Tuesday, August 18, 2009

August 18, 2009

Hey Family!
First off: YAY! Dad is home. Congratulations dad! How are you feeling? What have you been doing to make up for lost time in the hospital? President Bassett called to give me the update, but I'll tell you about that later, 'cause that's a bit of a story right there, lol.
Secondly, I am impressed with the latest Joe torturing attempts. They sound like their doing alright. Bishop Duke, in one of my wards, turned out to be a black belt of 20 something years and teaches martial arts as his actual income. You can tell Joe he's a ninja who trained Bruce Lee back in the day and that he's helping me develop my technique more, lol. Anyway, keep up the good effort, lol. :-P

Thirdly, Kaydee's taking Guitar! Are you using my guitar, Kassie's, or are you getting a new one? BTW, can you tune my guitar, if you haven't been doing that. The neck is probably way bent a little now if no one's been tuning it. :-(
Anyway, Keifer is awesome. He's the coolest music teacher at COM ever. Period. End of story.

Now onto my week.
Zone developement meeting went well. Everything worked out alright. But a lot of the trainings went over, so I spent more of it worrying about time than learning, it seemed like. But it all worked out and we still managed to end on time without cutting anything out. :-)
And our zone's numbers are continuing to go up, so that's great.
Elder Gomez and I woke up Saturday morning we had two baptismal dates set for this coming Saturday (I think I mentioned that last week), and we had both of the baptismal interviews set up for that day.
An 18 year old, had his in the morning. It all went well. He passed the interview, and was really excited to get baptized, and so were we!
Then, the other interview. He is 50 years old, came to the church and told us he was still smoking. :-O Needless to say, he didn't make it passed the interview. He was doing really well, but some current situations caused him to start smoking again, so the blessings of being baptized by someone who has priesthood authority will have to wait a little bit longer. We reset his date for mid September.
Then, later that night, we got a phone call from the 18 year old's girl friend. . . . He lost his job, and so his parents got mad and grounded him. So now he can't come to church for a while, and he can't get baptized for a while either.
:-( So we had two, now we have none.
But the rest of the zone will be baptizing seven or eight people this coming Saturday. WOW! We're seeing miracles, not just in the zone, but in the mission. The work here is going really strong.

So, Monday (yesterday) I woke up and got ready to go for the day. I had personal study, and then I started to feel funny. I got sick (I won't give you the details). After a while, I finally felt better, so we went out to work-- and came right back 30 minutes later 'cause I was feeling sick again. President Bassett called while I was sleeping, so Elder Gomez told me when I woke up that dad is out of the hospital. :-) Then we went out and worked from about 3 o' clock on. What made me sick you ask? Food poisining, it seems. From what? That is a good question. I don't know. Elder Gomez didn't get sick, and we ate the same things! Anyway, fun times.

This morning we had a Zone activity-- we played soccer. It was a lot of fun. :-) This afternoon one of our ward mission leaders taught us how to speed read. :-) With practice, we're suppose to be able to read way fast. He once read the Book of Mormon in 25 minutes, and the Old Testiment in 55 minutes. WOW!
Anyway, I love you and hope you all have a great week.
Jason

Monday, August 10, 2009

August 10, 2009

We weren't online this week to chat with Jason as we weren't expecting him to get on until tomorrow. So we missed him, but here is his letter and Jason responds to the news that "He's gonna be an Uncle"....


Hello again family! (from Apache Junction)

So, I got your emails, and I opened the first one and thought "I want some of that cake. It looks really good. Why's there a question mark there? Is the cake vanilla or chocolate?"
Then I opened the second one. . . . HOLY SANTA BIBLIA!
Congratulations. But I'm warning you, you better not corrupt the poor child. That's uncle Jason's job. ;-)

So my week was pretty good. We had another baptism, which I'll tell you about a little later on. But first, I have to tell you how awesome our zone is doing.
Our Zone is up to 9 baptisms after just four weeks! There are only 8 companionships in the zone, so you can kind of see how great things are going. As a mission, in four weeks, we've baptized 98 people! And many more are on there way for the last two weeks of the transfer. This is the most baptisms I've seen in the mission since I got to Arizona, I think. Hopefully this keeps up.

Moving on-- I think I told you a little bit about the baptism last week, but it was for Tracy and Lakota. We're teaching a part member family, and the mom and two oldest kids were going to get baptized on this past Saturday, but the mom wasn't ready so we decided it would be best to push the baptism back a few weeks. But the parents wanted us to baptize the kids anyway, so we went ahead and baptized Tracy and Lakota. They're doing really great. They actually started arguing over who gets to say the opening/closing prayer when we come over. :-) When I first started going over there, neither would pray. :-) Bishop Duke baptized Tracy, and guess who baptized Lakota? . . . . I did! That was pretty neat. It's the first time I've ever done a baptism. Hopefully their mom will be baptized on the 22nd of this month, but we'll see.

We do currently have two more solid baptism dates set for the 22nd. One is for an older guy named David (well, he's dad's age, so that to me is "older", lol), and the other is for a 19 year old guy named Aaron. Both are doing good and are on track for that day.

Tomorrow is Zone Development meeting, which is where we, the Zone Leaders, put together a meeting to help our zone improve. So we have assigned some missionaries in our zone to talk about street contacting (TTI's, as we call them), teaching simply, leaving commitments, etc. It should be great. It was a hard thing to plan, lol. All we really had to do was decide what the zone needed to work on and who we would assign to teach us a skill to work on that thing. Turns out that is kinda hard to do. lol.

That's pretty neat that Phillip is a ZL as well. And a lot of ZL's don't train. Elder Christensen was never even Sr. Companion when he became a ZL. He'd only been out 6 months. So you never know when it going to happen, I guess.

Didn't do much for my birthday. We had our entire day full of appiontments, which was really great. Except that all but one fell through. . . . that's probably the worst fall out rate I've seen in a long time. But the day was pretty good anyway. We had a district meeting, and elder Gomez had the zone sing me happy birthday. lol.

Thanks for all of the stuff. I love Eddie, my personal stress relieving from, lol.

Love you all,
Jason

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

August 4, 2009

Hey family!
So the mission is doing great with baptisms so far. By the end of this week our mission should be up to 90 baptisms so far for this six-week transfer, with two more weeks left after that, and 100 more baptismal dates set. To put that into perspective, we usually baptize between 90 and 120 people every transfer. It looks like we'll destroy that. And next transfer is looking good as well.
The mission is doing great. And, obviously, President Bassett is pretty happy about that.
The training blitz we did a while back really got the mission going in the right direction, it seems.
We had a great zone conferrence Tuesday. We talked a lot about finding. Elder Gomez and I gave a training on working with members, which was pretty neat. It went well, I thought. And I learned a lot from it. Usually missionaries go to members homes and say "who do you know that we can teach?" (usually after a spiritual thought or a short lesson). Our training was on how they need to be more than that. A lot a members don't have anyone for the missionaries to work with, but they really want to help. So we talked about how we can use members more by leaving them with simple things that they would feel comfortable doing. For example, coming to a lesson, sitting with an investigater at church, giving a friend a church video, etc. Things we should already know, but often don't do.
Speaking of, how's the missionary work going with the Mace family? I know you all have been a little busy (to say the least) lately, but any good experiences?
Elder Gomez and I didn't think we would have any baptisms this week-- we thought we'd have to push our investigaters dates back-- but we will have two baptisms this Saturday. It will be for Tracy and Lakota. Tracy is 13, Lakota is 11 I think. Their mom was suppose to get baptized as well, but she wants to wait a little bit longer. We were going to have the kids wait as well, but she wants them to go ahead.
We have several more baptisms set up for August 22nd. So that should be another big day.
We found some great new investigaters (finally!) yesterday. Their names are Justin and Samantha. I street contacted Justin a while back and set up a time to visit him. But Justin wasn't home at the set up time, and we couldn't ever seem to catch him. We almost gave up, but decided to try again. We stopped by yesterday, and he and his wife were home. We taught them, and they really loved the message. I'm excited to continue teaching them.
We went on exchanges this week, as well. That was a new experience. I've never really had to "evaluate" before. It's a little intimidating giving feed back to a district leader that's been out for longer than you have. :-P But I think it went okay.
And because of Zone Conferrence and exchanges, out finding numbers are finally starting to go up. Not drastically, but a little bit, so that's good. :-) Hopefully it keeps up.
I think that's about all that's happened this week.
Love,Jason
P.S. I won't be a teenager any more. It's the big Two-Zero. :-P I got three packages in the mail this week, so I assume that's all of them. Thank you!
And no, I haven't opened them yet. But I'm not waiting until 2010, whoever wrote that. lol. :-D