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