August 25, 2009

TRANSFER NEWS!

Hey Family,
Yes, another six weeks have come to a close, and transfers have come and gone. What happened you ask? Are Elder Gomez and I still companions? Nope. . . :-( Elder Gomez got transferred to be a Zone Leader in Scottsdale, with the rich people. :-D So now I'm Jr. Zone Leader to Elder Page. I've only known him for less than two hours now, but he seems like a really good guy. I'm excited to work with him.
It should be another really good transfer. Our zone did really good as far as baptisms go. The zone has been getting a consistant 6 baptisms per transfer (6 weeks). Last transfer, we got 17! Almost three times that number. And this transfer we're looking good. We still have a lot of dates set up, so that's exciting.
We took Donaldo to the Visitor Center last night to watch the Joseph Smith movie. (It was probably the 20th time I've seen that movie. . . . It's really good though.) If you don't remember who Donaldo is, it's Roxanne's dad. She was baptized a while back, the mom is also a member. We're just trying to get Donaldo baptized. We're not really sure what's going on there. . . Right now we're just trying to help him feel the spirit and gain a stronger testimony.
We found several new investigaters, as well. And all of them seem really solid, so that's exciting.
Sunday we had an appointment fall through, so as we were walking back I saw a guy in the park. I walked over and talked to him, and we ended up teaching him about the restoration right there in the park. His name is Jack.
Then, yesterday we taught a guy named Jesse. His grandma is a less active member, and I don't think his mom is a member. He's a really cool guy, and we had a great conversation with him. He wants us to help him quit smoking-- we happen to be experts at that. Not really, but we try.
And finally, last night a couple had us over for dinner and then a lesson. That went really well, too.
This next transfer should be really good. No baptisms coming up until September 12, because all of the baptisms are done on a stake level. So, the next stake baptism isn't until then, so our investigaters can't get baptized 'till then either. But it makes it a really spiritual experience, 'cause the stake does a really good job. One of our investigaters wouldn't come to church, but we got her to go to the last baptism. She came and liked it so much, she was in church the next morning. :-)
Not too much more happened this week.

How's yours been?
How's the new car? YAY! I have no idea how to drive it, but alright. I'll learn :-)

As for baby names.... I like Jason Jr. for the record. how about Jason XIV (That's roman for 14th, lol). That would be a really cool signiture.
I've got to get going. Love you and catch you next week.

Love,
Jason

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

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

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

July 27, 2009

Hey family!
--==Question & Answers:==--
Do you need 2 cent stamps and if so how many? Or do you need new .44 cent stamps?I meant to buy some 2 cent stamps (Why did the post office have to change the price!!!) but I haven't had time. So, yes, if you can get me some that would be great.
So, how is the area? Did your baptism go through or was that this next week? The area is doing well. And the baptism went well. I tried to send some pics, but it didn't work on this computer. I'll try again another time. I still have to show you pics of Jorge's baptism, Theophile and Suzanne, and Milton as well. One of these days, lol.
Are you drinking tons of water? I'm sure you are! Yup. You can never drink enough 'cause the heat just sucks it all right out of you.
What do you want or need for your birthday? The girls already have something ready to go. I'm slow, but have things started. Anything you are needing me to send? Not really, no. Just stamps, I guess. Oh, and some more lables, if you can. :-)

--==Now on with the letter:==--
Our zone's doing great in the baptism area. In just two weeks we've already had 5 baptisms in our Zone, and we still have 20 more baptismal dates set. Needless to say, we're all really excited about that. Previously this Zone has been getting an average of 6 baptisms per transfer (6 weeks). It looks like we'll finally smash that pattern. :-) The down side is that finding efforts our low. So we're trying to figure out how to help our zone, or else next transfer will be a bad one. We'll end up baptizing everyone and then we'll have no one to teach! But we'll get that going.

We're going to be doing exchanges soon, so we can work with everyone on that. :-D Hopefully the numbers will go up after that, so we can set ourselves up for another great transfer.
This week I interviewed someone else for baptism. :-) It was for a 10 year old girl named Brylee. That was another great experience, and she was baptized the same day as our investigater, a nine year old girl named Roxanne. Roxanne's mom is a member, her dad is not. We're still working on getting her dad baptized. They're a really great family.
Tomorrow is Zone Conference, which is why I am on today. I will also probably be on next monday, because Tuesday is Zone Developement Meeting and interviews with President Bassett. After that it will probably go back to "normal".
So how's everyone doing? Congrats on graduating, Kellie! YAY! Now you can go for your Ph.D. :-)
I see you're all on, so I'll wrap up this email.
Love you all,
Jason

July 21, 2009

Sorry, with everything going on last week, I forgot to post the letter from July 21st, so here it is...

Dear Family,
....No one let me know Kellie was speaking at graduation-- until yesterday when I got Kellie's letter and today when I read mom's email! Congrats!
Mom sent me a list of questions, so here's the answers: (BTW, I do like q's. If you have any, send 'em to me)
How big of a zone do you cover? That depends on what you mean by big. It's the 4th largest Zone as far as the amount of ground we cover, so it's pretty big in that regard. As far as missionaries, though, we only have 16 in the Zone (8 companionships).
What areas do you cover? Our Zone covers part of East Mesa and I think all of Apache Junction. Elder Gomez and I cover one ward in Mesa and two in Apache Junction.
We live right on the boarder of Mesa and Apache Junction on a street called Meridian (Meridian and University are the major cross roads, if you want to look it up on a map).
Any indian reservations in your zone? Nope.
How's your comp? He's a great missionary. It's so nice to not be with a greenie! lol. I've spent my whole mission thus far with greenies (except my trainer), until now! lol. He works really hard, is really obedient to the rules, and is a great example. He's great.
Where is he from? South Jordan, Utah. The same place as my trainer Elder Williamson.
What's the area like? Desert. lol. It's the first area I've been in that really shows what Arizona is-- a desert. lol. It's actually a lot nicer than I thought it would be-- probably a good size step up from my area in Phoenix. The people aren't as humble, though. But they also don't have as many problems.
Is it a downtown area again? No. It's again more like Seabrook than Houston.
Is it getting really hot yet? YES. I told you in my last few emails it's hot! lol. It got to somewhere around 115-117 this past week. But it rained this morning, so it's a freezing cold 106 today. *shiver*
How do you like being a ZL? It's interesting. lol. It's good so far. Interesting, but good. I realized that I definately don't want to be an AP. lol. Elder Diaz, one of the AP's, was with us yesterday and his phone rang all day yesterday with missionaries calling him for this or that. It was crazy. At least we are never THAT busy. lol.
Any news from those in your last area? No.
Isn't Apache Junc. next to your Mesa area? Close, but not quite. Mesa is actually bigger than I thought. It goes WAY out to the east.
Is it in the same zone? No, my old area was in the Pueblo Zone, which is right next to this one, I think.
Hopefully that answers all of those.

So I did my first baptismal interview the second day of being a Zone Leader. It was for a 13 year old girl named LeAnn. I was more nervous doing the interview than she was, no doubt. It turned out alright, but it was hard just because I had no idea what I was doing. Elder Gomez practiced with me that morning, so that was good, but still. :-P Anyway, it all went well.
Our Zone has some struggles-- our numbers are below the mission average, so we're trying to figure out how we can help our zone do better. One of the assistants came with us on Exchanges yesterday to see how we're doing and give us some feed back. Elder Diaz-- the assistant that came with us for the day-- was in my district in Mesa. He's a great guy, and REALLY good at street contacts. It made me realize how much I need to work on that.
We have a bunch of baptismal dates set, including a baptism for this Saturday, so that's really exciting. It's for a 9 year old girl named Roxanne. We're trying to convince her non-member father to get baptized on the same day. Her mom is a member. They're a great family, so I'm looking forward to the baptism.

Well, I've got to go. Catch you again next week. Hopefully dad will be at home. :-) I'm still praying for you. Tell everyone hi for me.

Love you,
Jason

July 14, 2009

Hey family,
Yes, president Bassett called me with the update. I'm glad to hear that dad is doing well. Hopefully he'll be home soon. :-)
[drum roll]
Yes, it's time for more exciting transfer news!
I know what you're thinking, the Central Ward area must have been split again! That would have been amazing, but no, it wasn't. Actually, transfer news is even crazier than that.
Elder Turner and I were sure that he was leaving-- he's been in the area for a long time. But we were wrong. In fact, I'm not emailing you from the Phoenix library today. I'm actually emailing you from a library in Apache Junction right now. Yes, I got transfered to AJ! Crazy, huh?
I told Elder Christensen when I went to Phoenix that I would go to AJ next-- it's the next logical place in the valley after Scottsdale, Mesa, Phoenix. Yup, I called it.
Oh, and I am once again Junior companion, which is nice. I've been hoping to go Jr. again since I went Sr. in Mesa, lol. The problem is that I am Jr. companion to a Zone Leader. Thus, I am now a Zone Leader! :-) I turned a bit pale when President Bassett called me to tell me. But I'm happy to give it a try. Hopefully I don't let him down. So I am a Zone Leader in the Superstition Zone (spelling?).
My new companion is Elder Gomez. He's a pretty awesome guy, and I'm excited to work with him. Elder Coffman was here before me, BTW. Just thought you'd like to know that side note.
Oh, and my first born in the wilderness, my greenie Elder Christensen is also now a Zone Leader up in Pasen (spelling?). That was really great to hear. Both of us becoming ZL's at the same time. He's only been out six months and he's a Zone Leader already! He's such a good missionary. I'm glad I didn't ruin him, lol. :-D
Last week Elder Turner and I found a new investigater. She was really great-- she reminded me a lot of Ceanna, my first baptism. We taught her the first lesson, and she was really excited, so we set a a church tour to show her around the church. Then we taught lesson two, then three and set a date for August 2nd. All in one week! It was really amazing. She was yet another GREAT referral from the spanish speaking missionaries. They give us some really great people to teach.
James is doing well. He's down to five cigerettes. So far, so good. He's still slowly working his way towards getting baptized.
Hopefull I'll be able to make it to all the baptisms that will be coming up this next month in my old area, but it's a pretty far drive, so I may not get to. Either way, I'm glad I could help get the area moving.
While I was there, more people were baptized into the ward than the entire previous year. Not because of me, of course, but because the members were helping out a lot, and Heavenly Father was helping us find some really amazing people. I'm so glad I could help. I know the ward will keep moving forward, and work will increase even more. Everything was going great, so I'm sad that I had to leave the area, but I am excited to be in this area. I hear that there is a lot of work going on here, so I can't wait to get started!
hope all goes well this next week.
Love you, and hope to catch you next week. :-)
Tell everyone hi for me.
Jason

July 7, 2009

Once again, this week was alot of talk about the concerns he has for Rick. We can tell from his letters that this is really starting to bother him. We've encouraged him to get in contact with his mission president. But, here is news from the mission field...

Hey family,
I had yeat another interesting week. . .
First of all, you will be getting a surprise in the mail this week. A victims rights packet. Yeah, don't worry, we're fine. Our car got broken into this week. Some one jimmied the door and stole elder Turner's camera and my MP3 FM adapter. Not a big deal for me, but elder Turner lost his camera, so that stinks. I don't leave my camera in the car-- in fact it's always in my pocket. But that was a hard lesson for him to learn. So we filed a police report, called the mission office, talked to the appartment office (it happened at our appartment at night while we were sleeping) and got all that taken care of. Legally they have to send the packet to our home, so you'll be getting it soon. Again, nothing to worry about.
We set a baptismal date with a guy named Brian. He's really great. He doesn't have a car, so he asked if we could get him a ride to church. We called and called and called and everyone was out of town. We finally had to call him back and say we couldn't get him a ride. He told us he'd be there anyway. And sure enough, when we came to church he was already sitting there, ready to go. He's really awesome. When we told him about baptism, getting ready to set a date, he cut us off saying "I want to get baptized!" So we were like, "great!"
James is having some trouble with church, though. He has a REALLY severe fear of people. He tried to come to gospel principles, but only made it through about half the class before his fear finally got to him. Poor guy. He's really awesome, but he has some hard challanges in his life-- most of them aren't his fault. Like his fear of people is caused from the fact that he was shot in the face a few years back. It also caused him to go almost completely blind. And so he's on medication for anxiety, and that makes it really hard for him to quit smoking cause he can't sleep, etc. Luckily, the atonement can cover such problems. We just have to keep building his faith, and we know we'll see miracles happen.
We also found some great new people to teach, but not much is going on there, yet. I'll have to update you on them later. We're short on time today. Kind of a long story, but a new guy in the office is making life . . . interesting for us.
My 4th was just a normal day. I saw no fireworks. Nothing special :-)
We set a baptismal date, though. So that was good. :-)
But anywho.
Love you all, and I hope everything goes good for you all this next week.
Dad, get better!
Keep me posted.

I don't say it enough, so:
Love you Dad.
Love you Mom.
Love you Kassie.
Love you Kellie.
Love you Kaydee.

--Jason
Oh, and Alex. . . . You're a good guy. . . . ;-)