got her to commit to coming to church, now shes getting baptized. That was some awesome news.

I've tried to really think through my week and think of good things to write about and I thought up of a few funny stories.
Here's the first one. In our room our beds are up on stilts high up in the air, like the top bunk of a bunk bed. Our desks are underneath. I'm not quite sure why they have it set up like that, because all the hot air rises and it is always waaay too hot at night, but that's how it is. The beds are around 5 1/2 feet up in their air...they are pretty high. There is a ladder at the end of the beds we can use to climb up, but I always just put my chair by the end of the bed, then just jump up. In the morning I slowly slide off the bed onto the chair below. Well one morning I was really tired and the alarm went off and I woke up, but I started falling back to sleep right away. Well I caught myself and jumped up really quickly and started to roll over to get off the bed, but apparently I was a lot closer to the edge than I thought and I came tumbling down. There was a lot of stuff, like cabinets and other random stuff I could have landed up and smacked my head up, but I somehow landed sitting down in my chair. It was pretty crazy. The wooden armrests left a mark across my back, but that is probably the best way I could have landed. I was so tired I didn't really realize what happened and I started to laugh and said my morning prayer and carried on with my day.

Next story. Have you guys ever heard of the fruit called Papaya? Back in Richmond, that Haitian family made my companion and I a papaya smoothie and it was waaay good, and I've told other missionaries about it and every single missionary who has tried papaya before has told me that it is one of the most disgusting foods they've tried. I don't know what that family did to make that smoothie good, but nobody else seems to have tasted a good papaya. Well on Sundays here we eat with the same member every Sunday and he always makes way good food because he worked in a restaurant. Last Sunday he had a papaya sitting there on the table and I made the mistake of asking what fruit that was, then he told us it was a papaya and he went on to cut it up so we could try some. I was pretty worried because of what all the other missionaries said. Plus this was after Elder Johnson and I stuffed our faces, so we were full. He brought us both out plates full of papaya. I sniffed it first because I was a little apprehensive and it smelled aaaawful. It smelled like something rotten. Luckily he had put a bunch of sugar on it, so I got a piece and loaded it up with as much sugar as I could and took a bite and it tasted just as bad as it smelled. And there was no hiding it. My companion laughed as he watched me eat it, and he asked me how it was. I told him it was not good, but he had to try it anyway and he had the same reaction. I thought it might have been a rotten one, but they were all eating it and they all said it was good. I guess our gringo taste buds are not use to that kind of stuff. We have a good relationship with the member, so he wasn't offended or anything and he just thought it was funny, but that was honestly probably one of the grossest things I've eaten before.

Weather: It has been pretty hot here. Its been in the 90s all week and it also rained a little bit a few times this week, which means it was really humid too. Everyone always gives us bottles of water, so we stay hydrated...its not too bad. A lot of Hispanics here start up little businesses in their apartments where they'll sell drinks, chips, snacks, phone cards, etc. A couple members have these little businesses, so they'll give us Gatorades whenever they see us. There are also these guys with cards that walk around all day selling paletas, and ice cream and stuff, so elder Johnson and I keep a few dollars in our backpacks to buy some when its hot.

Alright well that's about all I can think of for this week. Happy birthday to Heather! Have a good week!! I love you all!!

Love,
Chase

People at bus stops: We talk to crazy people all day long every day. You meet allll sorts of people wandering up and down westheimer. Some of them are literally crazy.

Received Mon, May 24, 2010

2010-05-24T10:55:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

BYU Living arrangements: To be honest, I don't know anything about any places to live at BYU. Wherever CJ and ST think will be good, I'm good with because I don't know anything about any place.

Congrats to CJ on getting the new job. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

My week here has been a pretty good, normal week. We still have a whole bunch of people to teach, but were trying to help them make that next step of coming to church, so they can really progress. Everyone is always so busy, or something comes up last minute that prevents them from coming to church. I am glad that we do have a pretty good sized teaching pool now though. We are still having a lot of success with less active families. So many people stop coming to church because they got offended by someone or something. We always talk about the reasons why we go to church, which is basically to renew covenants with God which are necessary for salvation. And by letting themselves be offended they are missing out on blessings which makes life harder, and they will not be able to have salvation. It usually works pretty well...it gets people thinking. We got 2 new families to come this week and they were really excited to be there. Once people come back, they always feel good and always want to come back the next week.

We found a new guy to teach this week who has a lot of potential. His name is Victor Raul...hes from Peru. The missionaries used to teach this guy all the time and he came to church several times, but he started to get really busy with work, so he slowly lost contact with the missionaries. Well, now he has some sort of health condition...thyroids or something, and he has to sit at home and just rest and recuperate for a couple months. So now he has all the time in the world to listen to us and come to church. Unfortunately he didn't come this Sunday because he was out playing soccer, so we'll have to talk about that, but were pretty excited to be teaching him again.

I don't really know what to write about this week! Here is one story I can think of. There is this family in our ward who just got sealed in the temple. They are the familia Madora...they are awesome. When I met them the first time they both said they were from Mexico. We've visited them several times since then, and I've always noticed that hermano Madora has an accent, and he looks just like an Argentino. Well, this last week we were visiting him, and he had all these different Argentinian foods and then I saw a mate cup in his kitchen. So I asked him why he likes Argentinian stuff so much and he told me that its because hes Argentinian. I was like whatt?? That's what I thought the whole time, but you told me you were from Mexico. I don't know why, but he said he just tells people he's from Mexico because his wife really is from Mexico. I told him how Christopher and Dad served their missions there, and he told us allll about Argentina. He gave us some alfajores and they were goood. He said its the best brand you can find...it was the Havana brand. He is an awesome guy.

Well...that's all I can think of for this week. By the way...I sent a memory card with pictures home a week or two ago, did you ever get that? Hopefully it didn't get lost in the mail.

Next week I'll have transfer news! Elder Johnson is probably getting transferred, but we'll see.

Ok I love you all!! Have a good week!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon, May 17, 2010

2010-05-17T11:41:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

Happy Birthday on Wednesday Kylie!!! It sounds like you're going to have a pretty good party. I love ice cream cake. And molten lava cakes. I hope you have a good party.

The weeks have definitely been flying by here too. We are already about to start week 5 of the transfer. We've had a lot of good things happen this week though. We taught the Mendez family again, which is the family I wrote about last week where the husband was pretty mad at first to see us again. This time the wife was awake so we got him to go invite her. He said she would never come and listen, but we told him to go try any way, and he did and she came and joined us. We taught him, his wife, and his brother. It was a pretty good lesson. We left them with Books of Mormon and gave them part of King Benjamin's speech to read. We're going back tomorrow.

We found a lot of other new people to teach this week too. I think we got 6 new investigators. We have been trying something where instead of just trying to set up return appointments, we ask people if we can teach them right then. Surprisingly a couple people of week say yes and that is how we've been finding a lot of new people. Here are two cool stories. The first one is that last Monday at the end of our P-day, we were riding our bikes down Westheimer, which is the big, very busy, main street that runs through our area, and I saw this Hispanic guy riding his bike across the street with some groceries. I started talking to him, then I asked him if he lived in the apartments that were down the street a little bit, he said yes. So I asked him if we could come back to him apartment with him and share an important message with him. He surprisingly said yes. My companion couldn't hear much of what was going on because of all the traffic and everything and when he saw me get off my bike, he was like, what are we doing? I told him we were going back to this guy's apartment to teach him, so we did. His two roommates were drunk, so he didn't want us to go in, so we taught him on some benches in the courtyard of the apartment complex. It was a really good lesson, and my companion extended his first Spanish baptismal date, and he accepted. It was pretty awesome.

The second story is that we were riding our bikes down Westheimer again and we stopped to talk to a couple of people at the bus stop. As soon as I started to talk to this guy I saw the bus coming down the road, so I gave him a card and told him we have a really important message we need to share with him, and to call the number so missionaries can come by and share it to him. He asked if I could just tell it to him there. I told him its not a message you can just share in a couple of seconds, and that his bus was there and we didn't want him to miss his bus. He said..."Nah its cool man, I can just catch another bus. I want to hear your message." So we sat down on the grass on the corner of this busy road and taught this guy. He was really really open to it and we extended a baptismal date to him too. We gave him as a referral to this English Elders, so they are teaching him now. It was a pretty cool experience.

So those were some of our good experience of the week. On a funnier note, we talk to Lars (the guy we live with) most nights when we get home and as you can imagine, he is a pretty interesting guy. Being single at the age of 40, you have a lot of free time on your hands. He is waaay into studying about the end of the world and dissecting the book of Revelation in the Bible. He is pretty sure he's got in all figured out. The second coming will be in 2037, and all the big signs you read about in Revelation will start coming to pass after the year 2017. He is really serious about this stuff, so he has been preparing with food storage and all sorts of crazy things. Some of the things hes got are 500 lbs of wheat, 50 lbs of baking soda, he is building a massive water storage holder (like thousands of gallons), he's building an electromagnetic generator to produce electricity, and his newest project which I just learned about this week is that he wants to start raising chickens. The only problem is that it is against some city code to have chickens, so he is going to do it upstairs in his attic. He bought 3 fertilized chicken eggs, which should be arriving any time, and he's got this chicken egg incubator, which probably came off the internet too. When he was describing this whole thing, I kept thinking of that scene in Napoleon Dynamite where they try to buy a time machine off the internet and they've got these crystals and everything. I told him that's what it reminded me of and he just laughed. We'll see what happens with that. It is all good entertainment, that is for sure.

That is exciting that Zak is getting his Eagle project done. Has he gotten all the merit badges he needs? I remember I had to go to camp trask to finish off a couple. Does that old man who lives up the street still do all the eagle scout interviews? That would blow my mind if that guy is still alive. He used to always ask the same questions. It was about like...hypoxia?/altitude sickness, hypothermia, and something else.

Today for our morning exercise, Elder Johnson and I decided to run to McDonalds which is around the corner and eat some breakfast. It was good. Running is not that easy when you haven't run for 2 years though. It wasn't too bad though...I think the bikes have helped out with that.

Before I forget, I've got one last thing. I've got only 2 pairs of contacts left, so if I keep both of them in for a month each, I will barely make it, but I'll be pushing it. Is there any way I can get 1 more pair sent to me? I'm pretty sure my prescription is for -1.75 in both eyes, which is probably going to need to be readjusted when I get back. I've got the nigh & day brand.

Ok, I think that's about all for this week. I love you all and hope you have a good week!!!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon May 10, 2010

2010-05-10T11:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

Well I think were all pretty much up to date from our conversation last night. The only thing I can think of to report on is yesterday at church, we had an awesome Sunday. We finally had a lot of people come. Only one of them was an investigator, but we got 4 other good sized less active families to finally come back to church. We counted up 14 people who we invited who finally came. That really makes a huge difference in a small ward like the one we have. It made for a good Sunday. I think it got the bishop and everyone else excited too. Most of them left after the first hour, but it was still a huge step to see them in sacrament meeting. Hopefully we'll see them keep coming.

Our area is doing a lot better now too. We have found some pretty good people this week that were going to be able to go back and teach this week. The best part about it is that they live in houses as opposed to apartment complexes where literally every single other Hispanic person we've met live. So hopefully they are a little bit more stable and wont disappear one day and maybe they'll even have cars to be able to get themselves to church. One of those families is actually a part member family. We talked to the wife in the driveway 5-6 days ago and she told us how her husband actually got baptized in Mexico. We were all excited and went back one day to meet him and we were met by a man (her husband) who was not very happy and said nobody in that home has faith in God. We asked him some questions and got him thinking about everything and a lot about how he felt when he was getting taught by the missionaries and by the end of the conversation he liked us and he let us make a return appointment for the next day. So we taught him yesterday and it went pretty well. The mom was asleep though, so next time were going to try to teach them all.

Ok, about housing at BYU. I think the best choice is probably going to be to have Christopher and Steven just choose a place for me to live and I can always change it sometime later if I feel like it. How does it all work? Do you have to sign a lease for a certain amount of time or what? If I got signed up for a place this month, but found a different place to live when I got back, would I be able to change it? If not, would I be able to change it at the end of the semester? I really have no plans at all right now, so either way the best thing to do is probably to have CJ and ST find a place for me to live and sign me up for classes.

That's too bad Christopher has got such a bad sunburn. I've never felt the aloe vera thing before. I think I have put it on though..I don't remember very well what happened. I haven't gotten a sunburn for a looong long time. Lets just say I have a pretty bad farmer's tan. And a watch tan. And a collar tan on my neck. I am going to try not to get the bike helmet strap tan lines.

Ok that is all I can think of for this week. We are starting week 4 of the transfer...it is flying by fast. I love you all and hope you have a fantastic week!

Love,
Chase

PS. Its true that the obedience stuff has helped a lot, but I was talking about the # of baptismal DATES we have not baptisms. Right now we are baptizing around 40 a month which is still about double what we use to be doing.

Received Mon May 3, 2010

2010-05-10T11:06:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

Dad's two comments about me in high school are pretty accurate. I went to sleep at around 9 or 9:30 my freshman and sophomore year, then my last 2 years I would usually go to bed around 10 or 10:30. And for at least my first two years in high school Dad would read to me at night. That's how I heard like 5 of the Harry Potter books.

BYU Stuff: I think it would be good if Steven could register me for some classes. I can always try to change it afterwards, but I think it would be smart to try to get some good classes early on. I'm probably going to need to take Statistics and some computer class to finish my prerequisites for the business school. I've thought it might be fun to take a soccer class too. Either that or a racquetball class.

Mother's Day Call: We found a member who will let us use their phone. We are planning at calling around 7:30 our time, so that's 5:30 your time I'm pretty sure. Hopefully that will work out.

This has been another good week in Houston 1. This is probably the hardest Elder Johnson and I have both worked in our missions. President Saylin got back from a meeting in Arizona where they met with some other general authorities, and one of the things they talked about was how in South America there are no cars, but in the US there are tons of cars and missionaries miss out on a lot of opportunities to talk to people. They gave promises to the mission presidents there that if the missionaries would park the cars and use bikes and rely on members to help them, we will always have people to teach. So he extended a challenge to all of us, that if we want we can accept, to park our cars for the month and not use them at all. So we've been doing it this week. It has been a HOT and reeeally humid week too. We rode our bikes to church and everything. Were definitely starting to run into some complications with dinner appointments all the way on the other side of the area from where we have all our other appointments throughout that day. And our area is huuge, so it is a challenge. We'll see what happens. I don't think I've ever sweat so much in my life. But we have found a lot of people to teach.

Here is a cool story. When we were riding home from church yesterday, we were talking to people along the way. I pulled over on my bike to talk to these two Hispanic guys walking down the rode and as I turned to talk to them, I realized I recognized one of them. It was Victor Hernandez, an awesome guy from Nicaragua that I taught while I was in Houston 2. He came to church several times, he was living all the commandments, and he had a baptismal date, then he disappeared because they all got evicted from their apartment. He had just gotten jumped too so he didn't have any phone. He was really happy to see us again yesterday. He said he's recently been thinking a lot about us and he wanted us to start coming by again, but every time he saw the missionaries they were always far away, so he was never able to flag them down. That would be cool if he was living in our area, but hes not. He's still back in Houston 2. So I passed on the referral to them. It made my day though.

We also saw another crazy thing happen. We were getting a ride home from our last appointment last night and as we were driving down one of the main streets in our area, these 2 cars zoomed passed us. One was an older Cadillac and the other one was a new Lincoln. They kept cutting each other off and they kept slamming on the brakes trying and they were trying to run each other off the road. They would actually bump into each other too...it was crazy. At one point the Lincoln actually pushed the Cadillac off the road onto the center median thing. Then when they passed through this intersection the Lincoln managed to pin the Cadillac between the median and his car, then they both jumped out of the car. We thought we were about to see someone get shot. Luckily neither of them had guns, and the one Cadillac guy jumped back into his car and back out into the intersection, into oncoming traffic and flew down the road. It was pretty crazy. I think it was probably just a bad case of road rage.

Everything has been going well. Elder Johnson and I are good friends. Spanish is going really well too. It has been awesome being back in a full Spanish area.

Oh yeah...Blue Bell Ice Cream. That's like the pride and joy of Texas. Its probably one of the first things I heard about when I got here. Its a brand of ice cream that I think they only sell in Texas. They have alll sorts of different flavors. It is all pretty good, but in my opinion (I would probably be hanged if I said this out loud here), I think its a little overrated and definitely over priced. Its like $5.75 - $6.50 for a gallon. It is pretty good though.

Ok well that's about all for this week! Have fun on your cruise Mom and Dad! Have a good week everyone...I love you!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon April 26, 2010

2010-04-29T10:46:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

It sounds like you all had an eventful week! I have as well. I got transferred!!! It is all really good news. If I could have picked for myself what I wanted to have happen and who I wanted to be with, this is what I would have picked. I am now in an area called Houston 1 (named after the ward we cover). It is in downtown Houston. And by downtown Houston, I mean it is really downtown, where a lot of the skyscrapers and stuff are. One of the best parts about it is that this place is chalk FULL of Hispanics. So yes, I am now back to Spanish. In our area we have the Pulga (it means flea is Spanish), which is the Hispanic flea market. Every weekend thousands of Hispanics go there to sell random stuff or just to shop and look around. So the place is crawling with people on the weekends.

My companion is Elder Johnson. He's been out for about 8-9 months now. He was in Galveston when I got to League City, so I met him there. We only really talked a few times there whenever we had meetings, but we already became friends. He is actually from La Canada. We are both in the Arcadia, CA mission, and that is actually where I did my missionary for a day thing. He is tall like most of my companions...he's about 6'5. We are pretty excited to serve together though.

Oh, and now I am serving as a district leader, which I am excited about to. It still the same amount of work as I would be doing as a zone leader, but now its all focused in a smaller area. I have a really good district too. There are 3 companionships and all of them are pretty strong. We got a call from the assistants this week and they said that President Saylin just got back from a training meeting in Arizona with a couple general authorities and he said that one of the idea that got brought up is what they are doing in the Arcadia mission with the whole inviting investigators to be taught in the church thing. He gave our district the special assignment to do that and test it out and see how it works. How it works is after we teach them the first time, we'll invite them to be taught the second lesson at the chapel. There we will show them the baptismal font and the chapel and talk about how our Sunday meetings go and say everything that will happen, so they wont be afraid to come. A lot of people are afraid to come because it is all so new, hopefully this will help with that. We've already got 2 return appointments set up in the church for this next week.

We live with a single guy named Lars. He's probably in his late 30s and he's never been married. He is exactly how you would imagine a single guy to be. He's got random unfinished projects all over the house, random stuff drawn on the walls, he eats cookie dough and cereal for dinner, etc. He is a pretty funny guy. He is in the Army Reserve.

Mother's Day phone call: So, I am hoping we can use Lars' phone, but all he has is a cell phone and I'm not sure if we has free minutes. We will have to call around and see if we can use a member's phone around here and I'll let you know next week. I'm guessing we'll call at night around 7:30 or 8, so you should be home.

Our area is in the condition pretty much every area is when I get there. We are in the re-building stage. They had several baptisms last transfer, but those were pretty much the only people they were working with, now we don't really have anyone! That's ok, there are tons of people around, so it shouldn't be too hard. I will be good. Hopefully I'll have good things to report back about next week.

Ok, that is about all for this week! I got Dad's letter this week finally, so I can write back now. I will do that right now. I'm sure I will have some good stories for next week. Congrats to Steven Heather and Christopher. I love you all!!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon April 19, 2010

2010-04-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

Here is the big transfer news!! We get a fax on Monday morning with all the transfer news, so yes I do have it. I am getting transferred!! This means I am probably going back to a Spanish area for my last 2 transfers and I probably will just be a normal missionary or maybe a district leader. You never know what will happen, but that is the most likely. I am really excited about it though. I will find out where I'm going on Wednesday at our transfer meeting.

Dodgeball last week was awesome. All 26 missionaries in our zone came and everyone loved it. We played dodgeball for 2-3 hours. We played a several different versions of dodgeball. We started off by playing pivot tag, which is a game we played earlier on in my mission. It is basically free for all dodgeball. There are 3-4 balls and when you pick one up, you have to plant one foot and you cant move until you throw it. If someone hits you, you have to sit down and you have to stay down until the person who hit you gets out. So it keeps on going until one person has gotten everyone out. It was really fun but reeally tiring when there were so many people. The next day I was the sorest I have ever been in my life. It was pretty funny. When we were driving down the road that next day we saw an old man taking out his trash, so we pulled over to help him, and when we were struggling to get out of the car because of our soreness, I could only imagine what the old man thought. He was probably more capable of taking out the trash than we were. It was pretty funny. Every missionary I talked to said they were sore...I'm glad it wasn't just me. I am definitely pretty out of shape right now though. Zak is a brave man. I dint think I would race against Mom right now because I would probably lose and that would be embarrassing to get beat by my mom. Maybe I'll get transferred to a bike area. But yeah, it was a pretty awesome p-day.

That is exciting that Christopher is interviewing with Google. In my mind I have always seen Christopher working there. I bet it will go well. I remember years ago Christopher was telling me about the work place for google and how their office is and how well they treat the employees there. Plus its in California, so what more could you ask for.

This week has gone pretty well. We've found some more people to teach, which is always really good for this area. We also got 3 people to church. One of them is a mom of 7 children. Her husband is a doctor and a lawyer and hes constantly traveling around the world doing surgeries and crazy stuff like that. It goes without saying, but they are loaded. I originally talked to her in the Wal-mart parking lot when she was sitting in her car eating a hamburger. I didn't know it at the time, but when I talked about it at church, one of the members said they they are good family friends with them. This lady has had a lot of exposure to the church. Her husband too works with a lot of Mormons. It is pretty exciting.
There are so many people here in this area right now that have testimonies of the church and some that even want to get baptized, but they just have one or two obstacles in their path they are trying to overcome. If things fall into place, there could be a lot of baptisms in the near future.

I don't remember if I've talked to you about the Muslim family from Bangladesh we are teaching. Their last name is Rahman. The father's name is Anisuir, and the two kids are Yahmin and Molmehr. We've been teaching them for about a month. They now believe in Jesus Christ as the Savior and they want to get baptized. They absolutely love us and they love it when we come over and teach. It is fun. Most of their family will probably disown them when they join the church, but they said they will follow God no matter what the sacrifice. They are awesome.

We have also done really well working with the members this week. What we've started to do is after a dinner appointment or for whatever visit it may be, we ask if we can come back in the next week to share another short message. Of course they accept. Then we tell them we have a challenge for them and we challenge them to pray about and invite someone to come to our appointment with them. So the commitment is just to make an invitation, it doesn't matter if they accept or not. This morning we had a lady call us and tell us about how she went out and started talking to her neighbor and she told her all about the book of mormon and now she wants a copy. She was pretty excited...she is usually a pretty shy lady. Good things are happening. Our ward mission leader and our bishop are also going to be speaking at our stake conference this weekend and talk about how we have the Ward Mission Process running so well, which is something Elder L Tom Perry introduced where the Ward council is supposed to invite people to be taught by the missionaries in order to help them reach 20 sit downs each week. It is going really well in our ward. We have an awesome ward.

It is weird to think I am starting my second to last transfer. After you have a pretty big chunk of time in the mission behind you, you just kind of stop thinking about it and the months and transfers just fly by. It seems like every time you get use to a ward and an area, you get transferred. That is half of the reason why I knew I was going to get transferred. I am pretty excited for this Wednesday to see where I am going to end up.

Congratulations to Christopher, Steven, and Heather on graduating. That is awesome that it hasn't been too hard for them to find jobs. Hopefully by the time I finish school the economy will be back up and the job market will be good. I'm not even sure what I'm going to end up going into. We'll see.

Ok well that's about all for this week. I am going to be getting mail on Wednesday and transfer meeting, so hopefully Dad's letter will be in there. I probably could have just printed it out and read it that way...that would have been really easy. Have a good week, I love you all!! I will let you know next week where I end up!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon April 12, 2010

2010-04-13T16:35:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

Mom's letter was full of questions this week, so I'll start off by answering some of those questions. Yes I did get my Spanish Bible, which I was very excited about. I also did eat all the cookies and they did come whole and they were all delicious.

The Family's name who we live with is Seeley. We do laundry every P-day in their house. I do wash my sheets about every 3-4 weeks. I got cake and ice cream for my birthday and they got me cookie dough ice cream, which was a good choice. I actually got all that stuff on Sunday, the day before my birthday because they were going to be at work all day on Monday. The funny thing is that the Saylin's called on Sunday also to sing happy birthday. Somewhere in the mission information my birthday got put in as April 4th and I got that corrected at the beginning of my mission, but I guess the Saylin's got old information and thought my birthday was the 4th, so they called me and sang to me that day. I couldn't make myself tell them it was the wrong day, but it did give my companion and I a good laugh. It was nice of the Saylin's to do.
And Steven was right on...I always do put reese's peanut butter cups in my ice cream. That just made me crave some home made ice cream with reese peanut butter cups. That is good stuff.
That is also good to hear that everyone is reading with their free time. That is a good hobby to have and it is actually productive. I would definitely recommend Ender's Game as well. It is a really good book.

As far as my week, it has been good. We taught 21 lessons, and got our 10 OYM a day average, and we found several new people to teach. We extended 2 baptismal invitations. One of those people we extended a baptismal invitation to is named Morris Doolittle. This was our second time teaching him. He is an awesome guy. He is a rocket scientist for NASA and he is one of the top engineers in the nation, but he's very humble. It is nice to teach someone who can pick up and understand so quickly the things were teaching. I love teaching really educated people for the reason, because the gospel makes sense logically, then you can pray about it to confirm your answer, but it is so much easier when you can understand it all. His date is for May 8th.

Our teaching pool is pretty big right now, but we need to help some of these people take that step and progress to baptism. We have a couple different people that are really close, but it seems like whenever they are almost there (like a week or 2 away), something happens in their life and we lose contact with them for a while. Who knows, if everything falls into place at once we could have a bunch of baptisms all the sudden.

Next week we get the transfer call and I find out where I'm going to be (probably) for the rest of my mission. It is a weird feeling. I'm happy to go wherever. I could really end up pretty much anywhere. It is exciting.

I just sat here for a couple minutes and that's all I can think of to write about! In an e-mail to Steven a few weeks ago I asked him for some ideas of what to do on P-days, and of course one of the things he suggested was dodgeball. So, today we are having a zone activity and everyone is coming here to League City to play some dodgeball. It will be fun. The rest of the week is going to be really busy. We are going to go on like 3 exchanges and we have to do our Investigator Fireside this Sunday too. Being busy is definitely a good sign.

Oh, yeah and I still haven't gotten Dad's letter. We get mail out here in League City only once every couple of weeks, but we are going to get mail this week...tomorrow I think, so hopefully I'll get it tomorrow. Then I can read it and respond to it.

Ok, well I hope everyone has a good week! I love you all!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon April 5, 2010 (Chase's Birthday!!)

2010-04-13T16:34:00.000-07:00

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

Received Mon March 29, 2010

2010-04-13T16:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

Wow...what an unlucky week. Luckily that is all over and its in the past. Sometimes missionaries go through a rough week or 2, then after that it seems like all they ever see are the bad things that happen every day. There is a missionary in our zone who is like that. Luckily I am one of the veeery few leaders he actually likes. And that is mostly because we served in the same district while I was in Richmond. Its pretty amazing to see how much of an effect attitude can have on someones mission.

Thankfully, we had a pretty good week this week. The best part was probably that we got to go to the temple on Friday. Usually we have a zone conference directly after we get out of the temple, but this time we just drove up to the temple, which is about 1 hr 20 min away, then we drove back to our areas and we will have a zone conference this week. It seems like our temple trips always come just in time. They are always so relieving and calming.

We also had our interviews with the president this week. I asked him if he thought I would get moved down to be a normal missionary for my last 2 transfers. Actually he's the one who brought it up first and he said he's still not sure whats going to happen. He asked me if I have had any impressions about what is supposed to happen. I said, "I don't think I've had any impressions, but I do have a desire as to what I would like to do." He just laughed and said, "I know what your desire is, I was asking if you've had any impressions." President definitely knows that I would love to go back Spanish for my last 2 transfers, but as always he's going to just pray about it and see where the Lord wants me to be. Wherever I go, I'll be happy. I did tell him that I am making sure my companion will be ready to take over the area and I am doing effective Spanish studies every day so that I'll be ready to go if it does happen. We just ended week 3, so in 3 more weeks we'll find out where I'll be for the last 2 transfers of my mission.

I have definitely enjoyed my time so far in League City though. This area has totally transformed. We have a big teaching pool, the ward is doing awesome and doing missionary work, and we've got several people who have pretty high potentials to be baptized. Plus like I said a few weeks ago, our zone had one of the best transfers President Saylin has seen since he got into the mission. Last transfer in interviews the possibility of me going back to Spanish for my last 2 transfers came up of course and he said to "make League City a fortress and we'll see what happens." Of course there is still a lot of work left to do, but I think I can safely say that this a pretty solid area now.

Here is my little story of the week. There is a family named the Thomason family that the missionaries have been working with foreeeever. They haven't been to church in like 7 or 8 years...I think I may have mentioned something about them before. Well as I was studying one morning, I was reading that talk by President Uchtdorf, called The Love of God. I thought that that would be the perfect talk for Brother Thomason. Brother Thomason is the key to getting this whole family, so I had been thinking a lot about what we could do to get him back on track. This was an answer. I also felt like we needed to get this talk on a CD and actually watch it with them because it would be a lot more powerful coming from President Uchtdorf than just having us paraphrase the talk. Sister Thomason said the other day that she has never seen a talk taylored so perfectly for someone as the Love of God talk was for her husband. But anyway, a couple days after we watched that talk and had that lesson, we stopped by and Brother Thomason was waxing his car. We talked to him for a bit and we offered to help with anything as we always do, and he jokingly said to wax his 2 cars. So we walked back to our car, dropped off our scriptures, and came back to wax his cars. He was surprised and said he was just joking, but we told him we were serious and we wanted to help, plus we wanted to learn how to wax a car. So we did. I think that little act softened this man's heart. All this happened about 3 weeks ago. Ever since then he has been to church each week. His non-member daughter has gone with him too. One of my favorite scriptures is the one in Alma 37 that talks about how by small and simple things are great things brought to pass. This is just another of the many examples. AND I got to learn how to wax a car, so that was fun.

Here is my one other comment. I don't know if I've ever said it specifically, but pretty much every single one of my companions has reminded me of some sort of cartoon character or someone like that. This last week I finally realized who my current companion is. I don't remember his name, but he is definitely the super smart ape guy from X-men. Hopefully you know who I'm talking about, but he is just like my companion. It dawned on my when my companion tried on my glasses that were sitting out on my desk. When I saw that I pictured a scene from the x-men movie when this ape guy was wearing glasses sitting at a desk doing some sort of business thing...I don't really remember. But anyway, my companion is huge like that guy, but also really smart. He reads a lot of books, uses 100% proper English, and the glasses just topped it off. But anyway, that's who Elder Mulitalo reminds me of.

Alright well I think that's about all for this week. We've got zone conference coming up this week, which should be good. Its amazing how fast these transfers fly by. Bumpa will definitely be in my prayers. Keep me updated on that. I love you all!! Have a good week!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon March 22, 2010

2010-04-13T16:30:00.000-07:00

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

Received Mon March 15, 2010

2010-03-15T11:26:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

I'll start with transfer news first. My new companion is Elder Mulitalo. He was born in Compton California, but grew up his whole life in West Valley Utah. He is Samoan. Hes been out about 14 months and he is a brand new Zone Leader, so I am training him on how to be a Zone Leader (not really very much involved with that). He is a good missionary...hes very humble. Hes like a gentle giant. He's about my height, about 6', but weighs 100 more pounds than I do. He's fluctuated from 250-295 lbs on his mission, but hes been on a bike the past year, so hes stayed down at 250. Polynesians are just built to be huge. He's probably going to go back and play BYU football where his brother is playing at right now. I am excited to work with him though...we have a goal to double our baptismal dates in the next two weeks.

We had all sorts of meetings and things to do this week. Tuesday we went into Houston to run the new missionaries. That was fun. They do a little training meeting about OYMing (Open Your Mouth aka talking to people in the streets) and how to do it and the missionary I was with basically said all that practicing was boring and that we should just go do it already. Haha...well we drove to a nearby apartment complex that was full of people and I think that it kind of scared him because he realized it was real now. I helped him a lot though. If he didnt know what they were saying (because we were doing it in Spanish) I would translate it for him and help him to say things. I think he felt good after the first couple ones. When he first got to the church for the training thing he asked me why we call it "running." I told him because when we go outside we run from person to person talking to them. So we did. We didnt run up to everyone because that would probably scare them, but there were times where nobody was around and we saw somebody all the way across the complex behind a fence or something and we ran over to them. It was fun.

So that was Tuesday. It took like an hour to drive there, and hour back and we had to do some other stuff while we were there, so we got back by like 4:30 or 5. Wednesday was transfer meeting, so we were at that for most of the day...until about 5. About half the missionaries in our zone changed and a lot of our best ones left, but we got replaced by a lot of really good missionaries. I'm pretty excited about it. One of them is Elder Schwarz, who was the assistant, but hes going to be a District Leader for his last 2 transfers and probably train.

I don't know if I mentioned it, but last transfer we had an amazing transfer in the zone...we baptized 21 people as a zone. President Saylin mentioned that this was the best transfer for a zone he has seen since he's been here. It was mostly because we had a zone full of amazing missionaries and we have another zone that is just as good, so hopefully we see another transfer just as good.

On Thursday we had our Zone Leader Council down in Sugar Land, and that always takes all day. So that is 3 days in a row that we were gone for most of the day. Friday we had District meeting, then Saturday we had to do our weekly planning session which usually takes 2-3 hours. On Sunday we had our Stake Correlation meeting, which meant that throughout our busy week we had to be filling out Stake Correlation reports for each of the 9 wards in our stake and each one takes like 35+ minutes to complete. What a week! On top of all that we had to make sure we got our 10 OYMs/day average and got our 20 sit down lessons for the week. We got our OYMs, but we ended up with 17 sit down lessons which is pretty good considering the crazy week. It had to have been a pretty crazy time for my companion to get into the area and have all this dumped on him. We got all the biggest stuff out of the way early in the transfer though, so the rest of the transfer will be good. We do have our Zone Meeting this Friday though as well as our Investigator Fireside on Sunday, which we are also in charge of. If there is one thing I have learned on my mission, it is diligence. You always think the work is going to slow down and youll be able to relax, but it never really does. You just get use to it.

Here is my one story of the week. This week a Cambodian family in the ward invited us over for dinner. We showed up to their apartment and all the lights were off and they proceeded to tell us their electricity got cut and it would be off the next several days. So they had some candles lit and we ate with them in the dark in their apartment. What generous people...they obviously dont have very much, but they are still willing to invite us over and feed us despite the difficult circumstances. The funny part of the story is that I am still not sure what we ate. It was some sort of Cambodian soup, but because it was dark I couldnt see very well what was inside. There was some carrots and I think potatoes, but then there was some slimy stuff floating around and some other weird textured meat. I just tried not to think about what it could be. Luckily it didnt taste too bad, but it was pretty different. The other cool part was that they invited a couple of their friends from Cambodia over, so we taught them a lesson after the dinner. They didnt speak much English, so the members translated for us. They were awesome...they had no fear in bearing their testimonies and telling them what they believed. It was a good visit.

Ok, that's all for my report for the week, so here are my responses to the e-mail.
Mom: I have had several dreams before of being at home, but I'm almost always in my normal clothes, but I am deathly afraid to see the TV or go around the computer or break any of the mission rules. There have been a lot of funny dreams.
That is pretty amazing running 11 miles. I dont think I have ran more than 50 yards at once for the past year and a half. It's gonna take me a while to get muscle back in my legs and be able to run again.

Beebachu: Congratulations on the home run! And have fun at Astro Camp. That was one of my favorite field trips that I ever went on in school.

Bub: I have never heard of that guy with the crazy last name. [I (me, the mother) wrote to Chase about this football player Ndamukong Suh]. You will have to keep me updated on what happens to good ol Michael Vick. I am surprised that he is still so good. If he does end up on the Rams, that will take the team from the stankest of the stank, to not quite as stank, so pray that it happens. <-- perfect time to use the chuckling asian smiley face. I just discovered these e-motion thing...this will make my letters so much more exciting. Tell me if you can see them.
**editor's note: the e-motion things showed up in my letter, but apparently, they do not live through a copy and paste onto a blog.

The G-Man: Wow that sounds like a lot of fun! Maybe we should just put Kitty Con Carne up in the attic until he eats all of the rats for us!

Ok thats about all for this week. Tell me how the dinner with the missionaries on Friday goes. I love you all!!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon, March 8, 2010

2010-03-08T21:28:00.000-08:00

Dear Family,

I cant believe another transfer has come and gone. They just seem to fly by. Here is the transfer news: Elder McFadyen is getting transferred and he is going back to the Chinese district to train a new Chinese missionary coming in. We were expecting this, but it is still sad to see him go. It is always fun to get a new companion though, so it will be good. This next transfer could be my last transfer as a zone leader, or maybe President will just keep me as a zone leader until the end of my mission, we'll see. I'm happy to do whatever is going to happen.

But anyway, I wrote down a couple things throughout the week to write about. The first one is about Anthony Castellanos, the 10 year old boy who got baptized. I mentioned how sometimes we'll help him with his homework and we've promised him that if he reads his Book of Mormon out loud then he will get better at reading. We'll this last week when we stopped by he told us that his teacher wanted our address or phone number or something because she wanted to send us a thank you card. She said that she has seen a big change in Anthony and he is doing so much better in school, with math and reading and just his behavior and when she asked how he has been doing so well, Anthony told her about us stopping by. That was cool to see. It has been fun to watch him learn and watch him realize he really can learn and have a desire to suck everything in.

The next thing is on a little bit of a lighter note. The other day when I was talking to the Galveston Elders, they let me know that they have carried on my tradition of naming all the hobos on the island. I thought that was hilarious...its been over a year since I left. They named one hobo the Riddler because he always tries to talk in rhymes, but the funny part about it is that all his rhymes are horrible. He usually just rhymes "to" and "do" or "them" and "then." It is pretty hilarious. Then there is Killer Bill. Killer Bill found out one of the Elder's names is Elder Moline, so now he thinks him and Elder Moline are best friends. (Apparently these two guys are always in the library so they always try to talk to them on Mondays when they e-mail). Killer Bill talks about how him and Moline go out and "steal kill and rob" and create riots and stuff. That's pretty much all he saays over and over. He is crazy. Good ol' Galveston...

We worked hard this week of course, but this was one of those weeks where it seemed like eeeverything kept on falling through. We didn't hit our 20 sit down lesson goal for the week..we got about 15, but we had 8-9 appointments fall through. We did of course hit our talk to 10 people a day goal though. We did all that we could, so I consider that a good week. We had this big long list of people that we got to commit to coming to church, and only 1 of them showed up. That was depressing, but we did all we could. We have another chance this week to help them come.

Since this Wednesday is Transfer Day, that means that all the new missionaries come in on Tuesday. We got a phone call this last week and the Assistants let Elder McFadyen and I know that we were going to get to drive into Houston to take the new missionaries "running." I put running in parenthesis because we don't literally go running with them. Right when they land, they drive them from the airport to a church building in Houston, where selected missionaries take them out to go contacting for an hour. Were going to be meeting back at my old church building in Houston 2 (the Spanish ward I served in). The missionary I'm taking running is going to be a Spanish Elder...it will be very fun.

This week we met a family from Bangladesh. They are Muslim. They let us come in and teach them because they want to know more about Christianity. They know hardly anything about Christianity. We have taught them twice so far. It has been a really fun experience...it is a challenge. I've never had to explain how Jesus Christ is our Savior, or how a man could possibly suffer for other peoples sins, or explain what the Holy Ghost or the Godhead is, let alone trying to explain the Plan of Salvation. We have focused so far on just teaching about Jesus Christ and God. We explained in the simplest terms possible what the purpose of baptism is and invited them all to be baptized on April 17and they all accepted. We have a looong way to go, but at least they're commited.

Other than that we've been teaching a lot of people we've found in the past few weeks and we've had some powerful lessons. We just have to get these people to church! I'll come next week once again with all the usual info on my new companion. I haven't called around to the other zone leaders to see who could be possibly coming here, so I haven't made my guesses yet, but I'll do that after I get done e-mailing. We are losing 3 of 5 of our district leaders in our zone and 1 zone leader, so were getting a lot of new people. Every companionship but 1 is changing. A lot of change has been the trend in the mission lately. Our zone did awesome this transfer though. We set a goal to have 13 baptisms in the zone this transfer and we hit 21. This is the highest I've ever seen in a long time. We broke almost all the records in the zone for pretty much about every number. It has been good...hopefully we can keep it going. And hopefully our own area will get up and running and be strong.

Ahh...I just saw the date and realized tomorrow is another month anniversary for me in the mission. I think I am at 20 now...that is a lot. It dosen't seem like anything to me though...this is just like normal life for me now. I feel like it will go on forever. I will probably have an anxiety attack or something when the day comes where I'll have to realize my time is about over. Until then...I'm not worrying about it!

Ok, well I hope you all have a great week. I love you all!!

Chase

Received, Mon March 1, 2010

2010-03-08T21:26:00.000-08:00

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

Received Mon Feb 22, 2010

2010-03-08T21:23:00.000-08:00

Dear Family,

We did have the baptism for Anthony this weekend! It was awesome. The sad part was that his family didn't show up. They always do that. All week they say they'll come to church or whatever and they claim they've taken work off, then they don't show up. They say they were sick every single morning. It is really sad. Despite the sad fact that his family was so unmotivated to come to their own child's baptism, it still turned out good. Anthony loved answering people's questions while they were giving talks and being involved in their object lessons. I think it makes him so happy to see that he is learning things and he is able to answer questions and participate. After the baptism everyone came up and hugged him and congratulated him. That was good to see. That is probably the most love he has felt for a long time.

The next day in Sacrament meeting Anthony asked me to be the one to confirm him, so of course I did. He was beaming all day since his baptism. I am happy for him. I'm happy for my companion too.

Unfortunately Keith Greear, the man who almost died a bunch of times and has the messed up back, didn't come to church. He's involved in some band that plays music for other churches and he had to do something for that. We had some really good lessons with him this week. We always go with a member named Brother Keichler. The missionaries used to live in the Keichlers home and they really miss them. Anyway, we always go over to the Keichler's home and practice our lesson and role play with Brother Keichler, then we go and do it and it always turns out good. One cool experience is that we decided we were going to review the restoration and try to help him have a better understanding of why this is the one true church and we were going to watch the restoration movie. Well Keith always studies stuff online throughout the week (hes a big computer guy) and when we showed up that day, he not only read the chapter that we left him, but he also went online and read the entire Joseph Smith History. He's probably the only investigator I've had ask me about Oliver Cowdery and about how the Aaronic and Melchizedek Priesthood were restored. We just need to get this man to church.

We have found a couple other people this last week too, which is really good. It is tooough to find people to teach here. But we have some pretty high potential people, so thats good.

I have heard about the Olympics this week...literally. Whenever we come home at night the Seeley's have the olympics on, so we can always hear it. They usually turn it off though or just turn it down so we can hear it while were upstairs. They are very considerate about all that. It has to be such a big hassle for them to go out of their way to do all this stuff. They are good people.

I got all the pictures in the mail this week!! That was probably one of the most exciting pieces of mail to open. I was pretty amazed looking at all the pictures and seeing how much our cousins have changed over the last year and a half. And how tall is Zak? He hasn't passed me up yet has he? Mom did a good photography job. Thank you for sending all those pictures, it was fun to look at.

This week Elder Zwick from the first quorum of the seventy is going to come tour our mission. We're going to have 2 zone conferences where half our mission will go to each. We go on Thursday. Everyone has been pretty excited about it. I got a phone call a few days ago from the assistants and they said that instead of having the assistants conduct the zone conferences this time around, the zone leaders are going to do it and that I am going to be the one in charge of conducting the one on Thursday. That's about enough to give me a heart attack. Not only am I going to have to conduct a meeting in front of half our mission, but I'll be standing 5 feet away from a general authority while I do it. I know there's not really any reason to be nervous because nothing bad could possibly happen, but I am still pretty nervous. I'll be happy when I get that over with. We also got some news that Elder Zwick wants to have a dinner with all of the zone leaders, so after zone conference on Thursday we're going to have a big dinner with Elder Zwick. This rich member in Sugar Land who is a steak fanatic is going to be in charge of the food. He gets his steaks cut specially for him and he gets them cut extra thick. He does these big dinners for all sorts of people. That will be exciting. I'm going to have to go fasting.

Ok well that's about all for this week. It has been a good week though. We've hit almost all our goals and our whole zone is doing really well. We've baptized 13 people in the zone so far this transfer, which is really high. We'll see how the transfer ends. I cant believe were starting week 5! Ok well have a good week everyone!! Have a good time in Hawaii Mom and Dad! I love you all!!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon Feb 15, 2010

2010-02-16T07:31:00.000-08:00

Dear Family,

It just never seems to slow down!! I've had some days in my mission that have been really really busy, but I've never had a period like this where every second of my time has been consumed for 3 weeks. I havent had any time to write in my journal or have a night time snack before bed. Being busy is always a good thing though. I've learned to just enjoy it, because if your life has to be consumed by work, this is the best kind of work to do it.

Anyway, last week on our P-day we were pretty excited for a day where we would finally be able to breathe for a few hours, then we get a phone call and a less active lady's daughter needs a blessing and she didnt know who else to call. Then a wrench was thrown into the mess because it was just the lady and her daughter at home and we cant enter the home unless another man is present. Anyway, it all worked out and we were able to bring somebody with us. Meanwhile our district went to the NASA space center again, since we have new people in our district who have never been. By the time we finished everything it was like 3 and we sped over to NASA and got there just in time to catch the last tram tour with our district. So we finally got to relax our minds for 3 hours until our P-day ended. It was pretty fun.

I'm not sure what we'll do today. I got my haircut, after this we'll go shop, and we'll probably just end up staying at home. I have a few letters to respond to that have been sitting on my desk for a few months. Tony and Jake both wrote me. They are both doing really well. Then a random girl from BYU decided to write me again. My mail flow has pretty much boiled down to an occasional letter from Tony or Jake, then every long once in a while a random person from BYU will write me. I was getting mail pretty frequently for a long time on my mission...so I havent done too bad. But, the letter with pictures and address labels will be grately appreciated. I am excited for that one.

This week we had the correlation meeting with our stake president and our mission president and a couple other stake leaders. That means we had to fill out reports for all the units in our stake (there are 9). That is what took up a lot of our time this week. I am happy that is all done and taken care of.

We went on exchanges this week with some missionaries in our zone...that went well. While I was there I got to do a baptismal interview for 2 hispanic people who got baptized this weekend. Our zone is doing pretty well so far. We have had 10 baptisms and 10 confirmations in this transfer so far (we just ended week 3). I am excited about that.

In other exciting news, were having a baptism this Saturday! Anthony, the 10 year old kid, is going to get baptized. I was really sad that his whole family didnt come to church with them this Sunday. Surprisingly one of the biggest obstacles that I have come across that is the hardest for people to overcome is pure laziness. This family really has desires to support their son and to come to church, but every Sunday morning they just feel tired and it is easier to stay in bed. It takes a 10 year old kid without any family support to be the strong one to get up and come to church. He is doing really well though. We got him to a family home evening last week with one of the kids family who he has made friends with at church. He loved it and begged us to let him go to another one of those. We also get him to cub scouts every Tuesday, then to church every Sunday. It is amazing how much cub scouts can do for a boy like this. Involving him in something like that and teaching him skills that his parents dont teach him, then giving him merit badges to show him he can accomplish things is just huge for him. I hope we can keep this fire he's got and help him stay a strong member. I am excited for this baptism though. For one, because I am happy to see Anthony make this huge choice in the right direction, and for 2, this will be my companion's first baptism. That was one of my hugest goals this transfer. A missionary as good as him who has been out as long as him needs to have a baptism, so I am excited to see that happen.

This next week should be a good one. We dont have any huge projects to get done or anything problems as of right now to work out. Hopefully it wont be as hectic as the past few weeks have been. You go through everything for a reason though. I've learned how to prioritize and how to work under pressure and how to stay calm and just work when you have a mountain of work ahead of you.

Ok, thats about all for this week. Happy Valentines day yesterday! I love you all!

Love,
Chase

Received, Mon Feb 8, 2010

2010-02-14T18:54:00.000-08:00

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

Received, Mon Feb 1, 2010

2010-02-07T21:00:00.000-08:00

Dear Family,

This has been one crazy week. I feel like I’ve been on the phone from Wednesday til today. We haven’t had a chance to do full morning studies since Wednesday either. So, here is the news. My new companion is Elder McFadyen. He is from Roseville, California. Hes been out for about 15 months and he is actually a Chinese speaking missionary. He became a zone leader a transfer or 2 ago. I think he is definitely going to be one of my favorite companions. There are some people that you just seem to click with and you're always on the same page about missionaries and there are other missionaries where you wonder where the heck they are coming from. Elder McFadyen fits into the first category and as much as I liked Elder Roberts, he definitely had his own idea about how missionary work should be done. Elder McFadyen and I will hopefully be able to correct a lot of things that have gone on here in the past and get this area up and running.

In the few days that we’ve been together we have already seen some pretty amazing things happen. One of the coolest things is that we found a new investigator and gave him a baptismal date. Here is the story:
So a week or 2 ago the Spanish Elders gave us a referral for a guy named Keith Greear. Elder Roberts and I set up an appointment, but when we got there he wasn’t there because apparently his grandson fell down and broke his arm. So on Friday last week Elder McFadyen and I decided to stop by and see if we could at least set up another appointment. Well when we stopped by he miraculously let us in. He walks around with 2 canes because he has some back problems from when he broke his back in 8 places from falling out of a massive tree. Then some time after that he got hit by a car while he was riding on his motorcycle and messed it up again. He was also standing by a tank of napalm that exploded when he was on a boat and somehow managed to survive. So anyway, he has a pretty crazy story. We told him he was probably being kept alive for a reason. He strongly agreed with that and started talking about how ever since he has been bedridden he has had a hunger to learn about God, so he has read “all the bibles, even the Book of the Mormon.” He got his hands on all sorts of crazy religion books. Well we taught him about the restoration and he actually understood everything really well and definitely felt the spirit and accepted a baptismal date. We taught him for a 2nd time yesterday and taught him about the Book of Mormon, or Book of the Mormon as he calls it, and he thought that was fascinating. He just so happened to be studying all about the American Indians before we got there. He was pretty excited to research about these Lamanite people.

We have also found an unusually large amount of people who have been receptive to us this week. On Sunday our whole district also fasted so that we could all find more people to teach. This has been a pretty tough area for a long time, so hopefully this will help.

On Thursday, after our transfer meeting on Wednesday, we had our big long meeting down in Sugar Land, but this time it was a mission wide leadership meeting rather than a meeting just for the Zone Leaders. All the zone leaders did have to get there an hour early and stay a few hours after though. I think we got out of our meeting at like 6 and finally got back to our area at 7:45, and we left at like 7 in the morning. For a big part of the meeting President talked a lot about obedience and how after we had a big push for obedience when he first got here, people started to get a little lax and that we need to make another push. So a LOT of little rules were clarified and he strongly encouraged us to follow them. I am definitely not a fan of a whole bunch of little rules for everything, but unfortunately there are a lot of people out there who don’t have common sense and they think that if there's no specific rule against a specific action, it is ok. I prefer to just be a missionary and do what a could missionary would do and use common sense to know what we should be doing, but like I said, unfortunately we cant do that. So we are fixing a lot of little things that haven’t been done correctly here in League City. Oh that reminds me of a story. So one of the rules is that we are not supposed to have dinner appointments on P-days because we are supposed to be out and proselyting when our P-day ends at 6:00pm. Well there is this one lady in our ward. She is a very good person and does a lot of good for people. So, she has told the missionaries that the only possible day that she can have the missionaries over for dinner is on Mondays. We had to go try to tactfully correct this problem, so we went up to her and told her about this “new rule” and told her we cant do that anymore, but we said that we would be willing to end our P-day an hour early and go over to eat at 5 instead of 6. She started to get all emotional and said that there was no way her husband could get home in time and all this other stuff. We told her we would be willing to do breakfast lunch or dinner any day of the week, or come over after church or any time they were open, but she said that it would never work, then she stormed down the end of the hallway crying, then stormed back past us and we told her that we would try to see if we could work something out, but she just screamed, “NO, I don’t want to be the cause of your disobedience.” And stormed out of the church. I was half expecting something like that to happen just because that is kind of how this lady is, but my companion was totally blown away. That was his welcome to League City moment.

We also had a really good lesson with a lady named Chrissy Ross. Her husband is a member and they have an 8 year old daughter who they want to have be baptized on March 14, when the husband’s mother will be in town so she can see the baptism. Chrissy wants to be baptized too. We haven’t been able to get in contact with her for a long time, so we haven’t taught her much at all, but we finally got in and brought a member with us and taught her the Word of Wisdom, because she smokes. Shes been smoking for like 24 years. It was a pretty powerful lesson though and she is determined to stop so she can get baptized.

Oh yeah, I spoke in sacrament meeting yesterday. I don’t mind speaking in sacrament meeting, especially on my mission, but this time the topic was not the greatest. The theme for the sacrament meeting was the standard works, so the 2nd counselor called me and asked me to speak on “which of the standard works do the missionaries use when they teach.” Well the answer is all of them. There's not a whole lot to talk about that. So I answered that question at the beginning of the talk and kind of took my own route and talked about other things that were more interesting. It went pretty good, but I only had like 20 minutes to prepare it because we have had absolutely no free time.

Well that’s about all for this week. We still have a big huge To Do list, so its going to be another busy week. Busy is good though. I hope you all have a good week and good luck at the doctor’s office today. I love you all!

Love,
Chase

Received, Mon Jan 25, 2010

2010-02-07T20:58:00.000-08:00

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.

Received Tue, Jan 19, 2010

2010-02-07T20:55:00.000-08:00

Dear Family,

I’ll start off with the whole driver’s license thing. I’m glad you remembered because I totally forgot about all that stuff. If I do get something in the mail, maybe it would just be easier if one of you signed my name on the paper for me and sent it in. I don’t know how that would work or if it would work, but I thought I’d throw it out there.

I only have a couple things written down for this week. Its been mostly the same stuff going on. But I do have a couple things. The first one is about the show Extreme Home Makeover…I think that’s what its called. I know you know what it is. Well they are doing one of those houses here in Kemah, which is right by League City. I guess there is some family here and they take in all these foster kids. They’ve had like 20 something kids go through their home and they’ve adopted a lot of them…like 8 or 9. Several of them have disabilities too. Their house got destroyed last year by the hurricane and they haven’t had any money to fix it, so they have been living in FEMA trailers. So Extreme Home Makeover came in and built a massive house for them. It is the biggest house they’ve built on the show. Its something like 8 bedrooms and they have an elevator in the middle of the house so the kids with disabilities can go up and down. We stopped by to see the house. There were toooons and tons of volunteers there. I’d say probably 80% of them were standing around and they’d pick something up every once in a while and give it to one of the few contract workers who knew what they were doing. They really did work on it 24 hours a day though. I think that episode goes on the air in March or something.

You will never guess what I did for some service this week. We mucked out a house! I never thought that over a year after the hurricane I would muck out another house. Apparently some lady finally got cleared by her insurance to muck everything out, so I guess she knew a member and the member sent us to go help her. It was a lot more fun when everything wasn’t saturated in sewage water. The insulation was nasty though…I did not go near that stuff. It was black. It was fun to smash in the walls and tear everything apart though. It brought back a lot of memories.

The only other really eventful, out of the ordinary thing I remember from this week is that on Sunday I got to interview a family of 4 for baptism. Baptismal interviews are always fun to do. You get to hear first hand about all these people’s conversions. All of them are amazing too. Everyone had to overcome some pretty significant things whether it be family issues, friends, word of wisdom issues, or whatever else. Its probably one of my favorite parts in the mission.

I bought myself a little Christmas present yesterday. I’ve started to try to do exercises in the morning again and I decided that I’m just going to do pushups in the morning. I want to do 100 push ups every morning. I honestly didn’t think I would be able to do more than 15 pushups without stopping right now, but I was and I did a couple sets of 20. I’ve been doing about 85 pushups in the morning. Anyway, sometimes it hurts my wrists to do pushups on the ground and some missionaries have these things called Perfect Pushups that they use and I’ve used them before and I liked them, so I decided to use some Christmas money to buy them. They are those things you see ads for on the TV that were designed by some navy seal or something and basically all it is, is that you spin your wrists 90 degrees as you do the pushup and it works more muscles and takes the stress off you tendons. We’ll see how those work. They are small so it will be easy to just throw in my suit case.

This is the last week of the transfer! So that means next week I will have transfer news. Now I will be veeery surprised if I get transferred, but you never know. Everyone has been moving around a lot lately. My companion has been in this area for like 6 months, so he could go at any time. I am pretty sure I will go back to Spanish sometime, but my guess is that will be in 2 more transfers. Speaking of that, it has been really cool to see how my Spanish has not gotten worse at all. If anything it has gotten better. I see Spanish people throughout the week, so I always take the opportunity to go talk to them. It doesn’t feel like I’m rusty at all. Plus I’ve been handing out about an average of 1-2 referrals to the Spanish Elders every week, so that makes them happy. And today I am on exchanges in one of the Spanish areas, so that is fun. And all the interviews I do are in Spanish. I’ve done about 6-7 interviews this transfer, so that is always fun.

We are still searching for people to teach in our area. We have been hitting our goal of each talking to at least 10 people every day and we finally found a person or 2 who actually might be interested. We have return appointments this week, so we’ll see how it goes.

Well, as always it was awesome to hear the updates from home. And yes I am back to full health. And I bought some hand sanitizer, so I need to start using that stuff again. It always seems like there is something going around in every house we go into. And Bub, you should start that Driver’s Ed. You should just do it online like I did. I would just put on some music and read through that stuff on the weekends and I got done with it pretty fast.

Ok have a good week!! I love you all!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon Jan 11, 2010

2010-01-17T16:22:00.000-08:00

Dear Family,

This has been one crazy week. I think I mentioned last week in my e-mail that I woke up not feeling very well. Well it never really went away. Today I feel the best I have felt since I got sick, so I am hoping this whole thing passes. I called up the guy in charge of missionary medical stuff, but he is kind of crazy and just told me to take a bunch of medicine and stay inside for 48 hours. There was no way I could just sit around inside for 2 days…even if my health did get better, I would probably be mentally insane. Plus it wasn’t so bad, so we kept working.

So with that in mind, here are some of the things we had to get done this week. First, we had to plan, prepare, and do a Zone Meeting, which is basically a meeting where all the missionaries in the zone come to and we have to train them and put on this whole program. So we had to plan out the whole meeting and prepare our training. It actually turned out really well. We trained on the L. Tom Perry Plan, also called the Ward Mission Process, which is basically where the auxiliary groups are supposed to give us names of 5 people to visit. That hasn’t really been happening in any ward in the mission except for the League City ward, which is where Elder Roberts and I are serving. So we trained the missionaries on how to help their ward get that started. A lot of missionaries called us up afterwards and told us of a lot of good experiences that came from the things we trained them on. I am pretty happy about how it all went.

The next huge task was that we had to prepare for stake correlation, which is that meeting where we meet with the stake presidency, the high councilor over missionary work, and with our mission president and we talk about how all the wards are doing. We have to fill out these long tedious reports for each ward and we have 9 of them in our zone/stake, so you can only imagine how long that took. That meeting ended up going very well too. The whole Ward Mission Process came up into conversation and they decided that they wanted to train all the ward leaders on this whole thing and teach them how to get it started. That is exactly what we wanted to have happen, so we’re excited to have that happen. After this meeting and after all this gets running, there is going to be a big difference in the work here.

The NEXT thing is that we had to move on Thursday and help 2 other companionships move. We moved in with members. They are named the Seely’s. I’m not sure how to spell it. They are probably about 50 and their youngest daughter just moved out of the house to go to college. They are a pretty cool family. We live upstairs where we have our own room and study area and everything. Its definitely not as big and spacious as the Randall’s home in Richmond, but not very many people’s houses are that big. So we did all that on Thursday.

Then we just had all the normal missionary work stuff. In the mission we have recently been stressing how every missionary needs to get 10 OYMs a day. OYM = Open Your Mouth…so in other words, you need to talk to 10 people a day. It is actually a lot harder than it sounds. You just don’t see 20 people(for both companionships to get 10 OYMs) in your path each day, so we’ve had to go to shopping center parking lots to try to find people to talk to. We have not had much luck at all yet. Its so interesting to see how all the different cultures are. I could get rejected by 10 American white people in a row, then if I go up and talk to a Hispanic person in Spanish they always sit and listen and they always say you can come back and teach them. Of course a lot of the time they really aren’t very interested and they really don’t want you to come back, but they are too nice to tell you no. I think that a lot of the people who have grown up here just have it trained into their minds not to let anybody take advantage of you. They see 2 20 year old kids walking around in nice clothes, and naturally you think they must be getting something out of it and they must have some hidden motives. The good thing is that when you find someone who says you can come back, they are serious and they are usually really good investigators, so in the end it all ends up the same. We just have to keep looking!

The Keichler’s, who Mom got that knitted thing from, are an older couple who have had missionaries in their home for like 2 ½ years. The missionaries finally moved out into a different place. They live in our ward. So of course they love the missionaries and I guess she sends one of those things to all the missionaries who come into the ward. They are nice people.

So that was my week. Somehow we made it through all that and we got everything done on time and we had a decent week in terms of missionary work. This week will be much more relaxing.
In response to news at home and Mom’s e-mail…Bub you are the man. As long as you get a decent GPA you are pretty set. Of course if you think you can do even better, it never hurts to take it again, but a 30 is very good.

I think church at 11 is the perfect starting time. Our ward currently starts at 8:30 and it is way too early, especially when you have early morning meetings. We might have to cover another ward, which means we would have 6 hours of church plus at least another hour or 2 for meetings. That does not sound fun.

Alright I think that’s about it for this week. Ohh yeah..I realized yesterday that I hit my 18 month mark on Saturday! That is kind of exciting. I was gone on exchanges in Sugar Land with the assistants that day. I was with Elder Schwarz who is one of my good friends in the mission, so we had a really good time. It didn’t even cross my mind all day until Sunday in one of our meetings I saw the date was the 10th and remembered that the 9th is always another month mark. Oh yeah and one more thing. I don’t know how often they have you go and give a missionary report in sacrament meeting, but in your next one could you please tell everyone how grateful I am for all the letters and stuff they sent me at Christmas time. I don’t think I’m going to have enough time to write everyone back, but I don’t want anyone to go unthanked.

Oh and the other last thing is that it has been FREEZING here again. It was down in the 20s on Thursday and Friday, then it was in the 30s on Saturday and now today its warming back up and it will be warm again. We didn’t get any snow…the skies were all clear, but all the water puddles and everything did freeze over. I wont be surprised if it is in the 70s this week. There is a saying in Texas where they say, If you don’t like the weather, wait a couple minutes. Obviously referring to how frequently the weather changes.

Ok have a great week, I love you all!!!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon Jan 4, 2010

2010-01-17T16:19:00.000-08:00

Dear Family,

I am glad to hear everyone had a good time with the wedding/visit to Utah/Idaho. It sounded like it was all fun. It sounded like a lot of eating too, which is definitely a good thing. So where are Steven and Heather living right now? I know they eventually plan on moving down to California again for Steven’s job.

I finally got the lost package with the Sees candy and stamps! I don’t know what the deal was, but it looked like it has been tossed around a lot. It was all ripped down the side and somebody had tried to tape it back together. Everything was still in there as far as I could see though. The Sees candy was still delicious, so thank you.

After e-mailing last week I got started to get sick and I think I had the 24 hour flu. My companion got it a couple days before and its spreading like crazy in the mission. Yesterday I started to get a sore throat and this morning I woke up and it has gotten pretty bad. I have a headache, backache, and sore throat. It already feels much better though. I called up the 2 senior missionaries in charge of all the health stuff with missionaries and they told me to stay in for 48 hours and to take Tylenol and ibuprofen. They are kind of crazy. I did take some Tylenol and I’m going to buy some ibuprofen…hopefully that helps with the back. There is no way I’m staying in for 48 hours though. I have never been sick so many times though. Before the mission I was never sick, now in the mission I’ve gotten sick like 7 times. I wash my hands all the time too. Luckily it usually never lasts more than 24 hours.

I got to go on exchanges to an area called Clear Lake this week. I know if I ever explained it fully, but I know I did mention the League City Zone was barely created when the League City Stake was formed about 2 months ago. Well when that happened, the stake took in wards from another stake just north of us, which is actually outside of our mission. Because of that our mission boundaries changed and we got a couple new areas and some new missionaries. Clear Lake is one of those new areas. Ever since being in our mission, the area has never had a baptismal date. I’m not really sure what the problem is…I know there were some pretty disobedient missionaries there who got sent home, and that always leaves a bad taste in the member’s mouths, but I honestly believe you can change that pretty fast if you just work hard and work well with the members. Anyway, when we went on exchanges we planned out some good lessons and planned to extend baptismal dates in every lesson. We only got in to teach 1 of the investigators they had planned, but we taught the lesson as we planned, extended the date and he accepted! I think a lot of missionaries just get afraid of extending baptismal invitations and they end up doing it pretty weak, or just not at all. I think our experience at least helped cure this problem at least a little bit. They went to teach one of the investigators who we had planned for, but wasn’t home, the day after I left and they extended another date. That was good to hear.

Elder Cameron, my last companion, also called me up last night to update me on how all the people from my last area are doing. A lot of the people that I found and taught with Elder Cameron are progressing well still and are getting closer to baptism. That was a pretty amazing area. Hopefully we can turn this area into an area like that. Our teaching pool is pretty sparse right now though. Although we did get another baptismal date and find a few new hopeful people, so things are looking better.

Ok, one more thing. My driver’s license expires on my birthday in April. I talked to our vehicle coordinator guy and he told me I have 2 options. 1: I can go to the DMV here and get a Texas driver’s license, or 2: I can write to my family and see if they can extend my driver’s license. At first I thought it would be pretty cool to have a Texas drivers license, but then I started thinking about it and thought it might cause problems living in California, but having a Texas driver’s license. I’d have to change the address and all that stuff. So the best option would probably be to extend my driver’s license at least until I get home, so I can go and get a new one when I get back. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll just get one here. So, could you please try to find out what all needs to happen in order to extend my license?

That’s about all for this week. Pray that we can find some new good people to teach! I love you all!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon, Dec 28, 2009

2010-01-04T07:32:00.000-08:00

Dear Family,

The whole story about trying to leave for Utah but running into all those problems was funny, but at the same time, I’m sure it was pretty frustrating. It will be a good story in the future though. That is pretty exciting that Steven’s wedding is already about to happen…that came up pretty fast. You will have to give me a full recap. Zak and Quinn will definitely have to go to Tucano’s some other time. It is definitely my favorite restaurant.

Well there is not too much to update on here. It was fun being able to talk on Friday. I thought about a lot of things before hand to talk about, but completely forgot about everything when I called. Its a weird feeling trying to talk about whats been going on for the past year and a half in only 40 minutes. I guess all that really matters is to know that everyone is doing good and were happy.

We definitely have a lot of work to do here in League City though. This last week has been kind of a difficult one with Christmas and our zone conference and my companion got sick, so were hoping for a good week this week. We honestly don’t have much of a teaching pool. It seems like the missionaries who have been in this area have been going to the same people over and over again for the past 10 months and they are getting nowhere. So hopefully we can find some new people.

I guess I will tell you a little more about my companion. Like I said, he is named Elder Roberts and he's from the San Francisco area. He is one of those guys who just taaaalks and talk and talk loud and all the time. It is so over the top sometimes it makes me laugh. He is definitely a people person though. He is good at talking to people and getting them to like us. We are definitely working on working together though. I guess with all his last companions they would just jump in and kind of cut each other off when they would want to say something. That is definitely not a very smooth way to do things, so we’ve talked about that and our teaching has gotten much better.

One thing I’ve learned is that in order to have powerful teaching, you and your companion absolutely have to work well together. A lot of times that won’t come naturally, so you have to talk about it, figure it out, and probably change/sacrifice a few things to make it work. It took me a little while to figure that out, but it makes things a lot easier. I think we will have a good time together.

Ok that’s really about all I have for this week. Hopefully I have some good updates for next week. I know you guys will. I love you all and I hope everyone has a great time at Steven’s wedding!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon, Dec 21, 2009

2010-01-04T07:29:00.000-08:00

Dear Family,

Transfer news: All of my predictions for transfers were correct! I am in League City.

It is an English area. Half the zone is English and half is Spanish, so I will be doing all the Spanish baptismal interviews and all the exchanges to Spanish areas and my companion will do all the English stuff. So thankfully I will still get to speak a little Spanish. You can look on a map to see where League City is, but it is basically just a little more on the mainland from where Galveston is. So I will get to go on exchanges to Galveston! I am excited about that. League City is also where a huge NASA base is. You know in all those famous lines where they say “Houston…we have a problem” or whatever? Well they are talking to the space center here in League City. A lot of the members at church work at NASA. There are always air force jets flying around here to patrol the area too. I’m sure for one of these P-days I will go tour the place.

My companion is Elder Roberts. He has been out for about 14 months, and this is his 2nd transfer as a Zone Leader. He actually has a twin brother in this same mission. His twin brother came out about 8 months before him and he just happened to get called to the exact same mission. He is from northern California somewhere. All of my companions except for my Tongan companion have been from Utah up until now. He is a pretty funny guy. He is pretty outspoken and opinionated…it makes me laugh. He goes off on these rants talking uncontrollably sometime. It is pretty funny…I am helping him with that. This zone was created last transfer when the League City stake was created. So everything is pretty new and President told me he wants us to really get things going here. It should be fun. At our district meeting on Friday it was really weird to find out that I am the oldest (as far as time in the mission) missionary in our district. Time really has been flying by.

We are living in an apartment here, but we are going to move in with some members at the beginning of the year. I have mixed feelings about that. Its always kind of hard to have to share a fridge and everything with members. I’m sure it will all be good though. And no I am not unpacked yet. Our P-day ends at 2 today too so I don’t think I will be able to unpack today either. The second half of our P-day is going to be used on Christmas this Friday. So on Christmas we will do our normal studies in the morning until 11, then were thinking everyone in our zone will come to the stake center here and we’ll open presents and half a lunch and all that stuff until about 3, then we will go out and start working again. On Sunday we passed around lists for members to sign up and let us come by on Christmas and share a short Christmas message with them. So that is what we will be doing for most of the day. But on Tuesday is when we will be having our Christmas Zone Conference. We haven’t gotten very much info as to what is going to happen, but I will let you know next week.

Christmas phone call: I am thinking I will call at around 7pm my time on Christmas day, which is 5pm California time if I am not mistaken. And yes, I still do remember our home phone number and mom’s cell phone and dad’s cell phone number, so I should be ok.

In our area we don’t really have a very big teaching pool right now, so we will be working on that. In the mission we have a goal to have every single companionship baptize every transfer. I’ve actually had a personal goal in my mission to at least average 1 baptism per transfer too. I am right on track with that right now, so hopefully we can keep that up. Good things have been happening all across the mission too. Areas are starting to baptize where they haven’t seen baptisms for a long time and more and more people are starting to baptize. It is pretty exciting.
It has been pretty slow in the area so far because of all the meetings and things we’ve had.

On Wednesday it was transfer meeting and we had to drop everyone off in their areas and drive all over the place, so we got back at like 7. Thursday we had a Zone Leader Conference, which is pretty much an all day meeting. We left at like 7:30 and we got back at about 6:30 or 7. Friday we had our District Meeting, then a big planning session which lasted several hours. Saturday was our only mostly normal day. Then Sunday we had church which starts at 1 (the worst time for church…it eats up your whole day. Next year it starts at 8:30 I think). Then we had an investigator fireside at 7 which goes until the rest of the night. I think the investigator firesides are probably one of my favorite meetings…I may have written about this before. It is the fireside that Bessy Aquino spoke in last week. Well that was for the Spanish one, then last night we had an English one for this part of the mission. 2 recent converts of only a couple weeks speak, then a convert of like 5+ years speaks. They always have good stories.

I do have one kind of funny story. One of the few people in our teaching pool is a 10 year old kid named Anthony. The rest of his family are inactive members. So we were teaching him on Saturday and trying to get him to come to church but he kept throwing out the excuses like “I am busy” and other made up things. Basically he just wanted to stay home and play video games. We explained to him that in order for him to understand why he needs to come to church, he needs to come and find out for himself. Its something that you just feel and you know is right. He kept asking why, so I used this analogy that I heard…I think Boyd K Packer use. I asked him how salt tasted. And he was like…”I don’t know how to describe it!” Then he runs over to the cupboard and pulls out thing of salt and dumps a bunch in his mouth. It was hilarious. Then of course he starts to spit it out, so I asked him, “now do you know how salt tastes?” and he yelled”YES!!” then I say, “How?” He says as he is still trying to wash his mouth out, “BECAUSE I TASTED IT!” Then I said, “Ok, so how are you going to find out why you need to come to church.” He promptly yelled, “BY GOING!” It was hilarious….it worked a lot better that I had ever expected too.

Ok, well that is about all for this week. We will talk on Friday, so I will be able to fill you in on any other stories that come to mind then. Heather also wrote me this week…that was nice. Ok, have an excellent winter break and a merry Christmas! I love you all!!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon Dec 14, 2009

2009-12-14T14:18:00.000-08:00

Dear Family,

Surprise surprise…I am getting transferred! I definitely did not expect that and I am a little sad. This is probably one of my favorite areas. We have appointments all throughout the day every day. There are usually only like 3 or maybe 4 hours of the day in the afternoon where we don’t have any set appointments and during that time we always have things to do or people to contact. It has been awesome. I don’t think I mentioned it last week, but one of the Assistants is going home this transfer, so they had to pick a new assistant. I definitely did not want that to be me. For one, because that is a 100% English area, for 2, they spent so much time in the office doing all these random projects and I would prefer to be out teaching people doing normal missionary work. They just have crazy schedules. So I have been worried about that for the past couple of weeks and I shared with President my thoughts in my last president’s letter. Last night President Saylin asked one of the zone leaders from the other Spanish zone to be the AP…so I am way relieved. He is one of my good friends in the mission, so that makes me really happy too. I am really excited for the next couple of transfers.

There are only a couple zone leader areas with spots open for me to go to, so I think I figured out where I am going. I love playing the guessing game and trying to predict where everyone is going. I think I’ve got it all figured out. I am probably going to be going to League City, which is out near Galveston, which means I’ll get to go on exchanges with the Galveston Elders. That will be awesome. The downside is that the area is an English area. Half the zone is English and half is Spanish, so they have 1 english and 1 spanish zone leader there. I’ll get to go on exchanges to all the Spanish areas, but my area will still be English. I also told president that I want to stay in Spanish for the rest of my mission. Well, this is what he responded:
“I appreciate your sharing your desires with me as to your own transfer
destiny! The good news is that you have lots of mission left to serve! We
will see where the Lord takes you! This I promise you -- you will receive
assignments to go where He wants you to be. I'll tell you, my friend, I am
very confident that there is no better place to be that where the Lord wants
you to be! Hang tight -- good times are coming!”

Basically that translates to, he is aware of my desires, but the lord wants be somewhere else and I will probably get to finish off my mission in a spanish area. I am ok with that.

Well enough of transfers talk. Transfers are always exciting so there is always a lot to say about it. But I do have some stories for this week.

On Tuesday, Bessy and Luis Miguel got baptized! It was an awesome baptism. I baptized Luis Miguel and Elder Cameron baptized Bessy. I have always tried to get members to do the baptisms, but they really wanted us to, so of course we accepted. My favorite part about the baptism was when Bessy bore her testimony right after getting baptized. She is going to be such a strong member. I think one of the most satisfying things on the mission is when you baptize someone and you don’t have any doubt in your mind that they will stay active for the rest of their lives. This was one of those baptisms.

On that same day on Tuesday, we actually got fed breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was awesome. There is a senior missionary couple that lives in our apartment complex and they invited us over for dinner that day, then we had lunch at a member’s home, then our dinner was the baptism “refreshments.” I say “refreshments” because when Hispanics say that, it means a meal. Whenever we have family home evenings they will allllways make a full course meal afterwards as the “refreshment.” So after the baptism we had pupusa’s, which are a delicious El Salvadoran food. It looks almost like a pancake, but it is made out of tortillas, and it is filled with meat and beans and whatever else they choose to fill it with. Pupusas are definitely one of my favorite foods I’ve had out here.

Then last night we put on an investigator fireside. That is where everyone in our zone brings their investigators to a fireside and we have a couple recent converts tell their conversion stories, then have a final speaker who is usually someone who got baptized several years ago, so they can hear testimonies of new converts, then of a convert who has been in the church for a long time. It is always a really good fireside. Bessy was one of our recent convert talks and she did awesome. I was also the one who conducted the meeting. This was my first real meeting I’ve conducted in Spanish. I was definitely nervous, but it turned out alright.

Ok here is an awesome story. So every P-day we go to the same Wal-mart and on the way we always drive past this donut store called Best Donuts. We always joke about the name and talk about how they have the self proclaimed Best Donuts. Well knowing me, of course I suggest we go try out these so called best donuts. When we pull up all the lights are off in the store, so we sit there for a second, then the owner of the shop, an asian guy, asks us if we wanted to buy some donuts. I told him yes of course, because they are the Best Donuts. They were about to close, but he let us in and showed us all the donuts he had left. I asked him if we could get discounts for the donuts since they were about to close. He was like, “Yes….I give you everything for 8 dollar.” There were over 50 donuts there! Of course we bought them! It turned out to be like 15 cents a donut or something. We all stuffed ourselves. I had like 8-9 donuts for lunch that day. Delicious. I do have to admit it made me kind of sick, but I would still do it again.

Next story…so you remember my story about giving the blessing to the guy who got shot in the head? Well the mom of that guy called us up again and wanted us to come back to say a prayer with them or something. When we show up we find out she wanted us to come back and see him because he is now conscious and he is recuperating very well. So we said a prayer of thanks with them. They all want to us to teach them. (None of them are members…the mom is just friends with a member of the church and she is the lady who referred us to go give the blessing). It was pretty awesome.

Well this lady has another friend whose son is also in the same hospital and she wanted us to go give a blessing to him. He has a pretty crazy story too. We don’t have all the details, but he was at some party and he fell/got pushed off the balcony of a 2 story building and landed on his head and he had been in a coma for 5 months. He was in the ICU with all these tubes and things keeping him alive. We had to put on a gown thing, gloves, and a mask in order to go into the room and give him the blessing. It was pretty intense.

We’ve had a lot of good things happen this week too with all our investigators. We’ve found some new people who are pretty awesome. There are going to be a lot of baptisms here next transfer. I am sad that I have to leave, but that is what we do as missionaries. We just go wherever were sent and we work our hardest and do our best wherever we’re put. So I am happy.

Oh, and to answer your questions, no I did not get any Sees candy nor a package from the YM/YW.
The polygraph test sounded pretty intense, but working for the department of defense sounds pretty awesome.

Ok, well next week I will be writing from a brand new area. We’ll see where I go! I love you all and hope you have a good week!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon, Dec 7, 2009

2009-12-13T14:20:00.000-08:00

Dear Family,

This has been a COOLD week. On Friday it was around 32 degrees all day and yes it did snow. It snowed for several hours in the afternoon. It was real snow too, not just the slushy snow stuff. It was all melted by the next day, but it was still freezing. I am definitely not a fan of the cold so I bundled up in an attempt to stay warm. Here is what I wore: a normal white T-shirt, then a long sleeve church shirt, then a sweater, then my suit coat, then my trench coat, 2 pairs of socks (including those big thick hiking socks I have), and gloves. Yes I was still cold. It was mostly my face, which meant I had a runny nose all day, but I brought tissues with me so I was fine. The next day was in the upper 40s and the next day was in the 50s. It was cold. Its back to normal now, so I am happy.

On Saturday we had the wedding for Luis and Caty Aquino, and Bessy and Julio. It all went well and they (Luis and Bessy) are getting baptized tomorrow night. Bessy is awesome. After church on Sunday, Bessy came up to us and was like, “I wanted to go up and bear my testimony to day, but I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to and Julio said he didn’t think I could.” Well, I think Julio is disfellowshipped right now because he is going through the whole repentance process to come back to church, so the bishop told him he couldn’t say prayers or bear testimony or anything and I guess he thought that meant that non-members couldn’t bear testimony either. We told Bessy she’d have another chance the next month, and that we were going to ask her to bare her testimony after her baptism too. Then last night we had another baptism in our ward and we had invited some other investigators to come and see it, one of which was deciding whether nor not he should be baptized, so afterwards we had Bessy go and bear her testimony to him. And she happily did and invited him to get baptized with her tomorrow. He was a little apprehensive about doing it so soon, but he is going to get baptized on Sunday. She is going to be an amazing member.

We’ve been having success with a lot of other people as well. There are 7-8 people who are preparing for baptism right now, but for whatever reason they don’t feel comfortable choosing a specific date yet. One of them is named Mario. He is a 74 year old man from Mexico. He is our only investigator that we have that lives in a house (as opposed to living in an apartment). He is a big, jolly old man who is always laughing. He has been getting taught for several months, but these last few weeks he has really started to make some good progress. He finally came to church and he even agreed to fast. Hopefully he keeps it up.

This is week 6 (the last week) of the transfer! I’d assume my companion and I would stay together, but you never know. In week 6, President Saylin e-mails all of the zone leaders and asks us to give suggestions and input as to what we think should happen in transfers, so that is always fun to be a little part of it. Next week I’ll have the news as to whats happening next transfer.

This week I went on exchanges with the APs, assistants to the president, in Sugar Land. I finally got to go drive by T-Mac’s house (ask dad if you don’t know who he is!). We got the code to get into the gated community where he lives from a member in a ward in Sugar Land who is dating T-Mac’s neighbor. He lives in a reeeally nice area with mansion houses, as you could imagine. I don’t think he was home though…none of his cars were in the driveway and no lights were on.

I think I may have mentioned that we cover the Medical Center area in my area. That means that whenever people’s investigators, or members go to the hospital and need blessings, we get called up to go and give the blessing. I’ve only had to do 3-4, but they are all pretty intense. This week I had a pretty crazy one. This guy was apparently in his car one night here in Houston and these guys walked up to the car, and pulled him out to try to steal his car. I’m guessing he tried to fight back or something, but they pulled out a gun and he put up his arm and they shot him, I don’t know how many times. But the bullet shattered when it went through his arm then it went into his head, so they’ve been having to do surgery to get all the bullet pieces out of his head. He was in the ICU hooked up to tons of machines and had tubes coming out everywhere. We barely got there in time to give him a blessing before he went into another surgery. That was a pretty crazy story to hear though.

This week for whatever reason, missionaries stopped by our apartment on different occasions and when they walked in they noticed the painting Dad gave me that I have up on the wall, and they would walk up to it and say, “Woooow, who painted that? That is an awesome painting!” I’ve gotten compliments for the painting for pretty much my whole mission. It is a pretty awesome painting. Thank you Dad!

Well I think that’s about all for this week. I am pretty excited for the baptisms tomorrow. Transfers is always exciting too. In my last interview President Saylin mentioned, “You never know how long you’re going to be with your companion.” Mission presidents always throw in little hints. So he was thinking about moving at least one of us…we’ll see.

Oh yeah…congratulations Mom on running 9 miles…that is really impressive. I don’t think I could even do that.

And yes I did get the wedding invitation…I forgot to write that last week. That is the first wedding invitation I have gotten! A lot of these missionaries from Utah have friends back at home getting married left and right. That is way weird to me.

Zak have fun with the braces. “Vale la pena” as we say in Spanish. It might not be fun for a while, but it is worth it. My braces didn’t bother me at all after a while…I was just happy my teeth were getting straight. Zak’s teeth were already pretty straight, so he wont have to have them on for too long will he?

I am glad Dad is somehow finding some good business at work. I definitely know how it feels to work when you are sick. Not fun.

Definitely update me on Christopher’s polygraph test. So…isn’t a polygraph test where they hook you up to a lie detector and ask you a bunch of questions? Is he going to work for the government or something? Or is it just some big company over there?

Michael Vick plays for the Eagles? The Eagles just boosted up to be one of my favorite teams.

Oh yeah, last thing. I think the best thing I could get for Christmas besides those other few things I mentioned would be just some treats/food. I don’t really want anything else. I can’t believe I am hitting my 17 month mark on Wednesday! I just realized that. It is scary how fast time goes by.

Ok that is the end of my list of random thoughts and stories! I hope you have a good week!! I love you all!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon, Nov 30, 2009

2009-12-02T20:19:00.000-08:00

Dear Family,

Last week I decided I wanted to set a goal to gain some weight. When I came out on my mission I weighed 150 lbs, and I’ve been fluctuating between 145-150. Whenever I get sick I always lose 5+ lbs and it takes forever to get back up to 150. My goal is to hit 160. Well, I learned that you had better be careful what you ask for. On Thursday we had an appointment at about 12, where we went taught a lesson, then they said they had food ready for us. I was happy, because I was hungry of course, and I stuffed myself. I had 5 tostadas and it was delicious. Then at 6 we had our normal dinner appointment. I was honestly still not that hungry because I ate so much at lunch, but I stuffed myself again and ate as much as I possibly could. We had chicken and mashed potatos and salad and some other stuff. Most Hispanic people here have never eaten a turkey and have no idea how to cook one. I don’t think turkey is that great anyway, so no big loss. Well after that we had another appointment. We show up with our lesson prepared and everything and we sit down on the couch waiting for everyone to come in, then we see them bring out a huuuge turkey and drop it on their dinner table. Then they start bringing out all the rest of the food. I guess they decided they wanted to eat with us instead of do a lesson. I thought I was going to die, but we definitely could not reject it. They went out a bought a huge turkey for us and they barely have enough money to pay rent. Then they got some recipe and just tried to cook it the best they could. I think the funniest part was after we said the prayer they were all trying to decide how to serve it, then One of them just stabbed the huge turkey and started forking out random pieces of meat. It was a lot of chaos. We managed to stuff down a little more food. I’ve become a master at making it look like I have more food on my plate than I really do…these little surprise dinners happen all the time. I could hardly walk back to the car that night, but the most disappointing part is that I weighed myself a few days after and I didn’t gain any weight. Oh well, I will have to keep trying. I’ve started to buy whole milk instead of 2% milk too, but that isn’t doing anything either.

This Saturday we are going to have 2 weddings and then on Tuesday 2 baptisms. This is that family who I talked about where, Samuel Aquino just got off his mission and how hes reactivating his 2 brothers and sister and were teaching their boyfriend/girlfriends. Luis Miguel is going to get married to Catalina (who is the member…Samuel’s sister) and Julio (Samuel’s brother) is getting married to Bessi. Luis and Caty have been living together for like 4 years and they have a 2 year old daughter, so they are happy to finally just get married, and Julio and Bessi have been living together for about a year. Then on Tuesday Luis and Bessi are getting baptized. So that is exciting. They are both very happy. Bessi especially was really prepared and she’s going to be a strong member. At our thanksgiving dinner with them we went around and talked about what our goals for the next year were and she said she wanted to keep learning about the gospel and get a strong testimony to endure to the end. What an awesome answer.

I think I have talked about this black Honduran family named the Mejilla’s before. Unfortunately they are probably not going to get baptized. They have this problem where Lucia Mejilla, the wife, is married to some other guy in Honduras, so in order for her to get married to Fernando, the guy she is living with right now, she would have to get a divorce first. It costs tons of money to get a divorce and they literally don’t have enough money to pay for rent. They’ve gotten their power turned off several times. Unfortunately there are a looot of people stuck in this situation. In our ward right now there are like 5-6 people who are active, but not baptized because they don’t have enough money to get their divorce first. That is one of the biggest struggles that we have and there isn’t really any good solution.

Ok, here are 2 more little random observations that I’ve made about this area, so that you can imagine the area. Most of our area is pretty much like a Spanish speaking country. Nearly everyone is Hispanic…most of the signs are written in Spanish and everything. There are these guys who have these little cart things with wheels and they sell “elote” which is corn on the cob. So they push their little carts around yelling ELOOOOOOTE!!! And kids with run out with money to buy some elote. They usually eat their elote with a ton of mayonnaise on it, and some chili powder. I’ve had it before and its pretty gross. They’ll put ketchup and all sorts of other weird stuff on it too.

My next observation is that there is this ghetto restaurant here with the funniest name…its called “Finger Lickin’ Good.” I think it’s a fried chicken place or something…they have tons of fried chicken places around here. It makes me laugh every time we drive past it.

Another thing I’ve noticed here is that everyone starts putting up their Christmas lights and decorations so early. People started putting up their Christmas lights and Christmas trees about a week ago. Most people live in apartments here, so they’ll just put lights all over their windows and stairwells. We don’t have Christmas lights but we do have a little Christmas tree that we put up today. It will be interesting to see what we do for Christmas this year in the mission.

I’ve also thought of 2 more things to add to my Christmas list. First…I mentioned the classical music thing last week…I remember bumpa has a pretty sweet classical music tape or something that he always listens to when he works out…I think you know what I’m talking about. Well I would love to work out to that in the morning as well. I started to do pushups and sit ups in the mornings again, but mormon tabernacle choir just doesn’t really pump you up that much when its early and you're trying to force yourself to exercise. I don’t know if its possible to copy that or anything about it, but that’s just a thought that came to mind.

The other thing is that it is always nice to get new ties. It is easy to get sick of all your ties. Oh yeah, and last week I mentioned I could use a few pairs of black socks, well this morning I had to throw away 2 pairs of my blue socks. I’m getting to that time where a lot of my socks are so used that you can see right through them, then big holes start to form. So it wouldn’t hurt to throw in 1-2 pairs of blue socks too.

Oh yeah…one more question. How is Dad’s work going? The last that I heard was on Mother’s Day when it was going slow like everywhere else. I have heard that the economy is starting to get a little better, but obviously I have no idea, plus I haven’t heard anything about the real estate market.

Well that is all I have for this week. Thank you for all the updates and stories, it was all entertaining and interesting. Its nice to see that some things never change, ie…DotA tournaments, turkey bowl, and random game competitions. And fantasy football. And the delicious Thanksgiving meals (I haven’t seen any better thanksgiving dinners out here than the ones we have at our house). I love you all…have a good week!!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon Nov 23, 2009

2009-12-02T20:16:00.000-08:00

Dear Family,

Hmm...not a whole lot happened this week. We had our Zone Conference which was good as always. Then we had our stake correlation meeting afterwards which was okay. It started to turn into a finger pointing match and everyone started to get defensive. These meetings are always interesting.

Our 2 investigators are still set to get baptized on December 6th. They are both living with their boyfriend/girlfriends and we taught them the law of chastity a few weeks ago and challenged them to either separate or get married. Yesterday they told us they finally decided they are going to get married. We have taught them pretty much everything, so they are set for December 6th.

We have this other investigator named Roman. He is awesome. His wife drinks a lot and they recently separated (which is weird...usually its the man who is the drunk). Roman is friends with one of the members, which is how we met him. He lives with a bunch of other guys in an apartment. Well last week we were in the complex and we saw all those guys standing around outside drinking beer and I thought for sure we'd see Roman out there with them. Well Roman was out there and everyone was drinking beer, but Roman was standing out there drinking a coke instead. That is probably one of my favorite mental pictures I have of my whole mission: Roman standing around with all the other guys drinking his coke while everyone else is drinking their beers. Roman is also preparing to get baptized.

Last week Mom mentioned that song that talks about the Word of Wisdom, well we tried it out last week and sang it before teaching one of our word of wisdom lessons. We taught the Word of Wisdom 3-5 times last week. It is always interesting to see people's reactions.

In the mail last week I got a bag of chex mix from the Achievement days girls and me and my companion and every other missionary who has been in our apartment have been enjoying it.
This week is just going to be a normal week of missionary work. We are just going to have a normal dinner appointment and everything. Most hispanic people here don't celebrate Thanksgiving really, so it wont be too hard to find people to visit.

OK, now in response to Mom's e-mail. What the heck is a droid phone? I am glad Christopher fixed my computer...I would be very happy if it was still there when I got back. I think that's really strange how the monitor stopped working.

I loved seeing everyone's favorite teams. Those are some good teams. I think all the teams that I like are on there. My favorites in order of how much I like them are: Chargers, Saints, Colts, Steelers

Hmm...I started to make a Christmas list and I was going to bring it today but I forgot. I think all I've really thought of is that I need more pens, those pilot G-2 black and blue pens. And black socks...and other random stuff like tapioca pudding (the kind I always use to make), and beef jerky.

Well that's all I can think of for this week. Oh yeah, I got a padded envelope, so I can send home my memory card this week. There's lots of space left still so you don't need to delete any of the pictures. But do make sure you save them on the computer somewhere. I love you all and hope you have a good week!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon Nov 16, 2009

2009-11-16T14:18:00.000-08:00

Dear Family,

I do not have a whole bunch to report on this week, so I will start by responding to Mom's e-mail.

Are the Colt's Steven's favorite team? They are definitely an awesome team. Isn't Austin Collie playing for them? I like the Colts, but I'd have to say the Saints are my back-up team.

Wow...I that is crazy that Christopher was in my area last week. Where all those hospitals are at is the very east side of my area, we only go out there when we have to give blessings to people in the hospital. We are always over in the other side of the area in the ghetto.

Good job Zak and dominating the ACT test. One of the good things about that test is that (I believe) it is graded compared to everyone else, like a curve. So if the test is hard, everyone else does bad, and you just have to do better than them and you'll get a high score. 28 is definitely good though...I think I got 27. I think the average score for incoming freshman is either 28 or 29.
I definitely want to do intramural soccer when I get back. Everyone here watches soccer, so it makes me want to play. I have a FC Barcelona jersey and I claimed that team to be my favorite, but then I found out Ronaldino is not on that team anymore, so I don't like it as much, so my backup team is Chivas. I don't know anything about them, but everyone talks about them and they have cool jerseys...I will have to get one before the end of my mission.

I don't ever remember singing In Our Lovely Deseret. That could be useful though because well sing a hymn a lot at the start of our lessons and we always teach about the Word of Wisdom. Its pretty much impossible to find someone who doesn't have a problem with the word of wisdom. Same thing with the law of chastity too. Most people here don't get married, they just start living together, so before they can get baptized they have to either separate or get married.

We have 2 people who are going to get baptized on December 6th, and 1 of them is going to get married and the other one is still deciding what to do. They are awesome investigators. I think I may have explained a few weeks ago how this member named Samuel Aquino was inactive, but then the missionaries found him and reactivated him, then he went on a mission, now hes back and hes bringing his 2 brothers, his sister, and their boyfriend/girlfriends to church. His siblings are members but have been inactive until now and the boyfriend/girlfriends are not members. 2 of them have baptismal dates right now and they are awesome. They've committed to live the Word of Wisdom as well as the law of chastity (that's why they are getting married), which are 2 of the biggest commandments and they have been coming to church for over a month now.

Our other best investigator named Victor, who is from Nicaragua, was supposed to get baptized yesterday, but about a week and a half ago he just disappeared. Its sad, but unfortunately that happens here. People don't have enough money for rent, so they just leave and they don't have phones or any way of contacting us. We just have to pray some other missionaries find them.

Then we have Maritza. She is the one who got sent to jail with her husband after they got drunk throwing a party, celebrating that they came to church. Her husband is not deported and back in Mexico and I'm not sure what his plans are. He doesn't have papers, hence the deportation, and it costs a lot of money to cross the border illegally. Basically the more money you pay, the safer the method you can take to cross the border. It costs several thousand dollars though and that is a ridiculous amount for most people trying to come here. Maritza doesn't want to go back because her kids will have much better lives here, plus it is very dangerous back where they lived. They both had several family members killed by the drug cartels and they were getting hunted down by them when they were back in Mexico. But anyway, Maritza came to church yesterday and she loves it. She was very active in another church until she realized all her tithing just went to the pastor and she realized the church was false, so she stopped going. But she loves our church, so that is good. If she ends up being able to stay here she will definitely get baptized.

Here is my story for the week. So in the mission when you want a haircut you obviously go to the cheapest place you can find. And there are tons of those 5 dollar haircut places in Houston. Well, unfortunately the haircuters there aren't always the best. I actually haven't had a problem until my last haircut. About 5 weeks ago I got a haircut at the place across the street and when I came back and showered I noticed that my hair looked kind of lopsided. She totally didn't cut the front right part of my hair. It was funny, but I wasn't willing to leave it like that so I got some scissors and cut it myself. It actually turned out OK. So last week I stupidly went back to the same place, hoping that the same lady wouldn't be there. Of course she is and this time she did an even worse job. When I came back and showered I went to check my haircut and it was wavy. There were like 3 rows of hair that was longer than everything else so it looked like I had 3 waves going through my hair. I was not willing to try to re-cut everything because I would make it worse, so the next morning I went back and told her to fix it. She barely speaks English (almost all the haircut people are from Vietnam), but she understood well enough and she did fix a lot of it. But there was still one part that was a little longer and I tried to fix it myself...not so much luck this time. I cut it shorter than everything else. It is funny, but its not too bad. Luckily my hair grows fast. Mom will have a lot of repairing to do to my hair when I get back.

Ok, well that's about all for this week. We have our zone conference this Thursday which is always good. After that my companion and I have a correlation meeting with the stake presidency and all the bishops and ward mission leaders, which is usually boring.

Ok, have a good week...I love you all!!!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon Nov 9, 2009

2009-11-09T10:41:00.001-08:00

Dear Family,

Happy Birthday Christopher! When I was serving in Richmond, a lot of the members worked for Exxon. They were all attorneys and project managers and stuff like that. Tons of people here work for the gas companies. If you were ever near the Medical Center area with all the huge hospitals or by the Reliant stadium or by Lakewood church, all that stuff is in my area. I would guess you were up north in the other part of the city. I think that’s where those big business offices are.

I got that letter from Mom a few days ago. I always love those things. All the FF stuff was interesting, and no it doesn’t distract me at all. All of the stuff about Heather was interesting as well. I was pretty impressed with the blog post about how she selected her football team. The Seahawks is a respectable choice. Wasn’t Jim Mora the coach for the Falcons before?

It seems like that is a huge epidemic of some sort of sickness going around here. In almost every single household there are people sick. We make sure we use our hand sanitizer all the time.

Congratulations Mom for running 6 miles. That is definitely further than I have ever gone. I don’t like running at all either. I think it is boring, but I do love to listen to music, so whenever I went running I just looked at it as a time to listen to music, that way it was so much more fun.

Here is my story for the week. We are teaching this family from Honduras named the Mejia family. (They are the black ones who speak Spanish). Well they have to move because they don’t have enough money to pay for their current apartment, so they decided to move to an apartment just down the block. So of course we volunteer to help and we got our ward mission leader to come with us and he brought one of the youth. Well when we showed up to help they had done absolutely no preparation for the move. Everything was still a mess, dirty dishes in the kitchen. Her husband was sick too so he was just laying on the couch. We figured we just start taking all the big stuff out like the couches and get started on the move, so we asked where the moving truck was and she was like, ok wait a second. She ran outside and came back in 5 minutes with a shopping cart. She said we should just put everything in there and walk it down to the new apartment. They didn’t have a car or truck or anything. So that is exactly what we did. We picked up the big huge couch and balanced it on the shopping cart and started walking towards the new apartment. Along the way we acquired 3 more shopping carts and we started caravanning back and forth, loading up the shopping carts and pushing them down to the new apartment. We put big huge couches on those things, an entertainment center, but I thought the most hilarious part was when we put a whole oven in one of those shopping carts and pushed it down to the new apartment. As we walked down the sidewalk pushing our shopping carts with couches and whatnot balancing on them, everyone stared at us as they drove past. It was hilarious. At one point it was just me and my companion pushing 2 shopping carts down the street with 2 big huge TV’s (EVERYone here has big huge TV’s here regardless of how poor they are. Even if they don’t have couches they always have to have their big screen TV), and it definitely looked like we were stealing the TV’s. Well after 4 hours we got all of the big stuff and we left. That was probably one of the most ghetto moves I’ve ever seen. It was hilarious. I am glad we were able to help them.

Here's my kitchen story…I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this one. I think I mentioned a few weeks ago about how one of the members taught us how to make banana milk and it is delicious. Well, a few weeks ago I started to buy frozen strawberry’s and I always buy that Kern’s juice stuff in a can. Instead of Kerns, I buy a brand called Jumex and its like 33 cents a can and it is delicious. Well we also have a magic bullet, which I love. I throw in some frozen strawberries, a banana, a scoop of ice cream, some strawberry banana juice, and blend it up and it is delicious. I usually have a smoothie with every lunch I make.

Yesterday at church I noticed 2 funny things that happened. The first one was that when we started at 10:30 like we are supposed to, we only had 20 people there. Like always, everyone starts to trickle in as time goes on and by the end of the meeting we had 104 people there. Not even a 5th of the people showed up on time. The next funny part was that the closing prayer was given by an old man who is a recent convert named Fernando. He is from Costa Rica. He has a lot of health problems and he always wears these black sunglasses because the light hurts his eyes. Well I guess he wasn’t satisfied with just giving a prayer, so he gave a prayer/talk. He got up and it sounded like he was praying, but then he started talking about how grateful he was that his daughter was able to come, and he asked her to stand up, so she did and everyone opened their eyes and realized he wasn’t praying. And he went on to talk about some of his experiences he had throughout the week and threw in a story or 2, then he continued on with his prayer and ended. Afterwards everyone was looking around thinking, what happened?? We visit Fernando all the time, so we were surprised at all, but it made me laugh.

One of my favorite people in the ward is named Manfredo. He is from El Salvador. He is 70 years old and he always signs up to go out on exchanges with us. He reminds me of Santa Claus. He is a jolly old man with white hair and he is always laughing. Well on Wednesday the other elders in our district had to use our car to go to transfer meeting, so we went out on our bikes and Manfredo went out biking with us to go visit people. I wish I could have gotten a picture of us riding around with Manfredo. He actually goes out almost every week with the bike Elders too. He is awesome.

In other news, the church started to do something new with all the missions a few months ago. The church had ads for the Book of Mormon and other movies and stuff on the TV, and people call in and order those things, then we get a text message that has all their information. Well they set up a system, where we call this number when we contact the referral and we report whether or not we dropped them or we are still teaching them and all that stuff. Our mission was terrible at it the first couple months. The church spends more money on advertising in different areas depending on what percentage of the referrals the missionaries report. Well this last month we got on top of that and started calling all the missionaries to get the referrals reported and our mission president informed us in a meeting this week that our mission is now #1 in the world for reporting referrals. I thought that was pretty cool.

Unfortunately our best investigator named Victor has kind of disappeared on us. That is one of the struggles with teaching people here. Victor doesn’t have a cell phone or any way of contacting him, so if he gets a new job or moves or anything, we lose him and we just have to keep stopping by his apartment until we get lucky and find him home. He is supposed to get baptized this Sunday, so hopefully we can find him this week. We have taught him everything and he is absolutely golden…he hasn’t run into any problems.

Oh yeah, here is another story. It is funny/ironic/sad. We have been teaching this other family for a week or 2 and they finally came to church last Sunday and they absolutely loved it. We stopped by their apartment a day or 2 after and their son answered the door and said that his parents were in jail. Uh oh! He explained that they threw a big party and had a big barbeque and invited all the neighbors and their friends to come over and they invited them all to come to church with them the next week. Well, like every party here, everyone started drinking and the parents got drunk and started fighting with one of their older kids. (Yes they were drinking to celebrate coming to church). They ended up calling the cops to try to get their son in trouble, but when the cops came they arrested them instead. The wife luckily has a work visa which expired the day after they got arrested, but the husband is here illegally and is now going to get deported. That’s definitely a problem when your investigators get deported. We don’t know whats going to happen with the rest of the family, but they're probably going to have to go to Mexico because they don’t have any money to pay for anything. Unfortunately its not very unusual to have this kind of stuff happen.

G-Man: I miss you too. I like to play with army mans too sometimes. You had a cool Halloween costume. If I was going to dress up for Halloween I would be Leonardo.

OK, that is all for this week. I love you all and hope you have a good week!!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon Nov 2 2009

2009-11-02T10:36:00.000-08:00

Dear Family,

We got our transfer information this morning! Neither me nor my companion is getting transferred. Our district leader and 1 of the sisters in our district are getting transferred. Our district leader was a really cool guy…he is one of my good friends in the mission, so it is sad to see him go, but we expected it. I’m glad nothing changed in my companionship though.

I actually have some pretty good stories this week. I’ll start off with Halloween, since Mom asked about that. No, not very many people at all went trick or treating. I don’t think any parents feel safe walking around with their kids in these apartment complexes. We drove through a nice part of our area, called Bellaire, which is like a city within Houston, and there were a lot of people trick or treating there. But, the eventful thing for that night was that we went to the Lakewood Church (Joel Osteen’s church). We went on exchanges with one of our members earlier in the week and we started talking about Lakewood and he talked about how he use to go to Lakewood before he joined our church, then when he found out both of us wanted to go there sometime he offered to take us on Saturday night. That was quite an experience. We got there a little late because we were finishing up at an appointment. The building is huuuge. It actually reminded me of the Marriot Center at BYU…it was actually almost the exact same size. But anyway…when we got there there was a band playing on the stage and the music was blasting. There are 3 big jumbotron screens to watch the people on the stage and it had the words to the songs. The music was actually really good. It was a pretty legit concert, with music blasting, fog coming down from the ceiling, people dancing around and everything. After that, Victoria Olsteen came up and talked about how they had just visited Kenya and they played a little movie thing showing their visit there. After that she talked about families and told everyone to stand up if they wanted her to say a prayer and dedicate their families. Then she started praying. Oh yeah, and the whole time there was someone playing background music on the piano. When they pray all the people who are really into it raise their arms into the air and if they really like it they stand up too. After that there was more music, then Joel came up and he started his sermon. He started by quoting Psalms 47:1 that mentions a “shout of praise.” His whole sermon was on how we just need to shout (literally) praises to God to overcome trials and be more faithful. He used the example of how the army walked around the walls of Jericho 6 times, but then on the 7th time they all shouted a praise, and that’s what tore the walls of Jericho down. Then he told everyone to get up and to shout. So everyone did, and we did that a couple more times throughout his whole sermon. People would yell out some Hallelujah’s and Amen’s throughout if they liked it. It was all so interesting. Then at the end on the way out, one of the Usher guys asked us if we would like to meat Joel. (All the workers there knew we were missionaries from the LDS Church). We said ok, so he took us to the other side and he let us go in first and we all had to stand in a line side by side…there were probably 40 other people there. They gave us these little book things. Then Victoria and Joel came in and they signed our little books and the Usher guys took pictures for us.

All in all, I thought it was an awesome experience to see other people’s opinions of church. Now I know what some people are expecting when we invite them to come to church. Brother Ramos, the member who took us, explained it pretty well. He said the church is a church about nothing. Joel Osteen is a great motivational speaker and seems like a really nice guy, but you don’t really learn anything. You don’t learn the gospel. Now I understand why so many people don’t understand why people come to church every week. Going there makes you feel good and everything, but its more like a show and you don’t make covenants or learn about the scriptures or gospel. Well…that is probably a lot more than you all wanted to hear, but I thought it was all fascinating. I left out a lot of details and thoughts, but I’ll just have to tell that experience in person.

Next…so we have this apartment complex called Jefferson House where we have tons of investigators and everyone always sees us there and we always find more and more people to teach. Well, in the morning we stopped by one of our investigators and asked how she was doing. She was sitting on the couch and said her stomach was really hurting. We asked if she had taken any pills to help, and she said yes but it didn’t take away any of the pain. She said she was just going to wait for her husband to get home at 5. So we left. A couple hours later we were back in that same complex teaching someone else in their apartment when we hear a banging on the door. They open it and we hear screaming and crying. It was Lucia Mejia, our investigator we visited in the morning. She could barely stand. Apparently she knew the people we were teaching. They sat her down in a chair and she just kept screaming and crying and breathing hard. Then all the sudden she stopped and her whole body just went limp and it went dead quiet. That definitely scared me. The people ran and grabbed some rubbing alcohol and held it in front of her mouth and nose and that brought her back to consciousness. Meanwhile the neighbor was calling 911, but she could speak English, so my companion talked to them. Then we ran to the front of the complex, found out what the code was to open the gate and opened it when the ambulance got there. Then they took her to the hospital. A day later we stop by and shes back on the couch again at her normal spot with the front door wide open as usual. Apparently she had a uterus infection…awkward! She is taking some pills and she feels better now, but that was a pretty traumatic experience.

What else….we had a pretty interesting dinner this week. It was a big huge pot with a soup, filled with full sized, unpeeled, untouched shrimp (antennas, eyes, little crawly legs, shells, and all), octopus meat, squid meat, and imitation crab meat. I didn’t really know exactly how to eat it. At another dinner a few weeks ago they plopped a full size untouched fish on my plate, and I wasn’t sure what to do with that either. They ate the whole thing. They ate the skin, the brains, the fins, everything. So now with this shrimp I didn’t know if they were going to eat the whole shrimp or what. Luckily they expected us to crack them open and eat the meat on the inside. They would eat the brains and all…I couldn’t make myself do that. The octopus was actually pretty good and the squid wasn’t bad either. After that meal we reeked like fish food though. We went on exchanges with a member and when we got into the car he said we stunk. It was pretty funny.

I also went on exchanges this week with a companionship who’s having a tough time. It is a brand new missionary and his trainer who doesn’t know what to do. The new missionary had a hard couple of first days. He is scared of black people and his area is in the middle of the black ghetto, so he is scared out of his mind. He also is really fiery…he wants to whip that ward into shape, and he has good intentions, but he is offending a lot of people (members mostly) when he tells them they need to repent and change all these things in their lives. The trainer isn’t really confident either and he doesn’t know how to handle any of it. So we had a really good exchange with them...they were both really happy at the end of it. It turns out that new missionary is getting transferred and he is probably going to go out to the country somewhere where he can be more comfortable.

Hmm…I cant think of anything else. We knew about day light savings time because President Saylin texted us and told us to tell everyone in our zones.

We did have our primary program a couple weeks ago…it was awesome. I loved hearing all the songs in Spanish.

Ok, I am about out of time…I love you all!
Love,
Chase

Received Mon, Oct 26, 2009

2009-11-01T17:26:00.000-08:00

Dear Family,

Well this week I don’t have a ton of stuff written down, but luckily Mom has provided me with a nice long list of questions/things to talk about.

First off, I am glad everyone is enjoying my iPod…I definitely had some good music on there. I think I have a workout playlist on there too that has crazier music to keep me entertained when I use to always go running. I don’t think I ever mentioned that the music rules got a lot stricter in the mission a month or 2 ago. We are now only allowed to listen to Mormon Tabernacle Choir, classical music, and EFY music. Usually we listen to motab in the morning, EFY in the car, and classical music on P-days and other times were in the apartment. I actually like classical music…it is the best workout music we have. Between my companion and I we have EFY CD’s 1999 to 2009. There are surprisingly a lot of really good songs on the newest EFY CD’s but I am definitely getting sick of hearing the same stuff over and over and over and over again. I just tell myself that I am going to really love and appreciate normal music when I can listen to it again.

Halloween: We haven’t gotten any direction yet. I’m sure we’ll just have a normal day. To be honest I doubt very many people are going to go out trick or treating around here. If I was a parent I definitely wouldn’t want my kids walking around at night time in this area. I will have to report next week what happens though.

I’m pretty sure I know Elder Barrow’s grandpa. He is a crazy old man named Wiley Barrow. He is in one of the 3 Sugar Land wards. I did service with him during the hurricane. With him, we patched up peoples roofs. They told us to be really careful if we were going to be on roofs and to try to stay away from steep roofs and 2 story houses. Well all the houses he took us to were really tall 2 story houses and they were all really steep. It was probably my most fun day of service though.

ACT: The second time taking the ACT is always better. I don’t remember where I got it from…but I got a practice test and I took that a week before I took the real thing. I think they had it in the office at the high school or something. All the counselors there are absolutely oblivious to the ACT, but I think they do have a stack of practice tests you can take. I also did like all of the practice questions they have online. That helped me out a lot.

Dads talk: I actually shared the same story about Captain Moroni 2-3 times this week. The wars chapters of the Book of Mormon are my favorite part of the whole thing and Captain Moroni is my favorite one to read about.

AHS Soccer: Quinn that is too bad about not making it onto the team, but its also no big deal. The same thing happened to me and Christopher. I will tell you one thing though, I wish that I had tried out for the track team as well. I would have loved to do the 100m dash and the long jump and maybe the high jump. If you like to do any of that stuff I would definitely do that…it would be fun.

Swine Flu: We haven’t gotten any direction on the swine flu as far as the vaccine, but at our last zone conference the Saylin’s bought a ton of those little hand sanitizer bottles and have them to us and told us to use them all throughout the day. They’ve told us to be careful and wash our hands a lot. A couple weeks ago when I got sick I don’t know what it was but I had all the symptoms of the swine flu. So maybe I already got it, I don’t know. I survived and I’m fine now, so I’m not worried about it. I actually worked every day I was sick too.

Yes I got the 1001 pitfalls book and I read it every morning as I eat my cereal and during lunch too. It is a good book. I also found this picture dictionary we have in our apartment. It takes a scene like a grocery store and it has definitions of allll the things you can find in a grocery store. So its like you study the vocab by topic which I have been loving too.

I actually just got an e-mail from Tony today. He got to Argentina a few weeks ago (he had a little Visa delay). His companion is from Buenos Aires and has a thick Argentine accent, so he can barely understand him. He says everyone talks fast and with that accent so they are hard to understand, but he says its getting better every day.

Ok I am just about out of time. This week has been a good one though. We had 10 people at church yesterday. We are teaching a bunch of really good people are I don’t doubt are going to get baptized in the near future. This is our last week of the transfer so we will get the transfer call next week. There is not much of a chance either of us will get transferred and I definitely hope we both stay. Its pretty certain that I’m going to kill him off, as we say in the mission. Hes only got like 2 transfers left…he goes home January 23 or something.

Oh yeah, and about that thing we need to send to the Burtons, I am planning on writing that little paragraph today and I’ll just send it in the mail, then Mom maybe you could type it up and e-mail it to Sister Burton along with those 2 pictures. I’ll probably just send you the letter that she sent to me that has all her information and a description of what exactly it is.

Ok, have a good week! I love you all!

Chase

Received Mon Oct 19, 2009

2009-10-25T21:17:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

I think I will start this week’s letter by responding to Mom’s letter. First question: What is everyone’s record for fantasy football? Next comment…I thought that missionaries could always e-mail in the MTC. I e-mailed the whole time I was there. We either had 30 or 45 minutes to e-mail…I think it was 30. Out in the field we get 45 minutes. I remember when I tried out for the soccer team the first year it was when there were a whole bunch of fires and the air quality was really bad, so that was not a very fun time either. The coaches are pretty stupid…I don’t think they gave us many water breaks either.

That is awesome that Zak got to do the Missionary for a day thing. I did that as well and I had a good time. I thought it was all interesting. I went to La Canada where everyone was rich.

Ok…this has been a good week. Yesterday we had 7 people at church and they all had really good experiences. We also had a baptism yesterday. The baptism went well for the most part, but Abev, the kid getting baptized, was really nervous. He didn’t really know how to act being the center of attention. He kept hiding before the baptismal service, then he had to get a drink, then he got really hungry and needed a snack. It all went well though. I did have one funny/embarrassing experience. Before the baptismal service the mom of the kid getting baptized was carrying in a big cake with a bunch of cupcakes and it was all decorated and it looked good. So I said…wow…how beautiful! (in Spanish of course). Then she turned around with a big smile and was like…really?? Thank you elder!!! Then I said it yeah…it looks good. Then she was like, Me?? Then I realized she thought I was talking about her the whole time. So I said…Oh NO, no, no, I was talking about the cake. Haha….it was embarrassing, but hilarious at the same time. I’ve learned to never be embarrassed on my mission and just laugh at stuff like that.

Lets see…last week I mentioned we have a bunch of people with baptismal dates. I think I talked about a few of them, but I’ll tell a little more. One of them is named Victor; he is awesome. He is from Nicaragua and he has been here for only about 3 months. He’s like 46 years old and he has a family back in Nicaragua who he sends all his money to. He’s probably one of the most humble and genuinely nicest guys I’ve ever met. Well, about the second time we stopped by, when he opened the door we noticed he had a shirt of something wrapped around his elbow and when he sat down he was obviously in a lot of pain. When we asked what happened he was pretty distressed. He works at night, so the night before he was returning home from work at like 1 or 2 in the morning and when he was crossing the street to his apartment complex these 3 guys jumped out of a car and jumped him. They hit him in the arm with a baseball bat or something and stole everything he had. He managed to stumble away and run back to his apartment. But now he has no form of identification at all or anything. He cant go to the hospital either. He started to cry when he told us all of this stuff. These situations are always hard to know what to do. We said a prayer with him with helped a lot then we made a sling out of an old shirt he had. Then we started talking about the gospel to get his mind off everything and it turns out he is an amazing person and he is very prepared for the gospel. So that’s when we extended a baptismal invitation for November 15 and he accepted. He came to church yesterday and had a great time. I love him because he’s one of the most real people I’ve met here. It seems like everyone hides behind a big act or a mask or something. One of the most important steps for an investigator to take when were teaching them is to get them to take off that mask they hide behind and really open up and be real. After that is when everything takes off and they really start to progress and their lives change. We have 4-5 investigators who are at that point, and we love teaching them. I will tell you about some more of them next week.

We had our zone conference this week too. My companion and I were asked to do a role play in front of everyone to show them how they should teach this new principle that we learned. (Role playing is when 2 missionaries act like they are investigators and 2 other missionaries teach them). That was pretty nerve wracking. We were in front of half the mission, so we had to make sure it was pretty much perfect. Fortunately it went really well and we had an excellent zone conference. President Saylin has done some pretty remarkable things in the mission. Everyone is so much more obedient, even though we were already a pretty obedient mission. When he got here we had like 80 investigators with a baptismal date in the mission, now we have over 150. It has been cool to watch all of this stuff happen.

Ok, I haven’t shared any food stories recently. One of my new favorite things is Banana Milk. A member in our ward taught us how to make it. All you do is throw a banana in a blender, put in some milk and some sugar, then blend it up. I don’t really like bananas very much, but when its in the form of banana milk it is delicious. I usually make some banana milk to drink with my lunch. For lunch I have a new favorite thing. I’ve discovered at our walmart here a bag of chopped up chicken…fajita chicken or something. Its already cooked and seasoned so all you have to do it heat it up. With that I’ve been making chicken quesadillas, which I love. My secret ingredient is masterpiece bbq sauce. It is delicious.

The other new thing that I’ve found that I like are plums. The purple ones. I bought red ones last week and they were disgusting. I’ve bought apples a couple times in my mission, but I never like them that much. So one day I bought a couple plums and I loved them. Plums are just like apples, but they are juicier and they taste better.

Oh yeah...and I forgot to write up that little summary about how my mission is going (for that Christmas present for my BYU bishop)..I need to make sure I do that next week, then you can e-mail all that stuff to Mrs. Burton.

Well…everything is still going great. We have tons of people to teach. On Saturday we had more to do than we had time. We were late to everything and in a rush from the morning all the way until we went to sleep at night. If I had to choose a problem to have, I’d definitely take having too much to do over having nothing to do. Ok, I love you all!! Have a good week!!

Love,
Chase

PS. Mom thank you for buying that book…I’ve wondered since the start of my mission if there was a book out there like that and now I finally found it. I am excited.

Received Mon Oct 12, 2009

2009-10-25T21:00:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

This week all the computers in our library were full except for the computers in the kids section, so me and my companion are here sitting on little tiny chairs and my legs can barely fit under the table…it is probably a funny sight.

That was an exciting e-mail! Congratulations to Steven…I thought that was a creative/cool engagement story. My question is, how did you do it? Did you somehow figure out how to edit a movie, and insert a little movie of yourself, and just time it perfectly so that it would all work out? And how did you choose the Mount Timpanogus temple?

The Griffin story made me laugh as usual. When I was in primary I wondered why my name was part of the 13th article of faith too.

Fantasy Football: I think it is funny how random all our fantasy football seasons have been…you never know who is going to have the best team. So what is everyone’s record right now?

I am excited for Christopher that he gets to come to Houston for an interview. I’m sure he wont get to see much of the city, but I bet it will still be fun. I don’t think I could ever live in a big city. It seems like there's cars whizzing by all around you and there are freeways going everywhere and the people drive crazy here. We hear/see car accidents all the time and people jaywalk all over the place and they get hit pretty frequently too…it is pretty crazy here. This is definitely my favorite place to be when it comes to being a missionary though.

Ok, now on to my list of things to write about. First, I got a letter from someone in my BYU ward…well their parents (the Burtons) actually and they are putting together a Christmas gift for our bishop there. They want all the missionaries to send them 2 pictures from their mission. 1 unique picture that shows something unique about their mission, and 1 picture that depicts missionary work. Well unfortunately I accidentally washed my flash drive, so I don’t have any pictures on there to look at, but (hopefully) all of my pictures are on Mom’s computer. I was thinking that for the 1 unique picture, I could send that one picture of me and Elder Pedersen standing on the seawall with the ocean in the background. Then for the other picture I could send a picture of me with the Dors (the black family from Haiti) when they were all dressed in white right before their baptism. Those are the only 2 pictures I can think of. I forgot to bring the Burton’s e-mail address, so I will try to bring it next week, but Mom if you could e-mail those pictures next week, that would be great. You can also look through my pictures and see if you can find any better ones to share. The Burtons also said they will send whatever they are making to all the parents too if you ask for it. I assume you do want one, so when you e-mail it you can just ask for it. I think I also have to write up a little summary of my mission too or something…I’ll figure that out later. Maybe I’ll just mail that home and you can type it up.

Ok…I have a couple more things written down. I went on 2 exchanges this last week. 1 of the exchanges I went to an area called Fresno, which covers part of Sugar Land and all that surrounding area. It is pretty difficult to find Hispanics there, but they have this one random part of their area that is away from everything else and it looks like the country side and there are a lot of Hispanics there. So we spent a lot of time there. It is pretty ghetto there though. Apparently there are problems with a lot of gangs there. There was graffiti all over EVERYthing. I guess the night before they went on a little rampage and graffitied all the road signs, walls, and some trailer homes (most people there live in trailers). The craziest part was when we were talking to one of their investigators and his older brother walked by and the investigator told us he was going to go fight someone down the street or something. He went to this one house where some pretty hardcore gangsters live. After talking to the investigator for a couple minutes we road back down the street and when we past the house with the hardcore gangsters we saw a couple of them outside getting ready to go to the fight or something and one of them was walking around with this big rifle and I didn’t stare over there long enough to see what other weapons they had, but it was pretty crazy. That is the first time I’ve actually seen a gun on my mission. I’ve heard several gunshots but I’ve never seen people holding guns. So that was my adventure there.

Then I went on exchanges with Elder Pedersen in another part of Houston. It was a good exchange. It definitely felt weird at first because the last time we were together he was pretty much training me. But we had a good exchange. He only has like 3 months on his mission now. I was happy to see that he had changed a couple things for the better and he is doing amazing things in the area hes at.

We are going to be having a baptism this Sunday! There is this one family who has been coming to church for a long time, but the parents cant get baptized because they are not married and they are living together. The husband still is technically married to someone down in Mexico, so they have to save up enough money to pay for the divorce, then get married to the lady he’s living with now. Unfortunately a lot of people are caught in this situation…they just don’t have enough money to pay for it all. There are 4 kids and 2 of them are old enough to get baptized. The younger of the 2 got baptized like 2 months ago, and the older one has been resisting it for whatever reason. Well it turns out he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to “pass” the baptismal interview and he thought it was a test. We explained about that and we actually gave him all the baptismal interview questions. We had some good lessons with him, then after general conference he came up to me and said, hey I think I’m finally ready to get baptized, can I do it on Sunday? Haha…that’s what every missionary wants to hear. So he is going to be baptized on this upcoming Sunday.

We have been having a ton of success lately. We currently have 8 people with baptismal dates. We have seen a lot of miracles…it is exciting. We have several more who we are going to be extending dates too as well. At the start of this transfer, we had 11 baptismal dates in the zone. Our zone has 10 companionships. Now we have something like 36 baptismal dates in the zone. It’s been awesome to watch happen. Whenever a companionship gets a baptismal date they call us and tell us about it, so that we can hear the stories and also write it on a whiteboard and keep track of it. Its always fun to hear those stories. Missionaries have been putting the trainings into action and obviously have been seeing a lot of success.

Ok well I’m almost out of time, so I have to wrap it up. Next week I’ll have to write about how we extended a couple of our baptismal dates. I do have 1 other request though. There is a book called 1001 Pitfall in Spanish and one of the missionaries had it when I was on exchanges, so I studied out of it one day and it is a good book. It talks about all the really frequent mistakes people make when speaking Spanish. Most missionaries make tons of these little mistakes and I always notice the little things and I always wonder what the correct way to say things is. On the back of the book it said it was like 11 bucks or something, so I was wondering if I could get an early Christmas present and get this book. It is called Barron’s 1001 Pitfalls in Spanish. The one I was looking at said 3rd edition, but I don’t know if that makes a difference. I only want the book if it is cheap though. So if you can find it somewhere for cheap, I would absolutely love to have this book. It will answer the little questions about Spanish I’ve had over my whole mission.

Ok that is all for this week. This is a pretty long one. I hope you have a great week! I love you all!!!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon Oct 5, 2009

2009-10-05T11:37:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

Yes Mom, I did get the cookies, they did not melt, and they were delicious. They were all gone in 2-3 days. Thank you for sending them...I loved them. My companion also thought they were amazing.

Congratulations Christopher! I bet that is a relief to have all that under your belt now. I think that would be awesome if Christopher came to Houston for an interview, just to see how everything is. It would definitely be an experience. As much as I love Houston, I don’t think I would ever live here by my own free will. At least not in actual Houston. As a missionary I absolutely love it though.

Unfortunately I got sick this week…I’m not sure what it was, but I think it’s allergies. At the beginning of the week I got a really bad headache and I started to get a sore throat and an upset stomach. Then I didn’t get any sleep at all the next night and was just exhausted the next couple days. On Friday I finally talked to our missionary doctor guy and he told me to buy Zyrtec, so I did and it has helped a looot. I still have a cough and a stuffy nose sometimes, but at least I don’t feel exhausted all the time. I also apparently got poison oak all over my arms when I chopped down that forest last week and its been spreading all over my arms. I usually just tell people I have leprosy. I think finally it stopped spreading and its slowly starting to heal and go away. It is not fun though. It itches like crazy and it spreads like wildfire.

I thought all of conference was good. I always like to try to figure out what the overall theme of conference is going to be. Since being on my mission I’ve noticed that each conference has some overlying theme. This conference it seemed to me that the theme was love. That was a good topic because there is less and less love in the world. People don’t really know what real love feels like. Being on a mission and getting to know so many people has really shown me how lucky I am to have a solid family where we actually love each other. There are sooo many broken families here and I’d say at least 60% of the couples living together here are not married. There are so many children being born in unestablished families. If you have a strong family, life is soooo much easier and people are forgetting that. I loved President Uchtdorf’s talk, and when he said “Let us be known has a people who love God, and who love our neighbors as ourselves.” I get the feeling that the world around us is going to keep degenerating, but that is no excuse for us to lower our standards or change our way of living. I think that is why so many of the talks have been based off simple, but important principles.

Just being on a mission here has really helped me see how big of a blessing the gospel is. All these little things like, going to college, being able to speak English, having a decent place to live, are all blessings I didn’t realize were that big or that uncommon.

Despite being sick, we actually had a really good week. We have 4 people with baptismal dates now. We had a really cool experience with a recent convert too, his name is Anibal. He agreed to come out teaching with us one night, so we picked him up and went to go to our appointment. We had the apartment number, but apparently there were 4 different buildings/sections, A B C D, so we ran to every single building, knocking on every apartment number 218 and stopped and talked to people quickly between apartments. Of course they were in the very last one we checked, so we got there kind of late, but so did the people we had the appointment with, so it all worked out well. We didn’t have much time, so we talked to them about the Book of Mormon and I’m not even sure what else, but Anibal bore his testimony about how all of this has blessed his life and the people we were teaching loved it. Afterwards when we got into the car to go back, Anibal told us that he loved going out and teaching people about the gospel and that it made him feel so good. That little experience changed him totally. It was a good night.

We also found these 2 other people named Jocelyn and Alejandra Rodriguez. Alejandra is 9 and she is Jocelyn’s daughter. Jocelyn is in her mid 20’s and they all live in an apartment with Jocelyn’s boyfriend named Mario. We found them because we had an appointment with their neighbors, but they weren't home, and the door to the Rodriguez’s apartment was open so we stuck our heads in and asked if we could share our message with them. We had a good lesson and Jocelyn and Alejandra both accepted the invitation to prepare themselves to get baptized. Last night we had another lesson with them..it was a really memorable one. When we came to the door they were on their way out to go wash clothes at a nearby Laundromat, so we asked if we could drive to the Laundromat and just teach them there. They said OK, so we went and had a lesson sitting on the curb outside the Laundromat. We had a really good lesson and they opened up and told us everything…all their concerns and their whole stories and everything. I’ll spare the details, but like most people we’ve talked to here, they have had tough lives and they are not in a good situation right now. They know that the gospel is the way to fix everything and they are excited to get baptized. The cool part about the whole lesson was that we had this good experience in a huge parking lot in the middle of a huge busy city.

Ok, well that’s about it for this week….I cant think of any other good stories to write about for this week. I am finally almost done unpacking…I just have a couple more things to put away. Ok, have a good week!! I love you all!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon Sept 28, 2009

2009-10-02T17:13:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

Ok….where do I start. My new area is called Houston 2, named after the Spanish ward we are serving in. It is located in inner-city Houston..Yessss…exactly what I was hoping for. There is a highway called Beltloop 8 or something that makes a big circle/square around Houston. We are inside that circle just south west of the very center of the city. In our area we have Rice University and also the Reliant Stadium (where the Texans play). I love this area already. There are tons and tons of people walking out on the streets and at least half of them are Hispanic. It is so much fun to have Hispanics all around you all the time to talk to. Sometimes we take 30-45 minutes walking from our car in a parking lot into an apartment complex because we talk to so many people. There are TONS and TONS of apartment complexes all over the place, which means there are tons of people. A lot of the apartment complexes in Houston are kind of naturally segregated, where certain complexes are full of Hispanics and others are full of African American people. So we obviously go to the Hispanic ones and just talk to everyone.

Our ward (notice it is a ward, not a branch) is called Houston 2, or Barrio Dos. This is my first time I’ve ever gone to a Spanish ward, rather than a branch. I loved it. Everything is still exactly the same (the singing, starting late, ect), but there is just a lot more people. Our sacrament attendance is usually around 130. We also have 3 sets of missionaries in our ward. In our zone we have 4 different wards, each have 2-3 companionships in them, and we have 4 districts, each assigned to a ward.

My companion is Elder Cameron. He is from Utah somewhere, I forgot where. He’s been out about 21 months, and he has 3 transfers left, so I will probably kill him off, as we say in the mission (I’ll be his last companion in the mission). He is an awesome missionary and I was excited when I found out I was going to be with him. I’ve already learned a ton. We are going to have a good time together.

These last few days have probably been the busiest of my whole mission. I got here on Wednesday after transfer meeting and I haven’t had a chance to unpack yet. On Wednesday we had appointments until night time and I was exhausted when we got back so I didn’t unpack. On Thursday we literally had meetings all day long. We had a Zone Leader Council starting at 9am and it didn’t end til 4:30. In that meeting all the zone leaders in the mission (there are 12 of us) have a meeting in Sugar Land and we have a big meeting with President Saylin and the assistants and we talk about the direction of our mission and what things we need to do to improve and what we need to teach to our zones. President Saylin had a meeting in Dallas 2 weeks ago with Elder M. Russell Ballard and Elder Claudio R.M. Costa, so we talked about a lot of things he learned there. It was a pretty intense meeting. We had it in the high council room in the stake center in Sugar Land. When we got out of that meeting we rushed as fast as we could to dinner (Sugar Land is about 30 min from our area), then we ate, then we got picked up to go to a stake correlation meeting. The stake president, high counselor over missionary work, all the bishops in the stake and all the ward mission leaders in the stake go to this meeting and they give reports on how the missionary work is going in each of their wards. Me and my companion are there to answer any questions they have about the investigators and also to represent the missionaries and relay any information over to our zone. Our mission president usually comes with us to that too. That meeting was pretty intense too. That meeting went until almost 9, then we went back to our apartment and that was the end of our day.

The next day we had a district meeting, then I went on exchanges with an elder in an area called Missouri City. It was pretty fun. We did service that day for a member. They have a big back yard and half of it is overgrown by these big huge weeds and bamboo looking trees. So we all got machete’s and just started hacking down the huge forest. It was so much fun. They were pretty good, sharp machetes, so if I swung as hard as I could, I could chop down like 4 trees as the same time. It was so cool. We did that for like 3 ½ hours. Now my arms are all sore and my forearms are hurting just typing, but it was worth it. The Elder I was with was also have some problems with his companion and it was almost the same thing that was going on with my last companion, so I knew exactly how to help him. He felt way better by the end of our transfer…so I felt really good about that. I think that’s one of my favorite parts about missionary work…just helping other people and seeing how big of an impact you can make in someone’s life. A day or 2 ago we found out that a brand new Elder who just got here on Wednesday was having a really difficult time. Their area is also pretty ghetto and he was freaked out by everything. It was a huge culture shock for him. He was pretty miserable, just fearing for his life from morning til night. President Saylin talked to him, then asked us to give him a visit as well. We did and it helped him a lot. President Saylin also got them a car, because their area was a bike area. You could just tell by his countenance that he felt 100% better after President had that talk with him and he helped reassure him, so he feels much better now.

Hmm…what else have I missed. We are speaking Spanish a lot because there are Hispanics everywhere. My companion and I speak Spanish to each other pretty frequently too. Elder Cameron’s Spanish is really good.

I have met everyone in my district and in my zone. On Friday’s for our district meetings almost our whole zone meets together in the same building for the first part of district meeting, then we split off into our districts for the last part, so I get to see everyone pretty much every week. 4 wards also meet in the building where we have church, so I see missionaries there too. We have a pretty cool zone and I’m happy to be here, but the only part that’s kind of weird for me is that all of our district leaders have way more time than me in the mission. One of our district leaders is actually Elder Pedersen, who pretty much trained me. Pretty much everyone in the zone are good missionaries though, so it will be good.

Oh yeah, we have an awesome apartment. Its huge and everything in it is really nice. We have surround sound speakers in our apartment with a sweet sound system. We each have huge closets and nice beds and the bathroom is huge too. We even have a little type writer in there that we can use if we want to write letters. I bet its more of a hassle to use that thing, but its still cool. I’m definitely happy with our apartment. Our car is also really nice…it’s a new 2009 Chevy Malibu. I have to admit that I am happy to be in a car area. It is cooling down a lot, but you would still be drenched in sweat every day if you had to bike everywhere. I only need to shower once a day now, so that’s nice.

Ok I think I covered everything. Have a good rest of the trip and enjoy playing Mom’s DS, because I will have to shatter those records upon my return. Have a good week, I love you all!!!

Love,
Chase

Received Sept 21, 2009

2009-10-02T17:07:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

This has been a pretty interesting week for me.

I’ll start off with a story. On Wednesday afternoon we got a call from the mission office. One of the office ladies told us that President Saylin wanted to see us in his office the next day at 11:00am for an interview. That’s all that we knew. We didn’t know if he was going to interview just one of us, both of us, or what. I was trying to figure out in my mind why he would want to have an interview. The only thing that I could think of was that in my last president’s letter I mentioned that this has been probably the hardest portion of my mission (especially with the companion, the area, other stuff like that). But I also mentioned how I had that good exchange with Elder Geinger and that helped a lot. I was thinking maybe he was going to interview us both at the same time and try to figure out how to help us or something. That is definitely not what I was hoping would happen. Well, when we arrived at the mission office the next day it turns out President Saylin just wanted to interview me. He started by asking the normal questions, like asking how I was doing and all that. I told him good. Then he said that he had been praying about transfers all week and last night, well morning, at 1:30am he finally got confirmation on everything he was supposed to do. He said he was planning on keeping me in my area to help the branch and to get everything rolling there, but upon praying he found that the Lord wanted me to be a zone leader. I was not expecting that. But of course I accepted. He told me how the responsibilities of zone leaders are going to be increased and a bunch of other stuff that all translated into it is going to be stressful and a lot of work. I am a little nervous, but not too bad. I’ll just do the best that I can do and that’s all that I can do, so I’ll be happy with that. One of my good friends in the mission is also a zone leader right now, so hopefully I’ll be with him, but we’ll see. Transfer meeting is this Wednesday, so next week I’ll fill you in on everything.

Next piece of news. Elder Claudio R.M. Costa from the presidency of the Seventy came and spoke to the 3 Houston missions on Saturday morning. He is from Brazil and he joined the church when he was 28. He has a pretty amazing conversion story, which he shared with us. He was also a mission president twice and he has some incredible missionary stories, which are always fun to hear. He is an awesome speaker. After that meeting he automatically became one of my favorite general authorities. He was really funny and entertaining and interesting for the entire 2 hours he spoke. He had no notes or anything, but it all flowed together and he taught a lot of interesting things. He taught all about what exactly the Seventy is, how many quorums there are, how long they are called for, etc. Then he talked about mission presidents and their responsibilities, then he talked about the calling of a missionary and missionary experiences for the rest of the time. He told some amazing stories. He was the mission president over the whole amazon jungle in Brazil. He told stories about how missionaries would baptize every single week of their entire missions, and he told us how they did it. The thing I loved about him is that he still does missionary work every day. He told us how people had told him that missionary work was hard in America. He said he wanted to see for himself, so for these past 2 years, he has been sharing the gospel with everyone. He told about a lot of experiences and one he just had when he was in the airport coming from Provo to Houston just hours before. Then he said, “See, its easy!!” It was a good talk. Very motivating too.

After that we had some great lessons and we extended 4 more baptismal dates. I think I mentioned how we’ve been taught that we need to start extending baptismal dates earlier and more effectively. So that’s what we’ve been doing. We finally have some fairly solid investigators, so I feel pretty good about that. One of my goals in my mission is to always leave and area better than I found it. So I feel pretty good about leaving this area…I think we have made a lot of progress.

Other stories…I got some good compliments on my Spanish again this week. We were visiting this one older member and she asked me where I learned Spanish because I don’t have the same accent that most of the other missionaries do. She said I sounded like I was from somewhere in Central America. I told her I just learned in the MTC then from talking to everyone out here. That made me feel good though. I actually have bumped up my Spanish studies a notch this past week or so. Anytime I’m just relaxing after eating a meal, or in the mornings or evenings, I have a dictionary, then this little red Spanish book we get in the MTC and I just read out of there and study vocab all the time. It has not only helped me increase my vocab, but it also gets my mind in Spanish mode 24/7. The only problem is whenever we knock on someone’s door and they are English speaking, I stumble over a lot of my word and have trouble speaking because Spanish words keep coming out instead of English.

I also got another good compliment this week. Well, I consider it a compliment at least. We were teaching this one investigator who has been taught by missionaries a lot in the past. This was just my second time having a conversation with him, then part way through the lesson he was like, wait I have 1 question…it doesn’t really have to do with what were talking about right now, but I was just wondering when you joined the church. I was kind of puzzled and told him I got baptized when I was 8. He was like, oh wow…I was thinking you didn’t grow up in the church because you use a lot of scriptures from the bible and most missionaries I’ve talked to just use the Book of Mormon. He went on the explain he knows the Book of Mormon is good, but its just new to him and its more comforting to know that all this stuff is also in the Bible.

Ok, that’s most of my updates for this week, but now I will give my reactions/comments in response to Mom’s e-mail.

Have fun on the trip to Utah/Idaho and good luck to Christopher. That sounds like something really exciting. I would have loved to come and watch that…I think it would be really interesting. But on second thought, its probably not quite and bad as mission a trip to Hawaii.

Griffin’s sacrament story made me laugh out loud.

I am very excited for the cookies. Its also funny because I was thinking this morning about how one of my latest craves has been cookies. As of right now my favorite snack before I go to bed has been dipping oreos in milk. I bought Chips Ahoy last week, but they just aren’t as good. Hopefully I will get it soon. If it gets here before Wednesday I will get it at transfer meeting, if not, well since I have no idea where I’ll be, I have no idea when I’ll get it, but hopefully I’ll get it on Friday at our district meeting.

And lastly, Mom don't worry about the start/finish of your e-mails (I don't you probably aren't too worried about it, but just in case). The best way to start is to just start typing about whatever you want, and the best way to finish is to write Love, Mom. It doesn't matter to me if it is all random.

Ok, that’s all for this week! Have a great week and have fun in Utah/Idaho!! I love you all!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon Sept 14, 2009

2009-09-14T14:02:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

Lets see…I only have a couple things written down for this week. First, I realized that I made a mistake in my last e-mail. I mentioned a drink called Sangria that was a watermelon drink. Well actually Sangria is a nasty grape juice drink that people always give us to drink. I think its gross. Sandia is actually the watermelon drink.

Second, I got to go to the Pulga yesterday. The Pulga is basically a big swap meet…I think that’s what its called. It’s a flea market for Hispanics. Its just full of a bunch of stands of random stuff…most of which is counterfeit and really cheap. I got to go because the missionaries have a stand there with copies of the Book of Mormon, pass a long cards, pamphlets, etc, and we talk to everyone that walks by. We didn’t get to talk to that many people because it was sprinkling on and off so there weren’t that many people, but it was still a fun experience. There was Hispanic music blasting all around us and it was cool to see all the stuff they have there. There is also this guy there who loves missionaries and he owns this juice stand, so he always gives the missionaries a free drink every time we go. I got horchata…it was way good. Before we left I also got a Barcelona soccer jersey. That’s Ronaldinho’s team…he’s an amazing soccer player. It cost 15 bucks and that is a really good price for a jersey. So I am pretty excited about that. Watching soccer is obviously huge among the Hispanic culture here. Everyone has their team that they love. A lot of the Hispanics love Chivas, but I’ve decided my team is Barcelona. I would like to get a Chivas jersey before the end of my mission though. We see people playing soccer all throughout the day and whenever we go into houses they have the games on…that always makes me want to play soccer. I definitely want to play on an intramural team at BYU.

When I went to the Pulga I was actually on exchanges with an elder named Elder Geinger. He’s been one of my friends pretty much since the beginning of my mission. This is his very last transfer, so hes going home in about a week. We had a really good exchange though. I haven’t really written about it much, but I have been having a really difficult time with my companion. I feel like I have to defend myself all day long and it’s a fight any time I suggest anything. He’s a good guy, but he just has a single tracked mind, so if I suggest anything that isn’t exactly in line with what he was thinking, it is an absurd idea. There's just a lot of things that haven’t been going that well and it is really tiring. Elder Geinger and I have had very similar missions in terms of companions and areas and he knew exactly what I was going through. It was really reassuring to have someone I respect agree with me and tell me he knows exactly whats going on. It helped me to be confident about it all and to know that’s just part of the mission and its one of those times where you grow the most, so I am pretty happy about that.

Spanish is still going really well. I’ve actually had several dreams in Spanish and at night all my thoughts and conversations going through my mind are all in Spanish.

Ok, I have a question now. Christopher wrote me a while ago to tell me all about what exactly his thesis and all that was about and I liked it a lot because I really know nothing about that. My question now is, what exactly is defending your thesis. You stand in front of some people and they ask you questions about it, is what I think Christopher told me. But everyone is going up there to watch it, so other people are invited to come and watch too?

My responses to Mom’s random thoughts:
Wow…it looks like BYU might seriously have a good team this year. That is exciting. One of the players, Carter Mees, I believe hes some sort of safety, he just left out mission in December. He was an AP…he was a really cool guy. And I’ve never heard of the team called Tulane. Probably because they clearly stink.

Not surprising to hear Donovan McNabb got hurt again, but I am surprised it happened so soon in the season.

Zak’s quote made me laugh.

I was impressed by Mom’s correct use of the command form in Spanish (Habla espanol).

Ok that’s all for this week. This is the last week in the transfer already! It always seems to come so fast. I am about to complete my 9th transfer. That means I’ll get the transfer call next Monday. I don’t fully expect any changes, but you never know, so we’ll see. Have a good week! I love you all!!!

Love,
Chase

Received Tuesday, Sept 8, 2009

2009-09-08T16:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

I did not e-mail yesterday, as you might have guessed, because it was Memorial Day [I am sure Chase means Labor Day!] and no libraries were opened. President Saylin said that we could end our P-day 1 hour early (at 5:00pm) and take an hour on Tuesday to e-mail, so that is why you are getting my e-mail a day late.

I will start with my comments about Mom’s e-mail to me. It was an excellent e-mail. It got several audible responses from me as well as a fist pump when I read about BYU beating Oklahoma. Mom’s recap on the sacrament meeting also got several laughs out of me, especially the how the nicknames were included so I could understand who was being talked about. I started reading about Brother Holling giving his testimony and immediately thought…who the heck is that, then I remembered. Mom totally predicted my thoughts. That is also exciting that an investigator bore his testimony. One of the sister’s (they are also in our ward) investigators also bore his testimony. That’s always really exciting for the missionaries. I also want to comment that I know exactly what Griffin is talking about when he says he wants one of those cool tooth holders that you get from school. They are shaped like a treasure box and they come in all different colors. I got one of those too.

I’m starting a new paragraph here just because all that last paragraph was all random thoughts, but I still have more. That is a funny coincidence that Zak has Mrs. Goto as his chemistry teacher. I think it will be interesting to see where all my friends are and what they are doing by the time I get home. I did get the Jensen’s cookies, I got them at my year mark. They sent me cookies and a package of Stride Gum, with a note that said Lengthen Your STRIDE. I thought that was nice. I also got the memory card/FF info this week. That was all interesting too. There are several players on there that I don’t know, but I do know most of them.

I did have a funny dream a while ago though. Every once in a while I have dreams that I’m back at home, but I’m all dressed in missionary clothes and I’m still trying to keep the missionary rules, but I’m at home and I’m really confused as to whats going on. Those dreams are always hilarious. But this one dream I had that I had just arrived at the airport to see all my family, but Christopher and Steven both had wives that I never heard about. Then I hugged all my family members and the 2 girls were there and I didn’t know what to do, so I just shook their hands and kept going. It was pretty funny.

Ok, now I have about 15 minutes left to write and I actually have a good amount of things written down to write about. First, is a question probably for Mom. We were visiting a member and she made a comment about making sure to wear sunscreen because you can get skin cancer or sun spots or something. Well, I’ve never worn sunscreen on my mission yet. In my mind, sunscreen was only used to prevent sunburns…I’ve never thought about skin cancer or any of that stuff. I’ve gotten a pretty decent tan, so that’s kind of like natural sunscreen and so I never think about wearing sunscreen. So my question is, should I really start wearing sunscreen? By the way, I took a pretty funny picture of my watch tan…it’s a good one.

Here are a couple random observations I’ve made over the past couple weeks of Rosenberg. First, there are about 5 or 6 ice cream men in this city. They are always driving around playing their music…we usually see them every day. I don’t know how they don’t go crazy listening to that same song over and over again. They are also pretty shady looking guys. Another strange thing I’ve noticed is that there are tons of mortuaries/funeral homes here. There are probably 8-10. I guess that’s a pretty good business here? I don’t know. I’ve also noticed how all the kids here still love skate boarding. At home that fad died away like when I was in 8th grade…I guess its still popular here. Another thing I’ve noticed is that out of all the Hispanics we talk to here, I’d say about 75-80% are from Mexico. In Galveston it was really diverse, here its mostly Mexican people. If they aren’t Mexican they are probably from El Salvador. Then every once in a while you find a Nicaraguan or a Guatemalan.

Next: I think I found a typo in the Bible. At the end of James 5:4 it says, Lord of the saboath. I’m pretty sure that’s not a word and I’m pretty sure they meant lord of the Sabbath. Am I right..is that a typo?

I also tried this drink last week called, sandría, which is basically watermelon juice. There is watermelon chunks floating in it and the rest is watermelon juice. It’s a pretty interesting drink, but its pretty good.

Oh yeah…one of our investigators caught the swine flu as well. He has this weird inhaler thing he has to take so many times a day.

I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned, but one of the big things were doing in our mission is extending baptismal dates sooner and more effectively. Well, we’ve been doing that and we now have 4 people with a baptismal date in our area. We have about 5 others who are also genuinely interesting. At the start of the transfer we had 0 progressing investigators, so I am pretty happy. The huge problem we are having though is that nearly every one of our investigators has to work on Sundays. Most of them work in restaurants and the weekends are their busiest day. So that is a big struggle and I cant really think of any way to help, except to pray and hope a miracle happens. Right now were just focusing on helping them develop a strong testimony, then after that is where the miracles will happen. So the missionary work is going a LOT better right now. Those first few weeks were pretty stressful. Were in week 5 of the transfer right now. Anything can happen at the end of this transfer too (as far as transfers go), so we’ll see what happens. I’ll be sad if I get transferred away so soon.

Ok, this is a pretty good sized e-mail. I think I hit just about everything on my list. Oh wait, I also finished the New Testament last week! That was exciting. Now I’m reading Jesus the Christ and I’m going to read Doctrine and Covenants. I didn’t realize how huge Jesus the Christ is...that's going to take some time to read.

Oh yeah, and my last random comment is that, I got a District of Columbia quarter and a Guam quarter the other day when I was getting change to pay for laundry…I didn’t even know they were making those.

Ok that’s all…have a good week (I almost subconsciously put in a “ya’ll” right here)! I love you all!
Love,
Chase

Received Mon, Aug 30, 2009

2009-08-31T10:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

That is exciting Quinn is starting high school. That is definitely where grades do start to count. Every grade you get will be a deciding factor in whether or not you get into a good college.

That was a smart idea too, to have Zak take the ACT. I remember I just took it my senior year…that was cutting it close. Plus then you can take it stress free and not really have to worry about doing perfect your first time.

Mrs. Gant was at Highland Oaks when I was there too. I don’t really know anything about her.

You will have to tell me how the BYU vs Oklahoma game goes. That will definitely be a challenge for them. I heard they’re going to be playing in the Superdome. Funny story about that…we are teaching this one girl and she said she’s going to be busy this weekend because shes going to the superbowl. We were like..what are you talking about…the superbowl isn’t until the end of the football season. We might not watch TV, but were not THAT out of it. Shes said, no…I’m going to the superbowl to watch my cousin play soccer for the first time. She thought we were so stupid for not knowing what she was talking about. Then when she mentioned that the “superbowl” was in Dallas, I realized she was talking about the Superdome.

Lets see…this week we went to the temple! We usually would go sometime next month, but the temple will be closed for cleaning. The temple was of course great. It is always nice to be able to go and just be inside the temple where there is nothing but peace and relaxation. It was definitely relieving after several long days of stressful work. Then afterwards we had our zone conference as usual, which was also very good. We got more trainings on some of the things the general authorities wanted us to get trained on. They were really helpful and it was all interesting, but of course, as always, loooong and tiring. We woke up at like 5:00am to get ready to leave and we got back at around 6:00pm. That night we did have a really good lesson with a new investigator, which made me really happy. We had a member come with us too, which was also a success in itself (We’re trying to work together more with the branch). We also found 1 other decent investigator as well, so it is nice to finally start having a little success. It is hard to do missionary work when you have 0 progressing investigators.

This week we actually found 14 investigators and last week we found 15. We had something like 23 or 24 set appointments this week, but probably all but 10 of those fell through. Most of the people here don’t know their work schedules and they just work whenever they can and for as long as they are told to, so they never know when they're home. That’s probably one of the biggest struggles in the area. We find tons of people, but they are never there for their return appointments.

I also did my first baptismal interview this week. It was a 9 year old girl. It went well. She was shy and a little nervous at start, but I asked her a lot of questions to get her talking and then she really opened up.

Oh yeah, and David Haven, the guy from my last area, got baptized on Wednesday. He’s the one who drove up to Idaho to spend time with this Mormon family members up there and he also wanted one of them to baptize him. That made me happy.

1 more story about my last area: First, there was this family named the Gomez family who moved down here from Utah about the same time I got to Richmond (around 6 months ago). We would stop by and visit them all the time and work with them to help them to stay active. Well, the last week I was in Richmond, their lives pretty much got turned upside down. It’s a long story, but I will try to condense it and have it make sense the best I can. They both have been studying all year to take the BAR exam to become certified lawyers or whatever. So they finally went to go take it and when they were about to take it, someone asked Brother Gomez to please come to the desk. He did and there was a US Marshall waiting there who then arrested him and told him that he was involved with the biggest visa fraud and immigration scams ever uncovered in the state of Utah. He had been working for some lawyer in Salt Lake City doing whatever he was told to do, and apparently his boss had him doing illegal things. So he got sent to jail and eventually was freed on $10,000 bond and we visited him the day after he got home and tried to help them and gave him a blessing. They found a lawyer who would take their case, but it was going to cost them $200,000. Well, I saw Elder Campbell at our temple zone conference and he told me that apparently the Gomez’s just disappeared. They must have flown back to Venezuela and went into hiding. Another big coincidence is that someone who just moved into the Richmond Ward is basically a US Marshall and apparently he was assigned to try to find Brother Gomez. This member went on exchanges with Elder Campbell and told him about his job and how he was actually supposed to be looking for someone who might be a member of the church and supposedly lives in Richmond area. Elder Campbell was like, uhh…is his name Carlos Gomez? That surprised the member and he told Elder Campbell that apparently the Gomez’s had gone into hiding or something. Pretty crazy story!

A couple of random thoughts/information about Rosenberg: People here are crazy about their cars. Lots of cars have neon lights underneath their cars, people get all sorts of paint jobs. They deck out their cars with all sorts of stuff. They usually aren’t very nice cars though, so all the add-ons/accessories probably end up costing more than the car does. Something new that I’ve never seen before is that people now have like speakers outside of their car or something. I’m not sure how it works but somehow their music gets played outside of their car. It might be coming from out of the hood of their car or something, but people drive by all the time with their music blaaasting. Half of the time its like those Mexican mariachi bands and music like that…it makes me laugh.

One last random thought. Coming and e-mailing in these libraries is like sitting on one of those metro’s or buses in the city…you meet and see all sorts of people. Today there is one guy in front of me and I’m pretty sure hes sending out those scam e-mails that asks for you to send him money, then he promises you will get re-paid millions or something. He’s been sending a bunch of those types of e-mails. Then this other guy next to him is probably the fastest 2 finger typer I’ve ever seen. He just uses his 2 index fingers to type, but he goes SO fast. If you hear it, it sounds like he’s using all his fingers, but when you watch, you see a flurry of index fingers going all across the keyboard. It is pretty funny.

Ok, well that’s about all for this week. We’re just working hard to find more good people to teach. Hopefully some of these people we’ve found will find time somehow to keep taking the lessons and be able to come to church on Sunday. I love you all!! Good luck in school!

Love,
Chase

Received Aug 24, 2009

2009-08-24T10:26:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

Happy Birthday Quinn! I think this is the first birthday that has been on a Monday since I left. So that means Quinn is going to be a teacher. I think the thing I was most excited about when I was going to be a teacher was that I would get to eat the leftover bread.

Answers to Mom’s questions:
The Spanish is coming easier and easier now. I am happy about that, especially because its only been about a week and a half. Depending on how quickly/what kind of accent someone has, I can understand about 75-95% of what people are saying. I’ve also learned that I can speak so much better when I focus on speaking slowly and clearly, rather that trying to speak quickly and sound exactly like a Hispanic. I think that when I start speaking Spanish I get really antsy and my mind doesn’t think clearly. While I’m talking to someone I’ll forget a word or keep on incorrectly conjugating a verb, then immediately after the conversation I know all the words I was trying to say and I can conjugate everything perfectly in my head. So I think nervousness kind of clouds my mind, but hopefully that will leave with time.

Me and my companion don’t really speak Spanish in our apartment. We are starting to try to speak Spanish all the time at least while were outside of the apartment. I’ve tried to do it several times, but I don’t think my companion really likes to do it. I’ve decided that this week I’m going to do it whether or not he does. We might be having half Spanish half English conversations, but I think it’ll really help my Spanish.

I probably know more Spanish than my companion does. We were probably almost even when I first got here, but I’ve been picking it up again pretty fast.

My companion and I live in a 1 bedroom apartment. Yes there is AC…I probably wouldn’t be alive if we didn’t.

Lets see…in other news, I went on exchanges with our zone leaders this week, whose area is in inner city Houston. It was fun. I hope I get to serve inside Houston sometime. Its exactly how I pictured it. Basically it is really really ghetto. You always hear sirens whizzing by and in at least 1 of the complexes we went into I overheard a little group of people talking about some crime that had just occurred in their complex, then the cops showed up a few minutes later. We ate dinner in this one complex and literally every person that I saw in there was black except for the Hispanic people’s houses we were eating at. We ate on a little table just outside of their apartment because her husband wasn’t home so we couldn’t go in. A bunch of kids came sat around and talked to us the whole time. Their parents who were in the stairwell above us would yell at them to get away every once in a while. I learned how prevalent racism still is when one of those kids started talking to us and telling us about how her mom doesn’t like white people or Hispanic people. The little girl didn’t really understand why. It surprised me how that stuff already starts to get engrained into the heads of the kids while they are so young. On our way out we past by these 2 girls who were coming into the complex who nicely let us know that we shouldn’t be in that complex. Of course we have to be careful, but it kind of made me laugh. We wouldn’t have gone in there if it was past dark. In the back of the area books they have certain complexes names written down and there are rules that you cant go to certain ones past sundown. That’s really how things are in the inner city though. I thought it was all interesting. There were people outside everywhere too, so we always had a lot of people to talk to. That makes missionary work a whole lot easier.

Now that I’ve been in my area for a little while, I’m starting to kind of get a grasp of how things are and what needs to get done. Basically, a lot of work needs to get done here. We don’t have a single progressing investigator. So we have basically no teaching pool…that’s a big problem. And the next big thing is that our relationship with the branch is not very good either. That’s another huge problem. There's all sorts of other little things that need to get worked out too, so we have a lot of work to do. We found 15 new investigators this week and taught 29 other lessons (other lessons are just lessons without members, whether we sit down and teach them in the home or just teach them in the streets), which is the most I’ve ever had. Hopefully soon we can get some solid investigators that we know will show up for lessons, and have members accompany us to them.

Next note I wrote down: Rain. It rained probably 3 times this week. We got soaked all 3 times. One of the times it was raining it was probably 95 degrees…it was weird. Yesterday I went into a gas station to buy a drink so I could get change for laundry (yes I have to pay for laundry now, which is not fun because its not very cheap either), which took about 2 minutes, but when I walked out it was POURING. We were only like a block away from home but we both got completely soaked.

Here's my one funny story for the week. We run into a lot of crazy people and have some interesting discussions almost every single day. Last week we had a really good one. I don’t know if this guy was slightly drunk or just plain crazy. In the middle of our lesson he’d go off and start talking about random stuff. One of the times he was like, So do you know who taught the Indians? I was guessing we were supposed to say God, so I did. He was like, “No…it was the ANTS! The Indians watched the ants and copied what they did. They saw how they traveled up and down the hills, and that is why Indians lived in the hills!” He then went on to tell us how they wrote down all the secrets of the world and put them underneath a pyramid. I think that part he was talking about how they discovered some metal plates (like the plates the BoM prophets wrote on) underneath one of the Great Pyramids. People also always love to bring up how the Mayan calendar ends on December 1, 2012 and that is when the end of the world is going to be. One person expanded on that theory and told us how in 2012 that will be the first time ever that all the planets will line up, and at the end of the planets, there is a dark hole and that is going to suck us all in. Haha…I bet you never knew that.

Ok, well that’s all for this week. Enjoy your last week of summer! School starts today here in Houston…which I am happy for because that means all the libraries wont be full of a bunch of kids looking at myspace and playing internet games. I love you all!

Love,
Chase

Received Aug 17, 2009

2009-08-17T10:28:00.000-07:00

Dear Family, (August 17th’s letter)

Well, I believe I answered Mom’s first question when I re-sent my last week’s e-mail. Here is a recap of transfer day. It was on Wednesday; I packed a little on Tuesday night and finished on Wednesday morning. We went to Sugar Land where we always have our transfer meeting, which includes singing hymns (of course) and hearing a talk or 2…I don’t even remember what happens because its so hard to pay attention. After you sit through those talks thinking about where you're getting transferred to, the mission president finally reads off a list of the new companionships and what area they will be. So he goes down a list and says like…Elder Cole and Elder McGrath will be serving together in the Brazos Central area. Then I stand up/look around to see who Elder McGrath is. Then after he goes through all the names we end the meeting, you throw all your luggage into a car and drive to your area. Our area is a bike area, so the English elders who cover our same area took us because they have a car.

So my new companion is Elder McGrath. He is from Sandy Utah. He’s been out for about 10 ½ months. My area is called Brazos Central, which covers mostly the city of Rosenberg, which is a city that borders Richmond (my last area). I’ve actually been on exchanges to Rosenberg several times, so I recognize a lot of different places, so I’m not totally lost. We attend the Brazos Spanish branch, hence the name Brazos central. We are in charge of teaching all the Spanish people around here, so there are English elders who teach all the English people in the same area. So if we run into a good potential English investigator we give them to the English elders. They also have a car, so sometimes they’ll give us rides, which is nice. There are also Spanish sisters who cover the Brazos branch and they have a car, so they cover everything that’s too far for us to bike to. We live in an apartment complex and luckily it is pretty clean for a missionary apartment. Of course its not like any of the last places I’ve stayed at, but its still pretty nice.
Yesterday was my first day going to church in Spanish since Galveston…so about 6 months. I forgot how it is to be in a Spanish branch, but it brought back a lot of memories that made me laugh. When we started sacrament meeting there were around 20-30 people there and I was thinking…”wow this is a tiny branch.” But over the next 30 minutes about 20-30 more people wandered in. Then I remembered that everyone always comes late to everything in Spanish culture. I also noticed that they started off sacrament meeting and they hadn’t even finished preparing the sacrament yet. They finished maybe 15 minutes or so after sacrament meeting started. I think one of my favorite parts about attending church in Spanish is the singing. I love it because almost every single person sings, but almost nobody has any idea how to sing. There may be 1 or 2 people in the congregation that hit most of the notes and sing well. Everyone else basically says the words really loud and make their voices go up and down whenever they feel like it. I think the funniest part is that there is always at least 1 lady who loves to sing loud, but doesn’t really understand how to sing along with the notes. It is always a good experience.
Now I will tell you a little about the city of Rosenberg. It is completely opposite of Richmond, even though they are so close to each other. Rosenberg is a very rich, affluent area. Rosenberg is definitely ghetto and has a lot of Hispanic and African American people. All day long we hear Hispanic music blasting as cars drive past us. I definitely need to take some pictures of some of the areas that we go to, because it is exactly what I imagine when I think of ghetto. Old brick buildings, where the bricks are falling out with graffiti everywhere and a bunch of black metal bars everywhere. I probably wont take a ton of pictures here though because its not a very smart thing to carry that around with me everywhere and show it off.

So far it hasn’t been too bad on the bikes. We’ve been really lucky and have had a lot of cloud coverage for most of the time I’ve been here. Of course we still sweat like crazy and now I shower 2 times a day every day. When I got here it was 105 degrees outside…that was hot. Plus my companion doesn’t really ride very fast, so its not too bad. Our area is huge for a bike area though, so we ride at least 20 miles a day. My thighs are definitely sore today. We live on the second floor too, so running up and down there all the time doesn’t really help that much.

Other than that I didn’t really write down a whole lot to write about. I am very happy with the way my last area was going when I left. I believe in leaving the area better than you found it. We have a lot of really good things going on there, so I feel really good about that. I also like my district a lot too. We have 6 Elders and 2 sisters. I already knew everyone except for 1 elder, so I was excited about that.

Ok, that’s all for this week. Have a good week everyone! I love you! Hopefully my e-mails go through today.

Love,
Chase

Recieved August 10, 2009

2009-08-10T10:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

First of all, Happy Birthday Dad!! I actually remembered to say happy birthday before it came this time. I always forget when Mom and Dad's birthdays are. I know they are both the same day of the month. In my journal last year I wrote Dad's birthday was on August 9th, and I wrote Mom's birthday was on June 10th, so I knew something was wrong. I'm pretty sure now though that both of those are wrong and that your birthdays are on the 11th. Either way, I hope you have a good birthday, Dad!

Yes, I do have transfer news. I got the first bit of it yesterday when President Saylin called me. While we were in an appointment the Mission Home was calling us and I thought that was weird, and I forgot about it so we went straight to our next appointment. The mission home called 2 more times in that appointment, so after that appointment I called them back. It was President Saylin and he told me he had been praying a lot and he has received confirmation that the Lord wants me to be a district leader. After I said that I would do it he told me that I would be getting transferred and that I would be going to a Spanish area. He said he’s sending me to a very excitable district. I’m of course nervous, but also excited to be going back to a Spanish area. I cant say I’m really that surprised by it though. Its always been in my mind that after Elder Taufa left, I would get a new companion, teach him the area, then go back to Spanish when the transfer ended. So I’ve been doing my best to prepare for that (studying Spanish, making sure my companion is learning the area, ect). The first few weeks will probably be pretty rough getting back into the whole Spanish culture, especially because I’ve never served in a 100% Spanish area. But I am excited. Being asked to be a district leader threw a new spin on things too though. My main responsibilities are to be in charge of district meetings, interview baptismal candidates being taught by those in my district, and to take care of and help those in my district. I can just imagine having to do a baptismal interview my first night in my area…that would definitely be dropping me off in the deep end. So that is all I know. I will have more specifics as to where I am and who I’m with next week. It is really relieving to at least know what to expect now…I’ve been thinking all week about what my future is going to be like, so I’m glad I finally got the news.

So that was the main event for the week, but I do have a couple other random things I wrote down. First, I think I may have told you about the member in our ward who runs www.mycardata.com. And how he gets a brand new car straight from the manufacturer every Thursday. Well last week he had a brand new 2010 Chevy Camaro. After we shared a scripture with him and said a prayer and everything, I said, Brother Foss, I have one more question for you….how do you like the Camaro? He was like, You know what, I haven’t even taken it out today, do you guys wanna come for a ride? Of course we said yes. He took us for a ride around the neighborhood and a little up the freeway. That is one fast car. It was so much fun to ride around in. Everyone was staring at us and we had a couple people chanting, race, race, race! It was fun.

Next, I think I may have told you about how President Saylin told us about how all the leaders of the church taught them a lot of things in the MTC and promised them if they would apply them, they would see an increase in baptisms. Well the most investigators with a baptismal date our mission has had, was in the 80s somewhere and we hit that at the beginning of the year. Now were at 96 and were on track to get about 50 baptisms this month, this has been our mission goal for a long time. We had an average of 25 baptisms per month, and our goal the whole time I’ve been here is to double baptisms and maintain it. So it is really cool to see how much our mission is improving.

The next interesting thing was that yesterday at church we split our Elder’s Quorum. I guess when you hit 96 Elders or something you're supposed to split the quorum. Well we either hit that or got really close, because they’ve been talking about it for a while in PEC and on Sunday they finally did it. I’ve never seen that before, but it was interesting. I wont get to see how it all works out because I’m leaving, but it was cool to see it happen. Last week the deacons actually ran out of water cups during sacrament, so the priests had to get more water and re-bless it. I’ve never seen that either.

I’m planning on sending home my memory card either today if I have time (probably not) or next week. So expect that coming home pretty soon. I bought one of those padded envelopes that says handle with care, so I’ll send it in that.

Ok, that’s about all for this week! I love you all! Have fun at Yosemite and wherever else you may be.

Love,
Chase

Received Mon Aug 3, 2009

2009-08-04T19:23:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

I do know an Elder Taylor. We were in the same zone when he first got into the mission. I was pretty good friends with his trainer. He is also a Spanish missionary and I think hes somewhere in the city. I'm sure I'll serve near him again before the end of my mission. What is the new family's name? (**So you won't be confused, here is what I wrote to Chase and what he is responding to: Elder Taylor: he is in your mission. Started his mission in October, so I guess he got there sometime in December. There is a new family in our ward, that dad tapped me on the shoulder today and told me that his son’s friend was in your mission….Elder Taylor. Do you know him?)

I have been wondering what was happening with Michael Vick. I saw him on a TV in a restaurant when we were eating dinner with some members one night. So I figured something happened, but I had no idea what. I don't have any sort of guess as to where he would go because I don't know which teams would be looking for a QB. That will be interesting to see what happens. (**I also wrote to Chase about Michael Vick.)

Last week for P-day we went and toured a Hindu temple. It was very interesting. We were able to take pictures out side of the temple (which they call a Mandir), but not inside. The mandir didn't have any closed walls and it was made completely out of stone. There are pillars all around to hold it up, but no wall is completely closed off. The guy giving us a tour gave out all sorts of facts throughout the whole thing and I learned a little about their religion. One interesting thing is that they constructed the whole mandir without using any sort of steel..no wires or screws or anything. They just carve the stones and attach all the segments together like a puzzle. He probably mentioned this 5-6 times. He also mentioned they estimated the mandir has a building life of 1000 years. Another slightly comical statistic is that (you know Hindu's believe in reincarnation) they said that it takes 8.4 million reincarnations to reach the human form. There were all sorts of crazy statistics like that. It was all REALLY confusing, but interesting nonetheless.

One of the most interesting things that I have observed on my mission is how each church deals with their lack of knowledge of the fullness of the gospel. Each church has some part of the truth, but only one has all of it. After visiting the Hindu temple, it was pretty clear the Hindu's deal with it by over complicating everything. There are hundreds of gods, and the members don't know very much about their own religion. I've run into some churches that deal with the lack of knowledge by bashing and trying to disprove other religions. Others just completely ignore huge aspects of the gospel and say if you do just a few things that they do understand, then you will be saved. Its been really interesting to me to see all of this and its showed me how grateful I am to know of the restored gospel. The true, complete, gospel answers all these questions simply and directly and the holy ghosts testifies to you that it is true once you fully understand it. That way, we can all be confident in what we believe in and we don't have to take anyone elses word for it, each individual can know for themself.

In other exciting news, we have 2 baptismal dates now! The first is named David Haven. He has a lot of extended family that are members of the church and are even mission presidents and professors at BYU-Idaho. His wife is very very against the church though. Well about a year ago David started to gain a testimony and was getting taught by the missionaries. Well, something happened and the wife got really upset and their family was not going to stay together if David kept pursuing the church. A few weeks ago David showed up to church and we've been meeting with him and working with him as to what to do about his wife situation and he is going to get baptized on August 19th. We have been meeting with a member of our bishopric and we've worked out a lot of things. David talked to his wife and she is at least not angry about David's decision to get baptized.

Next, we extended a baptismal invitation to Niyeem. He opened up to us and told us about a drinking problem that he has and he mentioned he has a couple other small things he wants to work on before he gets baptized. He chose October 3rd as his baptismal date. He wants to make sure he can keep the covenants he makes when he is baptized. That date will get moved forward or back depending on how he is doing, so that is exciting too.

Next Monday we get our transfer calls. I am pretty nervous about it...I think I am probably going to get moved out. We had interviews with our mission president this week and he hinted that I would be getting moved and he's been giving a lot of strong hints that he is going to put me into leadership...I don't know how soon. I'm probably most worried about going back into a full Spanish area. I really want to go to a Spanish area, but I know it will be pretty rough for the first couple weeks. Since I haven't been able to speak Spanish very much at all in the past 6 months, my Spanish is not where I would like it to be. I know once I get submerged in it and I get on a good study schedule it will help a lot. It is really hard to study Spanish here, then never use it because I cant even remember something like that unless I put it into action. So there's a couple things that are just looming there in the future, but I'm just going to keep working and try not to worry about it.

I got the Griffin poster last week! I taped it up on my closet door. It will probably stay there until I get transferred, then I don't know where it will go.

Ok, that's about all for this week!! I love you all...have a good week!!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon July 27, 2009

2009-07-27T11:49:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

Happy Birthday on Thursday G-MAN! The scout story sounds exactly how I remember scouts being. I don’t think I ever remember going up a correct trail and we always ended up camping out in the middle of nowhere. That was a huge error on the leaders part to let a group of scouts hike way in front by themselves.

The dodgeball game also sounded fun. We played a pretty fun game a while ago…I think I may have told you about it. I’ll say it again anyway. Its called Pivot Tag. Its basically like a free for all dodgeball. You start out by having everyone line up on one side of the room and you put 2 dodge balls in the middle. You start and run to get a ball and when you get a ball you have to plant one of your feet and you cant move it until you through the ball, hence the name pivot tag. When you get hit you have to sit on the ground and you're out, until the person that hit you gets out. So basically to win, you have to get everyone out. It is really fun.

This week was a good week. We had a zone conference on Wednesday. It was President Saylin’s first zone conference, so he and everyone else was really excited. He told us he’s been excited for it because he wanted to teach us things that the prophet and apostles told them they should teach to us, and if we put those things into action we are promised an increase in baptisms. All the things he talked about were things that would be perfect for our area. I’ve really been trying to think of ways to find new investigators in our area and I know we have to use the members, but its hard to know how to use the members to help you find people. That’s what half the conference was about: how to get the members to actively do missionary work. Instead of sharing missionary related scriptures with families then asking them if they have any referrals for you, we need to actually help them with their missionary work. So, instead of saying that, we ask them if they’ve ever had any sort of gospel conversation before with anyone. Nearly every single person has. Then we give them suggestions and ideas as to how to take that little gospel conversation to the next level. Usually inviting them over for a lunch or showing them one of the pamphlets that we use or inviting them to an upcoming ward activity. That is so much more effective than just asking for referrals and making members feel guilty that don’t have any. Pretty much every member wants to share the gospel, its just hard and they aren’t sure how. So we have been doing that with a lot of members and its working really well. We were also taught a lot of other really good things in zone conference. It was a memorable one. In our zone we have 6 more baptismal dates in this week alone.

Elder Campbell and I plan on extending baptismal invitations to Niyeem, and also Michael and Yabo Akinola (the Nigerians) this week. It has been really cool to see our relationship with the Akinola’s evolve over these past few months. At first they kind of avoided anyone from the church and they were very hesitant about everything. Now every time Yabo sees us she gets a big smile on her face and gets all excited. They both work a lot, so its hard to schedule appointments with them, but they really want to meet with us and they are making time on this Wednesday so we can have an appointment. If all goes well, we plan to extend baptismal invitations to each of them at that appointment.

On Thursday afternoon, we went over to go on exchanges with the Elders in Rosenberg because they had a couple appointments, but one of them is sick (he’s actually got a hernia but he’s trying to wait til the end of his mission to get surgery on it) so we helped them out with that. Then that evening I went to Alief to go on exchanges with them. This was an awesome exchange. Alief is a ghetto part of Houston. There are tons and tons of African refugees there. There are entire apartment complexes just full of people from nearly every African country. It was so fun to go there and be with those people and to learn about their culture. It was like spending time in Africa. The first people I met were these 3 older African men who were standing outside of an apartment arguing about something. I couldn’t figure out exactly what language they were speaking, then after a couple seconds I realized it was English. After a while I learned how they speak and I could even speak it myself. They’ll cut off the end of a lot of words, they have really broken grammar, and the funniest thing is that they end “O” to the end of a lot of words, especially if they’re asking a question. One of them was asking me what I was drinking, so he said, “Wha you drink-o?” And of course they say it in their thick African accent. Another funny little thing they do is that instead of doing a normal handshake, you start out like you're going in for a hand shank, then you snap your fingers together with theirs. Its hard to explain, but once you get good at it you can make a loud snap. If you don’t snap it loud enough then they make you do it again.

In one of those apartments there was a man named Pappi. He is a member and hes from Liberia. Everyone in the whole complex knows Pappi, because everyone donates all their extra stuff to Pappi, then he gives it out to needy people. He’s like their own little DI/Goodwill. Like half his apartment is full of random junk he has acquired. People also bring them their empty bottle and cans, so he can recycle it, then use the money to buy soda to give out to all the kids who stop by. While I was there a group of 6 little African girls stopped by. 3 of them were from Tanzania and the other 3 were from Somalia. It was fun to be able to talk to them and make them laugh. A lot of them didn’t have shoes and they had probably not changed their clothes for long time (that might not seem too strange to SOME members of our family). But the neat thing is that they were all so happy and always smiled. The oldest one was 10 and she would watch out for all the other little girls. They would just roam this apartment complex by themselves and so would so many other kids. It was like being in a different country. It was fun.

Then on Friday evening, the Mission Bend Elders had some appointments and one of those missionaries is sick, so we went on exchanges to help them out too. So I toured most of our stake in 24 hours. Its amazing how many random members I know from each of the wards because of all the exchanges I’ve been on in the past 5 months.

Hmm..there is only 1 other story that I can think of. Last week on Sunday I woke up and my ankle was really itchy. At church it started to itch a ton so when I got home, I took of my shoe and sock to see that my ankle was huuuge. I actually couldn’t see my ankle anymore. It was pretty funny. After looking I saw a little red mark above my ankle and I’m guessing that while I was playing soccer a bee stung me and I didn’t notice. It healed in a few days and its back to normal size again.

That’s about all for this week! Thank you Christopher for your e-mail too. It was very interesting and entertaining to read. It sounds like a lot of work, but I’m sure it will pay off afterwards. I love you all!! Have a great week!

Love,
Chase

PS. I listened to a really cool recording this week. It was Glenn Beck's conversion story. Its titled, "An Unlikely Mormon." I thought it was really interesting and funny. I've met a lot of people who have gone through similar situations to him. I'm sure it was so fun for me to listen to because I'm a missionary, but if you are really bored, I bet you could youtube it.

Received Mon, July 20, 2009

2009-07-20T14:17:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

Well it is still blistering hot here and I now have a pretty impressive farmers tan (partially from how much sun I’ve gotten and partially because of how white the rest of me has gotten) and I am working on a watch tan. I have never gotten a watch tan in my life, even though I wear it all day, every day. It must be because it always slides around. I can actually see an outline of my watch now though. If I get a good one, I’ll have to take a picture.

We’ve also had several thunderstorms this week. And yes, it was still burning hot. I did get some sweet pictures and videos of the thunderstorms though. You could literally see lightning bolts shooting out of/around the sky every 5 seconds at one point. So I went outside and focused my camera then took the picture as soon as I saw a flash. I got some amazing pictures of lightning shooting across the sky. Then I took 2 videos as well. I’ll probably send home my memory card in a few weeks. I don’t have that many pictures on it right now, but I do have a good amount of videos.

Here is a pretty crazy story. We got a referral on our cell phone the other day. (When people call church HQ and order stuff, they send us those referrals directly to our phones via text message). Someone ordered a Book of Mormon from the church website and the comment was “I am looking into joining LDS. Getting and reading a Book of Mormon is the first step. Thank you and God bless!!” We were excited of course, but at the same time skeptical, because it sounds too good to be true. Well, we contacted the referral and it is true. This guy is 18 and hes about to leave for Kansas State University and he has a lot of friends that are Mormon and 2 grandparents that are Mormon as well. The only sad part is that hes moving in a few weeks. He did say that his mom and his sister would probably be interested as well, so we are trying to contact them as well, but they are going to move too if they can sell their house. It seems like everyone is moving away from our area right before they get baptized!! It is a little frustrating, but I am glad that people are joining the church.

2 Nigerian people came to church with their daughter yesterday. Their names are Michael, Yabo, and Elizabeth Akinola. They have been coming every so often (like once a monthish) for about 3 months, but they are almost impossible to contact and there is a little bit of a language barrier. We finally got in contact with them a few days ago and invited them to come to church and set up an appointment for this week. I am excited for that. Yabo (the mom) calls our church her church. Story: One day when we stopped by their house to try to contact them and Yabo happened to be outside. She asked who we were and we told her we were missionaries. Then she asked for which church. We told her the name of the church. Then she asked which church that is, and we told her the location of our chapel, then she gets a big smile on her face and she said “OH!! That’s my church!!!” So, they already consider themselves members of the church, but we just need to teach them so they can be official members of the church. Hopefully they are there for their appointment (a lot of African people don’t really have any concept of appointments).

One goal that my companion and I have made is that we want to have a member with us at every single set appointment that we have. I may have told you that before. But we have been doing that and it makes a huge difference. The members bring something to the lesson that we cant offer. We aren’t just normal people who live in the area. Its different for someone to listen to someone who lives in their own area, who is not a full time missionary. I really love working with the members. We have some really interesting people in our ward too.

I’ve told you about the ex navy seal/nuclear bomb maker. He is always a fun one to visit. I don’t know if I have ever told you about the inventor. I think I may have. He is a less active guy and he actually retired several years ago, but since then he’s started inventing tons of stuff. He is definitely passionate about inventing, and that is an understatement. He told us all about these pens he invented that use magnets, so it clips to itself, and how he did the same thing with glasses so he could clip his glasses to his shirt. Well, he comes to find out that magnets cause a condition called Rouleaux and Aggregation, which is where you blood cell stack and it causes all these problems. Doctors put magnets in pace makers, which gives them magnetic poisoning and they don’t even know they're doing it. So he is working with some big medical guys and he’s writing a huge report about that whole deal. It will be interesting to see if that turns out to be a big thing.

Someone else in our ward runs the website www.mycardata.com. Car manufacturers send him a new car every Thursday and he drives them around for a week, then puts up a report on that website I guess, then he gets a new car and repeats it. It is fun to see what new car he has every week. He’s driven almost every car out there. He once had a $300,000 Bentley.

Anyway, I’ve noticed in these past couple weeks that I’ve really learned to love missionary work. I’m not really concerned with the number of baptisms I get or any sort of numbers, I just love to help people and show them that they can live happier lives. That’s all I really care about. Whether I’m helping an active member, less active member, or a non-member, I just want to help them and bless their lives. It’s the one time in your life where you just forget about everything else and just dedicate everything to being an instrument in God’s hands. Throughout this last week or 2 I’ve seen so many situations where we have been led to the right place at the right time so that we could help someone out. Sometimes it’s a little thing and sometimes it’s a huge thing. This last week we stopped by and visited someone whose family is getting split apart and there is a whole lot of chaos and confusion going on. (He is the rapper I think I mentioned a few months ago). He’s been inactive since he was 19 and he knows hes made a lot of mistakes, but his family is the 1 thing he cares about more than anything. Now that that is falling apart, he knows he needs help. We just happened to show up at this doorstep the day after all this started happening and he broke down for the first time ever and he asked for a blessing. I am glad that we decided to go there at that specific time.
There is so much that is involved in missionary work too. You have to balance a lot of things and there really is a lot of skill involved. Its kind of like a sport to me. You need to practice a lot and develop your talents. As you do that then you perform well. Plus its also fun.

Ok I am out of time and I have got to go! President Saylin also started something in the mission where we e-mail him weekly instead of write him letters. He gave us 15 more minutes of e-mail time for that, so I am going to go do that right now. Have a good week, I love you all!!!

Love,
Chase

Received Monday, July 13, 2009

2009-07-15T15:13:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

It has been a hot week here too!! A hot month actually. All last week we had record breaking temperatures. The Randall’s kids came in to visit this week from Arizona and they said it is much worse here than in Arizona. The temperature might get higher in Arizona, but the heat is different in Houston. It is not fun to ride a bike in. I don’t remember if I’ve written home about this, but it starts to get hot by about 10 and keeps getting hotter until about 5. 4 or 5 is the hottest part of the day. Then at nighttime it hardly cools down. August is the hottest month here also. This has been an usually hot July, record breaking like I said, so hopefully it wont get even hotter in August.

To answer Mom’s question, I just read the e-mail every week and respond. I’m usually not very pressed for time, so it all works out well.

I didn’t really do anything extra on my anniversary. We had appointments that filled the night, so theres not much more I could ask for. I was thinking about burning a shirt, but I didn’t want to give up any of my shirts. I need them all for those days I have to shower twice a day. Plus it would be more of a hassle than a celebration. At nighttime when we get home we immediately plan out the next day, then I get ready for bed and usually try to write in my journal, then sleep. I am not afraid to go to sleep early.

This transfer ends on August 9th, so we are just starting the 3rd week. We are not quite half way. This is probably been one of the longest transfers I’ve had and that’s probably because this is the hardest I’ve worked. Elder Campbell is starting to learn the area a little more so I don’t feel so alone in everything anymore. It still feels like every day is 2 days though.

At church this Sunday we got a new bishop. It was sad to see our old bishop go, because he is an awesome guy and we have been working really well with him. Eating breakfast at his house every Saturday morning was fun too. Our new bishop is Bishop McPherson. He was the 1st counselor. I should also mention that I predicted our entire bishopric. I’m excited to work with Bishop McPherson too. He’s a funny hardworking guy. We are going to meet with him on Wednesday and we are going to try to set up weekly visits with him too, so we can always be on the same page and make sure were doing everything he would like us to.

Unfortunately we heard some bad news this week. One of our best investigators, Niyeem, is moving. I don’t know if I’ve ever written about Niyeem before. I think I’ve written briefly about him, but I’ll refresh your memories. Niyeem is from Bangladesh and he use to be a devout Muslim. He would go to the mosque and pray 5 times a day and do all that. Well after a while some bad things happened and he became angry at God and eventually started to deny his existence. It just so happens that a member of the church works at the same company as him and Niyeem saw him praying on his food before he ate it. That discussion led to an invitation to learn more, and we started teaching Niyeem. We didn’t realize that Niyeem didn’t even believe in God, so we taught an entire lesson then at the end invited him to pray about it. That’s when he said, “That’s the problem, I don’t even believe in a God to pray to.” In these last 4 months he has come a long way. He now believes in God, believes God loves him, and he prays daily. He has told us about a lot of neat experiences he’s had praying. He has changed completely. Unfortunately because of his background, it puts him in a difficult situation with religion. In the Muslim religion, if you convert to another religion you can be killed and your whole family is at threat as well. He probably wont be able to ever return to Bangladesh, but he is not really too concerned about that. Last week he brought his cousin to the lesson and he was very interested as well. Sadly, he lives outside of our area also. Niyeem is moving to a city called Alief, and I think that’s where Sadad (the cousin) lives also. That is in our zone though, so if he gets baptized while I’m still here, I’ll be able to attend it.

Our other good investigator, Maria, is also going to move. She is moving to Nicaragua, where she originally came from. She moved here when she was 13 and has lived here ever since. She’s just had bad thing after bad thing happen to her for the past few years and she doesn’t have a job and cant pay for her house anymore. So her house is going into foreclosure and the only place she has to go is to Nicaragua, where her mother is living. Her daughter hasn’t made the smartest choices either. I probably shouldn’t laugh at this, but I cant help it. Her daughter (she joined the church a few years ago) went to BYU-Idaho. Well, she’s been there 2 semesters now and she’s taken only 2 classes, and they were like marriage prep or something like that. I’ve heard of people just going to college to get married, but this is probably the most extreme example. But the story goes on..she failed both those classes and she got kicked out. She also used all the $15,000 that her parents gave her to help her out with college. I don’t think I’ve ever even used that much money in my life. I guess sometimes you just need to learn things the hard way. So Maria is worrying about that situation too, its all kind of a mess. Hopefully her moving to Nicaragua will be good for her, with the whole change of scenery and starting a new life. She plans on getting baptized after she moves too. I am going to try to stay in contact with her also.

Hmm…oh yeah, here is my kitchen story for the week. Each day I’m in the kitchen is like an ongoing experiment. I had a pretty good one last week. I bought some hotdogs with cheese in them (I’ve learned that I like cheese a lot) and I wanted to eat them, but I thought that would be too boring. So I cooked 2 hotdogs, then I cooked up some bacon, then I put some butter on the hotdog buns and fried them so they were crispy. Then I wrapped the bacon around the hotdogs and put a dab of masterpiece bbq sauce on there and it was delicious. I also made donuts again as a snack for our weekly planning session. That was delicious. The frosting was way better this time than last time.

I also got the letter with all the pictures from the trek. It was a good one. Other than that I don’t think I have much else to report on. President Saylin sent me an e-mail today thanking me for the president’s letter I sent him last week (we are supposed to write to our mission president weekly). I thought that was very nice. Well, I’ll just copy/paste what he said: “Thanks for your letter of 6/29 and warm welcome! Even though we have only met twice, I feel like I already know you. I look forward to getting to know you better in our upcoming interview. With love, Pres. Saylin.”

Oh, I just got another E-mail from Mom. I’ll respond to that one in another e-mail. Have a good week this week. I love you all!! Don’t stay up too late, that is a tough habit to break!!

Love,
Chase

Received July 5, 2009

2009-07-15T15:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

That was an awesome e-mail! I loved hearing from everyone. It was all good/interesting/made me laugh. Sounds like it has been a pretty eventful week at home.

It has been a pretty good week here as well. This was my first week with Elder Campbell. I have learned how hard it is to take over an area, especially when the area is hard to learn. I am still doing pretty much everything myself: planning, driving, deciding what to do, deciding what to teach, even teaching most of the lesson myself. It is exhausting! I think it is Elder Campbell’s personality to be a little more passive when it comes to missionary work. Every day has seemed like it has been 2 days, so I’m pretty drained mentally and physically at the end of every day, but that is ok. I love it much better than not being able to work. For the last 6 weeks our area has started to slide downhill a lot because of all the problems Elder Taufa was having. As a side note, his problems didn’t end. He had a layover in LA and there he had visa problems and they wouldn’t let him fly to New Zealand. So the mission president picked him up down there and Elder Taufa just hung out there for a few days, then they finally decided just to send him to Tonga, because Tonga would let him in, but not New Zealand. That whole thing probably didn’t make his family too happy. I’m sure he’s home in New Zealand now, but I’m not sure.

But anyway, we have been working really hard this week trying to get things rolling again. We’ve seen a lot of miracles happening. We’ve somehow gotten back in contact with a lot of people we lost contact with and we have met several inactive members who have pretty high potential to start coming back to church again. So I am really happy. I was disappointed yesterday when only 1 person we invited came to church. Well 1 non member came and 2 less actives came for the first time. Like 5-6 other investigators said they were planning on coming though, so that was kind of disappointing, but that’s the way it normally works. Hopefully they’ll come next week.

We met our new mission president and his family on Friday. They are an awesome family. Like I said before, they have 6 kids w/ ages ranging from 3 to 14. President and Sister Saylin are 40 or 41 years old. They all told the experience of when they got called to come to this mission. It was really interesting. They interviewed and met with 2 different apostles and with President Eyring as well. In the MTC they told about how all the mission president’s had a meeting in 1 room and sitting on the stand was the whole First Presidency, 11 of the 12 apostles, the presidency of the Seventy, and all the leaders from the Missionary Department. That had to have been an intense meeting. Elder Packer missed that meeting because he wasn’t feeling too well. I have a feeling he has not been in good health. Later that day Elder Packer did come and got helped up onto the stands and gave a really powerful talk. He told all the mission presidents that he promises them with the keys and authority he has as an apostle of the lord that they will never make a mistake unless first being told by the Holy Ghost. That is a pretty powerful promise to make. President Saylin also said a lot of things that made me put my full trust in him. He told us that just because he is the new mission president, that doesn’t void everything President Allred has taught us. He said he plans to “Stay the course.” Our mission has been on a huge incline the past several months and he wants to keep that going. President and Sister Saylin both said how much they enjoyed being able to spend an afternoon with the Allreds and they could tell they were great leaders and we should keep doing what we’ve been taught. Probably the most memorable thing President Saylin said was that he will take action unless he knows he is being prompted by the Spirit. That really made me trust all of the decisions he would make.

President and Sister Saylin both grew up in Southern California…in Palos Alto or whatever that place is. Somewhere around there. Then they moved to North Salt Lake and that’s where they came from. All the kids love sports and they like the Lakers, BYU, USC, and the Angels. That is a pretty good set of teams to like.

The only other interesting thing for this week that I can think of is that we ate at 3 hispanic members of the ward’s homes this week. 2 of them were Venezuelan and 1 was Bolivian. So we got to practice our Spanish a lot. (Did I tell you Elder Campbell is a Spanish missionary too?). One of the Venezuelan families fed us Arepas, which is kind of like their version of tortillas. Its basically like a scone. You cut it in half and put whatever you want in it. You can make it a breakfast arepa or a dinner arepa. I cant even remember what we put in it…it was some sort of meat, beans and rice. At the other Hispanics family we had empanadas. Those were delicious. That had some sort of meat in it too. They gave us the leftovers too so I ate that for lunch the next day.

On Saturday I also went and played our normal Saturday morning game of soccer. It was fun, but it got soooo hot. I could almost feel my skin boiling. All the heat just sits above the grass and the humidity is so thick that its like youre running through jello. At home I didn’t mind getting so hot like that because I would jump in the pool when I got home and it would feel soo good. Obviously that’s no longer an option. I will definitely never take a pool for granted again. Instead we always stop at a Sonic on the way home and I buy a powerade slush.

In other news…I’ve been taking a lot of videos. I recorded a good thunderstorm last week, I recorded us when we did the Haka at President Allred’s good bye party, I recorded us when we did the Haka for President Saylin’s welcome, I recorded a new Elder (VERY interesting guy) in our district showing off his bowstaff skills (it is impossible not to laugh when watching this video), and I recorded the Elder who just came into the mission who played for U of U’s bball team dunking over his trainer, who was sitting in a chair. I haven’t taken that many pictures but I’ve taken a few. Now here is my question. Is it safe to send home a memory card in a normal envelope? I heard from somewhere that they smash some of those envelopes when you send stuff and I wouldn’t want that memory card getting smashed. So I was wondering what the best way is to send home my camera memory card.

Alright thanks again for the great e-mail!! I loved hearing updates from everyone. That is the best 1 year mark present you can give me. And happy Anniversary Mom and Dad, and Happy Birthday to Steven. This is an eventful week! I love you all…have a good week!!!

Love,
Chase

Try, Try Again

2009-07-12T23:19:00.000-07:00

Just so you know,

I have TRIED several times to paste Chase's letter...IT WILL NOT WORK. I will try again tomorrow!

Sorry.

HUMP DAY!

2009-07-09T12:01:00.000-07:00

It's Hump Day for Chase!

One glorious year down, one more to go!

Keep up the good work.

p.s. ok, I just realized I haven't put up Chase's letter from Monday - SORRY- will do it before the day is over!

Received Mon June 29, 2009

2009-06-29T11:58:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

This has been one interesting week. I was only in Richmond last week on Wednesday, Thursday morning, and Saturday night.

Starting Monday when P-day ended (6pm) I went on exchanges to Rosenberg (nearby city in our district). Everything was going well until the next day I woke up not feeling well at all. That was one of the worst stomach aches I’ve ever felt. It felt like someone was wringing out my intestines. The Elder I was with had just gotten over a stomach virus that made him sick for a week, so I was afraid I was going to get that. All the food in my stomach came out whichever way it could (I wont go into detail), then after my stomach was emptied I started feeling a little better. But to make matters worse, as soon as I started to feel a little better the Elder I was with all the sudden got a hernia. His stomach had not been feeling right since he was sick, then that day finally he got a hernia, so some organ fell out of place and was poking his skin out to make a little bump. Gross. So my sick self drove him all the way over to a doctor in a couple cities over and they set up an appointment with a surgeon so the surgeon could decide what they needed to do. He is going to find out this week sometime if he’ll have to go home to get the surgery. But good news is that I was feeling much better by nighttime. I got a powerade slush at Sonic and that was my healing potion as usual. It helped rehydrate me and that was one thing I felt like my stomach could hold down.

Wednesday we did normal missionary work. Elder Taufa said good-bye to a lot of people. Thursday morning I dropped him off at the mission home. That was really weird saying good-bye knowing we would never see each other again. We became really good friends. Most people get sick of each other after staying together 3 transfers, but we weren’t. His family moved to New Zealand, so that is where he’s going home to. He’s never even been there before. I heard that he got stuck in LA with some sort of visa problems, so he’s been waiting around til today before he could leave.From Thursday til Saturday when we had our transfer meeting I was with our Zone Leader, Elder Fiefia, whose companion also went home. He is a good missionary…we had a good time. He is also Tongan, but he grew up in West Jordan (maybe South Jordan…one of those places), Utah. Then we had our transfer meeting.

After transfer meeting we had our little surprise party for the Allreds. Everyone in the mission came and hid in the gym while we were having our transfer meeting in the sacrament room. At the end they opened the divider thing for the overflow and everyone surprised him. It was fun…there was a slide show and a couple people sang songs, then our zone and another zone did the Haka. I got someone to film that one, so you’ll get to see that one when I send pictures home.

My new companion is Elder Cambell. He is from Layton Utah and hes been on his mission for about 18 months. He is our new district leader. He is a cool guy…I think we will have a good transfer. In my interview with president we talked about the area and he asked me what I think needs to happen so that we could keep having success there. I told him that all the area needs is a good missionary who is ready to work and ready to work with the members. I’m probably going to get moved out of this area at the end of this transfer and probably go back to Spanish, so I knew the Elder coming here would be taking over the area when I leave. It would be so sad to see someone lazy come take over the area and see it all fall apart. President Allred honored my request, so now Elder Cambell is here. He reminds me a lot of my first companion, Elder Nielson. He’s pretty tall and has a pretty deep voice and he talks really slow. And he’s one of those people ALWAYS has a smile on his face. It sounds like he’s always about to start laughing…its pretty funny. He is a good missionary though.

It is pretty exhausting to take over the area though. I have to do all the planning by myself and decide everything to do until my companion starts to learn the area so he can help. Yesterday felt like 3 days in 1. I love going home at night and being exhausted though…that means I worked hard. When I work hard I feel good.

My random story from the kitchen for this week is that I made donuts! Someone in Elder Fiefia’s area made donuts for him and him and his companion on Wednesday, so we tried making them on when we went on exchanges together on Thursday. So we made them on Thursday, then I made some on Saturday. They are sooo good. I think they are pretty unhealthy though. All you have to do is buy some biscuits (we use some Pillsbury kind…I don’t remember the name). And you poke a hole in all the biscuits so they’ll look like donuts, then you pour a bunch of oil in a frying pan and fry them up when the oil gets pretty hot. It probably only takes a minute to cook both sides and they look just like donuts. Then to make the frosting (this is the part I haven’t gotten down yet) you put a bunch of powdered sugar, some butter, some milk, and some cinnamon in a bowl and mix it together. You can replace cinnamon with whatever flavor you want your frosting to be, but cinnamon is good. We’ve found the best way is to rip the donut in half and dip it in the frosting. Its so good.

Responses to Mom’s e-mail:Yes I got the package with the Apple Jacks and the shirt…the Apple Jacks have already been eaten.The story about CJ & ST’s roommate who just got baptizes is very interesting. I have this CD called Conversion of a Catholic and that’s basically the story the guy on there told. He was studying to become a priest, but went to Idaho to take a couple extra classes and one of his roommates there was LDS. The story is a really good story. Maybe I’ll copy it and send it home some time…maybe the next time I send pictures. It’s a really good missionary CD. Yesterday in church before we started our elders quorum class our elder’s quorum president announced that Brazil just scored their first goal against the US and they could possibly be making a comeback. That is funny that they turned out winning.Last comment: I have never heard of a Trek til I came on my mission. A lot of missionaries here have a Trek CD that have a lot of songs that people listen to on their trek things or something. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it is a good CD.

OK that’s about all for this week. Thank you for the e-mail Mom…it was full of good stories. I think that all the stories are good, even if I don’t make comments about each of them. Have a good week, I love you all!!! I am jealous that you all get to go swimming!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon June 22, 2009

2009-06-22T14:28:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

It looks as though Mom forgot to send out an e-mail this week!! Either that or it just didn’t send. That is ok though, I got a good letter from home 2 days ago.

It is weird how mail works here. Some mail takes 10 days to get here and other mail takes 3 days, I’m not sure why. But I got the letter with pictures from the beach on it. I must admit that I am a little jealous…that beach looked nice. The weather here has been hoooot. The weather forecast this week is all between 95-100. Even though we aren't biking, the heat is still really bad. Every time we get into our car its like 115+ degrees and by the time it cools down were at our next stop.

Happy Father’s Day yesterday Dad!! Its hard to remember these things before they happen because when I’m writing e-mails I’m only thinking about my past week, not what's going to happen in the future.

We had dinner at our stake presidents house for father’s day…it was good. They are awesome people.

I’m going to go down my list of things I wrote down to write about. First I will talk about last week’s P-day. It was a pretty good one. We toured a Jehovah's’s Witness Assembly Hall. This is their version of a conference center or a stake center. There are only 3 in Texas and not that many in the whole world. Their normal meeting places are called Kingdom Halls. It was all pretty interesting. It was so surprising to me to see how much we have in common with them. Their beliefs have kind of been evolving over time and they have been becoming more and more like ours. Even a lot of the organizational things they have are similar to ours. At the end I asked the lady giving us the tour if I could see one of their Watch Towers (basically like our Ensigns, that’s what they use a lot to tract with). She opened a cupboard with a bunch of their books, so we all grabbed something to look through. It's amazing how even though a lot of their beliefs might seem similar to ours, they are so…different. The whole backbone to their religion is completely different. They are taught not to pray about whether or not things are true, they believe everything is in the Bible and you have to use your own intellect. One of their little books that we got is called Reasoning with Scripture and it was basically one of their bashing books. It has a huge list of different topics and sets up bashing scenarios…it would say “If someone says…..You might say…. “ It was all very interesting. The lady who took us on the tour was nice, so that was good.

After that we got together with another zone and we had lunch and we all learned the Haka (the war dance that Polynesians do before sports games). We are holding a surprise party for our mission president on Saturday, so we’re going to perform it there. It was really fun to learn. We got really good at it by the end, but I’m not sure how much of it we will all still remember by Saturday. I will try to get someone to record it.

At church yesterday David Majewski got the Aaronic Priesthood. That was awesome to see. He is going to bless the sacrament next week. Mendy Dor also gave a talk in sacrament meeting. We helped her brainstorm a little, but she did most of it herself and it was very good. Her sister will speak next week. It was also a sad day because a lot of people we invited to church didn’t come. We found someone good to teach for the first time ever tracting the other day. We talked to a bunch of people in a park who were watching their kids, and this lady is genuinely interested and is looking for a good church. She said she would come, but she didn’t. I’m just hoping she didn’t get anti’d. Maria also didn’t come to church…she is reeeally depressed again. She had to put one of her dogs to sleep and her dogs are like her kids. She doesn’t even know what day it is or what time it is whenever we stop by. She is planning on moving out and living with her newly married daughter in Washington in September, so hopefully that will be better for her. She said she wants to get baptized in Washington, so that is good. We will teach her and get her prepared here and she will get baptized there. I don’t really care where it happens as long as she gets baptized and keeps living the gospel…that is the only way she will be happy.

I found a good scripture this week. It is one of the first Isaiah scriptures that I like and fully understand and can use in teaching. It is in Isaiah 5:20 or 2 Nephi 15:20. I don’t remember word for word what it says, but it says Woe unto them that call good evil and evil good, that put light for darkness and darkness for like and put sweet for bitter and bitter for sweet. Basically its describing our world today. People are saying that bad things are good and they are saying that good things are bad. As missionaries we are out amongst a lot of people with all sorts of standards, and this is definitely true. As a result, there are so many people that are sad and depressed and don’t know what to do. I just like that scripture because it reminds me that I always need to do what I know is right, even if others aren't doing the same.

Well, my companion is leaving on Thursday morning. I will get my new companion on Saturday, so by next week I’ll have an update. Our mission president is leaving..next week or something, I don’t remember. Maybe he will be gone by next week too. I am actually pretty excited for all the changes. My companion is ready to go home…this last transfer has been difficult for him. He isn't sad or anything like that, its just hard for him to focus 100% on the mission know hes about to leave in a few days and not being able to move very much makes it even harder. He’s done really really well though. He is a great missionary. I have learned a ton from him.

Ok that is all for this week! Have a good week! I love you all!!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon June 15, 2009

2009-06-16T08:38:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

I have a couple things written down to write about this week, so I’ll go down the list and go from there. David Majewski was baptized and confirmed on Saturday. Bishop Jones did both the baptism and confirmation. It was a really good baptismal service. It was attended very well and it was a very spiritual experience. That is no surprise though because was very prepared and he has been coming to church for a long time and has a lot of friends. The confirmation was especially powerful. He is going to accomplish a lot of great things and be a very good member. I might even be able to go to the temple with him and his wife when they get sealed in a year. That was definitely the highlight of the week.

It seems like I’m always writing about food, but I guess that’s what interests me the most. I have a new lunch item I love to make. The isle Elder Taufa and I spent the most time at is the meat isle. We both love meat but we both don’t really know how to cook any of it, so we do a lot of experimenting. Last weeks experiment was very successful. I bought chuck tender steaks, which cost $3.60. There were 4 circular normal steaks. I threw 2 in a frying pan, put on some seasoned salt, pepper, and a little bit of garlic salt also. It only took a few minutes and it was really good. I experimented with one of them by cutting criss crosses on one steak and putting some masterpiece barbecue sauce on it and letting it cook. It was really good. I cooked the next 2 using a George Foreman grill. Those things are awesome. They cook both sides at the same time and all the fat drains right out into a little plastic container. It took less than 10 min to cook it too. It was delicious. I got to eat steak for 2 meals for $3.60. I bought a big can of Pringles chips for a buck too and I eat that with my steaks. I’m planning of buying more of the same kind of meat today. While I was cooking, I was wondering what kind of seasoning we use on our steaks at home. I’ve been experimenting with garlic salt and seasoned salt, and I think I might actually like garlic salt better. So…what would you recommend using to season those little steak things I buy?

Last week one of our dinner appointments canceled on us, so the Randall’s took us to Bamboo Village (the Chinese buffet place I went to a few weeks ago). We told them it was good, so they wanted to go try it out with us. It was deeelicious. The day before Elder Taufa was gone on exchanges and he told me how he got to go to Joe’s Crab Shack and eat a ton of crab. Well it just so happened that it was crab night at Bamboo Village, so lets just say I ate a lot. I was in a seafood mood. I had 7-8 crab legs, fried catfish, shrimp, salmon, ribs, rolls, and fruit to top off my stomach. I think it only cost like 9 bucks too.

Here's a random fact: I have recently started putting ice in my cereal. One time I was really thirsty and I was eating cereal and the milk wasn’t quenching my thirst, so I put 2 ice cubes in there and it was perfect. I like it to be reeeally cold. I think I might have seen Mom do that before.

Next random thing: I got a CD from a missionary in the mission and theres' a really good song on it. I believe it is called Dream Big, and I think Ryan Shube sings it. That is my favorite song as of right now. I think it has a good message. I heard it originally because the assistants had it playing for one of their powerpoints/trainings they did at zone conference this week. We happened to be at the office the next day, so he copied me the CD right there. My favorite CD is probably the Joseph Smith Tribute CD…the one Steven was referring to when I called home on Mothers Day.

I mentioned we had zone conference this week…it was just like normal: very good, but really long. It was President and Sister Allred’s last zone conference so they did a lot of reminiscing and talking about the Saylin’s (new mission president) coming.

I did get a letter from Mom with the pictures of Chad Johnson and the guesses for the NBA Championship game. That was a really good letter. Good pictures and good, interesting information. Thank you Mom.

Elder Pedersen is still in the mission; he finishes January 23 or something. He is good with the camera…he likes to take pictures or movies every single day. He has like 3 memory cards he's constantly sending home and I don’t know where.

I think that having several people speak about their favorite scriptures was a really good idea for a sacrament meeting. We use all those scriptures all the time in missionary work. We use the one in Mosiah 18 all the time for baptism…it talks about “what have ye against being baptized.” We use the Alma 32 scripture all the time as well. We read that whole chapter with a lot of our investigators. It helps them understand faith and understand they have to keep learning and endure to the end. Alma 41:10 is something that I’ve seen with my own eyes over and over again. Mom’s scripture in 2 Nephi 5 was good too..I have never thought about it that way.

New update on my companion’s knee. He is going to have surgery when he gets back to New Zealand. He wears a knee brace and he can walk as much as he feels comfortable. We don’t get to work full days, but we work from after lunch till night time. So it is a pretty good days work.

Ok that’s all for this week. Everything is still going good. The end of the transfer is in less than 2 weeks! That will be an exciting time. Thank you for all the mail Mom!! I love you all!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon, June 8, 2009

2009-06-10T10:18:00.001-07:00

Dear Family,

Although we didn’t get to get out as much as we normally could, this week was pretty good.

On Thursday we got to go to the temple. Our ward had a temple trip planned for our youth and we got to go because the two Dor daughters were going and 2 reactivated members were going for the first time. They all loved it. It was really neat to see these people we have been working with so much, experience the temple. I got to help do confirmations and 2 baptisms. Apparently missionaries are not allowed to baptize women in the temple, so we each just baptized 2 young men. It was my first time doing baptisms and confirmations in the temple. It was a really good experience. The water in the baptismal font was really warm too…it was almost like being in a Jacuzzi. That’s the closest thing we have to swimming on the mission.

The next piece of good news is that we have another baptism coming up. David Majewski will be baptized on June 13, this Saturday. He is very prepared and ready. He’s been coming to church for 3-4 months and he read the entire Gospel Principles Book. (Hes the one that wanted to finish reading the Gospel Principle’s book before getting baptized). He finished it like 3 weeks ago, but we haven’t been able to see him since then, but last week we set up an appointment with him and he said he was planning on getting baptized on his birthday, June 13. He’s already been interviewed and his baptism was announced in Sacrament meeting, so we’re expecting a pretty good attendance. That will be exciting.

I’ve written about Maria a couple times…she is the lady that has pretty bad depression. Well she didn’t make it to church last week…we’re thinking because she was arguing with her daughter about what date she would get married. The daughter joined the church 2 years ago and shes attending BYU-I right now. She’s engaged and she’s planning on getting married on September 4th, but Maria wants her to take a lot of counseling classes and marriage prep stuff and get married in a year. I guess the daughter has already made up her mind and wants to get married on September 4th. Maria really wanted to be in the temple for her marriage and that was a big motivating force for her starting to come back to church. Well, now that’s gone and she’s been going through some other trials, so her desire was a little shaken. We fasted for her and we’ve been praying for her, and she came to church yesterday and had a really good experience. It was fast and testimony meeting and a lot of the experiences people shared reminded her of some of her experiences. Then in gospel essentials class we had a really good lesson. She told us how much she loved church. I think she realized the big difference the spirit can make in your life. When you're really sad and you come to church and feel the spirit, there is such a huge difference so it makes it easy to recognize it. We have really high hopes for her and were planning on giving her a baptismal date soon.

We had a couple other good lessons with people, but that was our week in a nutshell. In the meantime, as my companion has been icing his knee, I’ve been reading a lot of scriptures and playing the piano a lot. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it…I think I have, but whenever we have free time, my companion and I will play around on the piano and we’ve kind of been teaching ourselves. We can both play the right hand of most songs, which is really cool considering neither of us really knew anything about piano’s when we first got here. So in the last few weeks I’ve gotten a lot of practice.

A few days ago I also felt like I should read the Book of Mormon again. I started 3 days ago and now I’m in 2 Nephi 9! I want to finish it within a month.

I made 2 omelets last week. One was a success and the other one didn’t go as planned. Apparently you aren’t supposed to cook omelets on really high heat. Well I was really hungry so I put the heat on high so I could eat my food faster. I poured the egg mixture in, and almost immediately it started looking like scrambled eggs. So I abandoned the idea of an omelet and finished making the scrambled eggs. Then I threw in some chopped up ham, then I threw in a tortilla, put it all together, put some cheese in there and I had a delicious breakfast burrito. Frying the tortillas makes a big difference. That’s what Hispanic people always do and they always have good tortillas. I usually just heat them up in the microwave, but frying them is way better.

One last story. We were eating dinner at a member’s home last week and the fact that I am a Spanish missionary was brought up, so the parents started talking about how their son is taking Spanish and how he is really good at it. So they prod him to show off his talent and they ask him to say “Hi, my name is Phillip.” This was his response: (pronounce it as you would in English): Hoe-la, Me lambes es Phillip. The first thought that came to my mind was to correct one of the words, but then I realized everything was wrong, so I just kept my thoughts to myself. I think he combined “Mi nombre es Phillip with Me Llamo Phillip, with a bad gringo accent. I not sure where llames came from though. Then the Mom said, “No, you said it wrong. You're supposed to say Felipe, not Phillip.” That made me laugh a lot. That was TexMex at its finest.Ok, well that’s about all for this week!

Have a happy birthday Mom!! I think this is the first birthday that I have remembered the Monday before it happened. Have a great week!! I love you!!

Love,

Chase

PS. I also sent pictures of the Dor's baptism. Enjoy!

A Couple of Funny Missionary Videos

2009-06-01T13:57:00.000-07:00

The Bike Jump:

Raining:

(I believe those rain boots have been to Argentina too)

Could Be More Than You Asked For

2009-06-01T13:31:00.000-07:00

Chase sent some pictures...215 of them!

Click the link to see the pictures
http://picasaweb.google.com/thxhune/FromChaseMay2009#

Don't Miss It!

2009-06-01T12:21:00.001-07:00

In Chase's letter of June 1st he talks about a video of him playing Phantom of the Opera. I found the video and put it at the end of that letter. So, if you read the letter, but didn't see the video, look at the bottom of that post!

Received Monday, June 1, 2009

2009-06-01T10:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

Wow...this has been a pretty unpredictable week. Last P-day everything went pretty much as planned. We ate breakfast with the ward, had a BBQ, then we went and played some football. Apparently some youth in Sugar Land challenged the missionaries to a game of football and they were talking a lot of smack, so the missionaries there called up a couple companionships to put a team together and we killed them.

We had 2 BYU football players, the starting running back for the Dixie State football team, a player from another college team, and 3 huge Tongans. It was hilarious to see my companion play. He would run directly at the guy with the ball, through whoever was in front of him, and get the guy with the ball out (we were playing 2 hand touch). It was as if he didn't see the people between the guy with the ball and him. After a few plays nobody would block him. Then on offense he would always catch the ball with one hand and half the time he would forget it was 2 hand touch and just lower his head and run straight at someone if they were in front of him. He had never seen football played until he got here.

Unfortunately the story doesn't have a happy ending. After we clobbered the youth, we (the missionaries) made 2 teams and were playing against each other. Near the end, my companion jumped up to get the ball and when he came down, he landed in a hole. It turns out he tore his ACL and his meniscus (however you spell it). So last week we had to go to doctors appointments, MRI's, and he had to ice it and keep it elevated. Tomorrow were going back to the doctor to get the MRI read and they'll talk about what to do about the surgery...whether they'll do it here or in back in New Zealand where his family is. Luckily, it doesn't hurt bad enough to the point where he can't move. Obviously we cant go knock doors or just make random visits, but if we had a set appointment then we'll go. So I've been calling all our investigators and setting up lots of appointments.

We get to go to the temple this Thursday! The youth are going on a temple trip, so the Dor's kids are all going to go for the first time. And we get to go with them. That will definitely be a highlight of the week.

Yesterday was a really good day at church. A lot of good things happened. Michelle Dor (the mom), brought her sister-in-law and her nephew to church. She is already doing missionary work! Hopefully we can start teaching her and her kids. 2 of her kids already come to mutual with the Dors kids. Jonathan Dor, who is 12, got the priesthood yesterday and passed the sacrament for the first time. That put a smile on my face. He is a really good kid...he's one of those people you know will be a good member the rest of his life. Then like 15 people got callings. A few less actives we've been working with got callings which made me really happy. It shows how much they've progressed and this will help them stay strong and active. One of the people who got callings was our investigator David Majewski. He's on the activities committee with his wife. That made me happy too. We're going to have a lesson on Wednesday with him..he should have a baptismal date soon. We haven't been able to meet with them for like 3 weeks because they've been out of town. We had 6 non members at church this week, which was really good.

I actually do have a couple stories even though we didn't go out that much this week. We had a very strange dinner appointment last Saturday. Mom would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in that house. We got to their house and they invited us in and we sat on their couch and talked with them for like 15 minutes. I was wondering if they had forgotten about our dinner appointment. I don't remember what we talked about but it was definitely a strange conversation. Then in mid sentence, all the sudden the husband was like, LETS EAT! (I use an exclamation point because he literally yelled it). So we go to the dining room and its all perfectly clean and very elegant. There were china plates and full silverware (including the different sized forks). I was pretty surprised and wondered what we were going to eat. So we went into the kitchen and saw 6 boxes of pizza. That were more boxes than there were people. Well, lets just say we both ate until we couldn't eat anymore. Oh yeah, there were a couple of boxes of breadsticks too. That was delicious. They talked to us about computer games and that vampire romance book and all sorts of other things. I had a great time there..it was all really entertaining. They were both very nice people, but they were just a little different.

Next story is also about a dinner appointment. We ate at a Chinese restaurant called Bamboo Hut. I wasn't too happy when I heard we were going to go eat Chinese food, because we eat it all the time and I never really liked it to begin with, but this was gooood. It was a buffet and it wasn't just Chinese food. They had steak and ribs and all sorts of meat. They had a sushi bar and a huge selection. There were some interesting foods too. I had a crab claw. I was thinking it was the fat part of the crab arm full of meat. It literally was just the crab claw. They put the claw part of the arm (basically like a finger nail) and wrapped it in potato or something. I also had cheesy crab. I think it was imitation crab meat, but it was still alright. I also ate a frog leg. I don't know how many chances I'll have to do that, especially for free, so I did it. It tasted just like fish to me. It didn't taste that bad, it was just weird knowing it was a frog. Plus you could see veins and ligaments and stuff in there.

What a coincidence...I saw a professional football player too. I actually got to eat dinner at his house. I think he just barely got released from the Texans, but the Broncos are going to pick him up. He's and offensive lineman, so he is huge. His name is Scott Jackson I think. He lives in Sugar Land. I was on exchanges in Sugar Land so I lucked out that we were having dinner with him that night. They were a really nice family.

Alright well I think that's about all for this week. Hurricane season officially starts today for this area. That always makes things more exciting.

Oh yeah, did you guys see the videos that were on my memory card? I thought the video of me playing the phantom of the opera was pretty funny, just because that's what Christopher would always play when he got home.

Ok, well have a good week! Don't tear any ligaments...its not fun! I love you!!

Love,
Chase

NOTE FROM CHASE'S MOM: I didn't even know there were videos on Chase's memory card! Glad he said something. Here is the Phantom video:

Received Mon, May 25, 2009

2009-05-25T10:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

Well, first off, Happy Birthday last week Kylie!!! I remembered all day that it was Kylie's birthday and I remembered while I was reading the e-mail Mom sent me, but I forgot to write it down! So Kylie has 2 new pet rats. Maybe we should buy a snake and feed them to it. I think that would be more excited. You had better watch out for the Black Plague!!

It's a good thing we live with a member, because all the libraries are closed! I am using the Randall's laptop to e-mail today. This week my companion got sick for the first time in his life. He was sick from Sunday to Thursday. He didn't really know what he had, all he knew was that his head really hurt and he was really really weak. He didn't know what was going on with his body, because he's never been sick with anything before. He kept having really quick body temperature changes. One time in the middle of the night he woke up and showered twice, then he put on his white shirt and tie and tried to go back to sleep. It made me laugh, but I could tell his mind was definitely not working right. The rest wasn't so fun for me though. Lets just say its pretty easy to get bored when you are stuck indoors and the only thing you can do is read. I did enjoy all the reading time though. I read the entire book of Acts. Now I'm in Romans...Paul uses some complicated language sometimes but I still love it.

Unfortunately reading so much really messes up your eyes. I've noticed that my eyes have gotten a lot worse and I'm sure I need a new prescription. I talked to Sister Allred about it a week or 2 ago and she said that the mission insurance doesn't cover it. At a walmart around here I saw a sign that said a basic eye checkup was $50. That seemed like a lot and my eyes aren't too bad, so I'll probably just wait and if my eyes really effect me with driving or anything.

I got my package full of socks and 2 shirts and a fortune teller. It made me laugh. It's supposed to start getting hot next week, so they will come in handy when I have to start showering 2 times a day again.

Yesterday we had a big thunderstorm randomly come by. The thunderstorms still amaze me every time. It takes about 5 seconds to go from sunny and not raining, to pouring rain. The rain drops are huge too. When they hit our car windshield they drops are bigger than a quarter. I love it when it rains though...it makes things more fun.

Oh yeah...last week we ended up going for a little tour in Reliant Stadium where the Houston Texans play. Unfortunately that day they weren't giving out full length tours, but the guy there felt bad for us and gave us a half length tour for free. We walked around on the field, which is actually just a cement floor right now, and we went into the visiting team locker room and their coaching areas and all that stuff. It was a really fun P-day activity. Now I want to go to Minute Maid Park and to the place where the Rockets play...I forget the name. I'm going to make sure I go to those places before I leave Texas.

That's funny that you guys are singing random hymns for sacrament meeting. They did that in our ward for a week or 2 and it didn't go so well either. I think its fascinating to be in a different ward. Every ward does things so differently. Nearly every single week here they have 2 youth speakers then 2 more older people speak. I also found out that every month they have a topic for sacrament meeting. Now that I look back I think that might be how most wards do it, but I never realized it. I thought it was so weird when I first got here that all they ever talked about was temple marriage. I wondered what was wrong with this ward and why that's all they ever talked about. They also have a transition hymn after the closing prayer where everyone sings a hymn, except for the teachers get up and leave and go prepare their classroom for their lesson. The good part is that a member of the bishopric stands at each door and shakes everyone's hand as they walk out.

We had 3 investigators at church on Sunday and 3-4 less active people were working with. That made me really happy. I'm pretty sure I talked about Maria (the lady with bad depression). She came to church. That was really good to hear. We had a member stop by to give her a ride. A lot of people talked to her at church to.

This morning we had a memorial breakfast and a 2 mile walk. Maria went to both those too. We skipped the walk and just went to the breakfast. It was delicious. There were unlimited donuts and cinnamon rolls and fruit and drinks. Then at 1 today were going to go to a Tongan member in a nearby ward for a BBQ. Elder Taufa served in that ward when he first got here and this Tongan member wants to do a big BBQ for him for he leaves. Then tonight we are having dinner at a members home who always feeds us steak or something really good. So were getting fed 3 huge meals today. That's what I call a good P-day. We're probably going to go play football or softball in between the BBQ and dinner.

Well...enjoy your 3 day weekend! I was going to send pictures of the Dor's baptism through my e-mail this week, but this laptop doesn't have a USB port, so I can't. I'll do it next week though. Have a good week!! I love you all and pray for you every night!!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon, May 18, 2009

2009-05-18T10:40:00.000-07:00

Dear Family,

I’m at a library in pretty ghetto part of Houston, so I’m making sure to type my e-mail in Microsoft word in case the internet messes up on me again. We’re planning on going to Minute Maid Park, where the Astro’s play and take a tour of the place. I think it will be a pretty fun activity.

I’ll start out with the highlight of the week: the Dor’s baptism yesterday! It was a really good baptismal service. The room was packed and the members gave some great talks. I’m not sure if I’ve explained this, but the father works in Miami and he flew in so he could see the baptism. He was really touched at the baptism and had a really good experience. It was a pretty long baptismal service because there were 4 people who got baptized, all 4 of them had to get confirmed because the father had to go back to Miami early Sunday morning, and they had to be welcomed into Young Mens, Young Womens, and Relief Society. The two daughters, Mendy and Pascale, gave their testimonies at the end of the meeting. It was a memorable experience.

The Dors live next to 2 families they are related to. Some of the cousins have been there when we have taught some of the lessons and they love it. One of them gave the closing prayer and he prayed that he could come to church to see the Dors confirmation and baptism. Both of the cousins that were there last week asked if they could get baptized too. Unfortunately the father in one of the families there is trying to become a pastor of his own church, so they got into a big fight because everyone except for him wants to come to our church. Finally the husband told his wife that if they went back to the church again he would divorce her. So we are staying clear of that situation. It is really sad to see that like 10 people are behind held back by 1 man. That’s ok…I know in the future they will have a chance to join the church.

We got our transfer call this morning: no changes. For me and my companion at least. One Elder is getting transferred and one elder is training. This is my companion’s last transfer and he’s always made it a goal to leave an area better than he found it, so were going to be working hard to find more good people to teach. This transfer should be a good one. My mission president will be leaving at the same one. They’re going to leave on June 26.

I got Mom’s “Guiltless Spaghetti” package. I thought it was pretty funny. Pictures are always fun to get too. Whats even funnier is that it seems like everyone here loves to make us spaghetti. For a whole week we ate only spaghetti and pizza. I’ve had some delicious meals recently though. We had porterhouse steaks & shrimp one night. There's a really good steak restaurant around here called Saltgrass and they used the Saltgrass steak spice to season the steaks. That’s probably the best steak I’ve ever had.

I know I’ve asked this question before, but if I was told the answer, I forgot. I’m starting to get bored of my food and I remembered (again) how Dad taught me to make omelets. I was wondering if Dad could remind me of how you do it. All I remember is that you put some eggs in a frying pan, let it sit, put some cheese and ham and whatever stuff you want on one half, then flip the one side on top of the other side. I’m pretty sure that’s how you do it, but I’m not sure if you have to put water in there or something.

Here’s a last couple of random thoughts. Since coming on my mission and especially being in this area with this companion, I’ve started to love the bible a lot more. My companion would read the Bible all the time back at home (ironically he would really read the Book Mormon very much) and he knows so many scriptures from the Bible and all the stories. The people here love the Bible and when they see that you know the Bible, they respect you a lot more. So almost every day in my personal study I’ve been reading the Bible. I found my new favorite scripture in the Bible too. Its Ephesians 6:10-18.

I’ve also learned to appreciate good weather. The weather here is awful. The difference between humid heat and dry heat is that in the humidity the air all around you is whats hot, so even in the shade its burning up. You instantly start sweating. In dry heat it’s the sun that’s hot. In the shade it’s a little cooler and when there's a breeze it feels good. When there's a breeze in humidity it just blows the warm air around. These last 2 days have been really nice weather. My companion got sick for the first time in his life, so yesterday I sat in a chair in the back yard and read general conference talks. The wind was blowing and it was cool…that was good weather. Whenever Nana and Bumpa would come to visit us they use to always say how nice the weather was. I didn’t really understand it because that’s how it was every day…now I definitely know what they're talking about.

Last thing: the name of the guy that got drafted into the NFL is Michael Bennet. He’s actually on the Seattle Seahawks. That’s what I’m told at least.

Ok…that’s all for this week. Sister Randall is going to send off a package with my memory card, and shirt for me today, so that should be coming this week sometime. Have a good week…I love you!!!

Love,
Chase

Received Monday, May 11, 2009

2009-05-15T15:50:00.000-07:00

Wow Mom, that was a pretty good e-mail considering we just barely talked on the phone yesterday.

The heat here is getting pretty bad. Every day is supposed to be 88-90ish degrees throughout this next week. I’m going to leave my watch on every day and see how bad of a watch tan I can get. I can never manage to get one, I think it slides around too much. I can see the faint outline of my watch on my wrist already, so maybe I’ll be successful this summer.

Here’s the story about a lady named Maria Solorzano. You might remember that about a month or 2 ago me and my companion went biking in the pouring rain. My companion’s pedal was about to fall off and we needed an allen wrench to fix it, so we were trying to think of a member nearby. My companion remembered an address of a convert that lived just around the corner. Neither of us knew anything about her, and Elder Taufa had just happened to see her address earlier that day. Well when we knock on the door a lady answers and she told us that her daughter joined the church a few years ago and now she’s at BYU-Idaho. She was really nice to us, so we went back a week later and we found out that she is going through some really difficult times (I might have told you some of this already in past e-mails). We shared scriptures, and gave her a blessing and gave her a lot of advice. Well, for the past 10 days she’s been in the hospital because her depression got so bad that it could have become fatal. While in the hospital she thought a lot about everything we talked to her about, and about how she felt. Last evening we visited her (she’s back home now) and she said her daughter just got engaged to a member, and they plan on getting married in the temple. She wants to be a part of it and she knows that she this church is the right place for her. Shes seen miracles happen in her daughters lives and she always gets a good comforting feeling when missionaries or members of the church come by. So she committed herself to come to church next week and she wants to start taking the lessons and hopefully get baptized. That was really exciting because we have been praying a lot for her. I can't say I expected this to happen though.

In other news, I heard a week or 2 ago that the gay guy named Ryan that we were teaching in Galveston now has a baptismal date. That is pretty amazing and a huge change to make.

Nope, I haven’t gotten the spaghetti letter yet, but I’m sure its sitting in the mission office, so I’ll get it on Friday.

Ok, well that's about all for this week. It was fun talking on the phone yesterday. Have a good week, I love you!!!

Love,
Chase

Received Mon, May 5, 2009

2009-05-05T22:20:00.000-07:00

That was a good letter this week. The griffin stories always make me laugh. Zak sent me a good update as well.

I figured the “”I got it” email was just saying that you had gotten my e-mail. I think you sent me an e-mail about the swine flu while I was checking my e-mail so I knew that you were online. I think there's a delay though because I didn’t get the “I got it” til the next week.

The brick idea is working well. It was actually our Ward Mission Leader who did it all. People are already building the house. Just about every day we go to one or two active members and remind them about bishops challenge to invite members into their homes, so we’re really trying to keep everyone’s desire to do missionary work up, and its been going well. No teaching opportunities have come out of it yet, but people are asking questions and slowly opening the door to the gospel. This has also helped us to gain the trust and respect of our bishop. A few months ago he was saying how this area needs more than one set of missionaries because it is so big and a lot to handle. This last week he changed that thought and he wants us to get more miles in our car so we can work our whole area. He really trusts us and he knows we can do everything he wants.

Our area is huge, I don’t know if I’ve ever said that. From one side of our area to the other its around 50 miles 1 way, so we don’t get to go out there very often. By the way, yes that was a typo, we don’t eat at our bishops house for breakfast every day, I meant every Saturday. Every Saturday morning before we go and play soccer we eat breakfast at the bishops house. Sometimes he buys donuts…those are the best breakfasts. I actually just went to buy some donuts. I spent like 3 bucks at McDonald's, then used a bag of change I have to get some donuts across the street. The lady there was a very talkative Vietnamese lady. We must have done a good job entertaining her because she gave us each an extra donut.

While were still on the subject of food, I have to tell you about the huge breakfast I had. Last week I ate all of my cereal so I couldn’t have cereal for breakfast for like 2-3 days. It was weird not to have breakfast for cereal. I obviously missed it because on Tuesday morning after I bought more I ate over half a big box of Apple Jacks and nearly drank a half gallon of milk. That was delicious. I calculated that to be about 1400 calories.

I had some more bike troubles this week. Its not really surprising to me anymore to go to get my bike and see that the tire is flat. The only problem was that I had a really difficult time trying to patch this hole. 2 patches popped off and I only had 1 left, so I put that last patch on, then got some electric tape and wound it around there several times. When I pumped it up, I saw that there was another little hole, so I wound some electric tape around that hole too. I’ve ridden on my bike 3-4 days now and my makeshift patches are still working. I’m pretty proud of myself for that. I do have to give credit to that Guatemalan guy named Angel in Galveston that fixed my inner tube using masking tape. He gave me the idea.

This week we had Zone Conference. It was really good. This is our mission presidents 2nd to last Zone Conference. But like all our other Zone Conferences it got reeeally long. We were at the building by 8:30am and didn’t leave til 5:00pm. They did feed us lunch, so that was good. It gets kind of hard to pay attention for that whole time, but I learned a lot of good things.

I have a kind of funny story. Somehow in our conversation a month or two ago I told Elder Taufa about how I got diarrhea really bad in Galveston. I came to find out that he had never had diarrhea in his life. So he asked me exactly what it was and I told him. (I’ll leave out my explanation of diarrhea). He said that he wished he could have it to experience it. Bad idea. Yep he got bad diarrhea this week. He thinks he got it from some old Mexican food that was in our fridge for a few days. He pooped constantly for almost 2 days. We could barely get out to work when he had to come back and use the bathroom. He couldn’t really use a members bathroom because it would stink up the whole house, so we always had to come back home. He thought it was pretty cool at first. Then he got tired of it. I couldn’t help but to laugh at the whole thing. I still remember when he had it the first time he walked out of the bathroom and was like “Woow…that was so cool. I think I got diarrhea!” He has a little accent that makes everything funnier too.

The Dors baptism is still scheduled for May 16th and they are doing awesome. We taught them the Law of Chastity last week and talked to them about watching good movies and having good language and everything like that. Michelle (the mom) was like, this is what I’ve been trying to teach my kids!! She’s never let her kids watch rated R movies or anything. The kids asked us if there are any movies made by the church that they could watch, so were bringing them The Other Side of Heaven.

Tien, the Vietnamese lady, is still going to get baptized, but shes had to go into Houston for the past few weeks so we were going to choose a baptismal date again for her this week.

That is funny that the JW's are stopping by. Its always funny when they knock on missionaries doors. If they are in their proselyting clothes, the JW's freak out and just walk away usually. Sometimes they'll give us one of their Watchtower pamphlets. They are afraid of missionaries though...every time they see us they turn around and walk the opposite direction. If you try to talk to them they will ignore you. I think just bearing your testimony to them was a good idea.

A preacher from the Pentecostal church came to our church yesterday. I sat by him during sacrament meeting and told him a few things, and showed him a picture of the prophet. I also gave him a Book of Mormon and told him all about it. After Sacrament meeting he took me into the foyer to ask me questions about our church. I think he was trying to scare me and he quoted a bunch of scriptures and things. I finished quoting a lot of the scriptures he was saying and answered all of his questions. He told me he was very impressed with our church services and he was very interested to see what was in the Book of Mormon. He told me he was very impressed with what us young missionaries do. It was a really neat experience.

Everything else is still going really well. We are in week 5 of the transfer now. That means in 2 weeks we’ll get our transfer call. I’m pretty sure I’ll stay here, but you never know.

I also just realized I’m going to hit my 10 month mark in 5 days. It does not feel like its been 10 months to me.

Alright, well I love you all!! Have a great week!

Love,
Chase

PS. I forgot the name of the guy in who was in the NFL draft. I only remember his first name was Jacob. I think he's on the Steelers now.

PPS. I carry a pocket sized hand sanitizer thing with me pretty much every day and I use it pretty often. I did hear there was a confirmed case of the swine flu in a nearby high school though.