Day after Christmas e-mail

Merry Christmas!! I hope that everybody had a great Christmas!

I don't have a ton of time to write this week.. so hopefully the pictures make up for it! Here in Costa Rica, Christmas Eve is bigger than Christmas so for Christmas Eve the Stake President invited 6 missionaries over to his house to eat dinner! It was really fun! 

Well.. Love you all lots! It was great seeing you yesterday! (Skype)

Mission President and his family

Loving the new area

This ward is seriously so great. This week was the primary program and we had an attendance of 171 people! I haven't seen that many people in church since I've been out here!

Tonight is the mission Christmas party so I don't have a lot of time for stories... but I would like to share a quickie.

Since I got here we have been teaching a guy named M. He is a talker. We get to his house and sit down and he just talks and talks and talks. He has had a pretty rough life and has fallen in to alcoholism after his second wife died. He pretty much spends all day alone watching TV all day long. He has been progressing pretty well, but always said that he will NEVER wake up at 8 to go to church at 9 on a Sunday. I decided that if he wouldn't wake up to go to church, he would never progress . We said many prayers asking the Lord to help M. get up early for church on Sunday. We go to his house, sit down, and the first thing he says is, "This Sunday I'm going to church." And I was awe struck. I don't know what made him change his mind, but I know the Lords hand had everything to do with it. And sure enough, when we passed by Sunday morning to pick him up, he was all ready to go!

Okay, I have time for one more experience... Like I said last week, this ward likes to give references (yessss) so the elders quorum president gave us a reference for one of his neighbors. When we went to contact the house a guy came out and said that he didn't live there anymore.. but after he looked at me and saw my gringo look he said in broken English, "I need to change. I feel bad with God. I have gotten spiritually far from the Lord. Help me change. Help me with my addictions. I want to be better." Wow. That doesnt happen often. So he let us in and said that he wanted to learn English to help him with his job and that he wanted to go to church. So to hit two birds with one stone, we taught the first lesson in English and he loved it! I'm excited to see where this one goes!

Well, hopefully you all have a wonderful Christmas, and remember why it is really important. To remember the words of Paul in Acts 20:35,

"I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive."

Much Love and a muy feliz navidad!

Service Project

This is going to be a good area, I can feel it!

This is going to be a good area, I can feel it!

It's been really strange, because since I have been in the mission for so long now and I have been in so many areas, I know a lot of people that are in my new ward! This ward is by far the strongest ward that I have been in. The attendance last week was 130.which is insane compared to the other wards and branches that I've been in. Also, this ward likes to work with the missionaries! The amount of references that I received this week has been more than all the references that I have gotten in all my other areas combined!

The last missionary that was here didn't leave me with too much to work with... which means that we will have to spend a good while looking for new investigators, but if the members help us out we will be doing well soon. 

It's so strange thinking that Christmas is right around the corner. It's really funny walking around on a hot, humid night and seeing Christmas lights and Christmas trees all around you! The Christmas spirit just doesn't feel quite the same here. But to help get in the Christmas spirit, the stake put together a ward choir activity. Every ward organized a little Christmas choir and sang 2 songs. It actually turned out really well and we got an investigator to come! The choir director was actually the father of the mom from the Navas family from Perez Zeledon... so I already knew him and his other daughter. Small world. 

Today was also fun, because we met the zone baptism goal last months so we got to go go karting! I didn't think I would get to do that again in the mission! And this time, I redeemed myself and got first place :)

Sorry no pictures this week. The computer is being weird.

love you!!!

Chase was pretty impressed by this bathroom. 

Chase got transfered! Lot's of pictures this week.

Had changes!! But... I got sent to the city! I'm practically next door to where I was in the office, but it's all good. At least I'm already accostomed to how it is here and what the weather is like. My new companion is Elder Martìnez and is from Mexico. He just finished his training and has 3 months in the mission.

It was actually pretty hard to say goodbye to the members in Perez. It is amazing how much their attitude has changed over these short 5 months. They have really started to trust us more and they are starting to see the importance of missionary work in their lives. I had to also leave some investigators that I got really attached to. Hopefully they will be baptized in the near future and will play a big role in helping the branch grow.

Well  I don't have a ton of time, because of changes and everything, but hopefully I will have lots of good stories for you next week!!

The Navas family feed Chase most Sunday's and they always played basketball with him on P-days.

For a Christmas service project the missionaries cleaned a cemetary.

They call this mountain the "Sleeping Indian Woman".  This mountain is always cloudy.

Chase taught the Chinchilla family who were a very nice and loving family.  The daughters attended Chases English class.  The family came to the Christmas devotional hoping to be able to say goodbye to Chase.

Not sure how I feel about this e-mail (mom)

This week has gone by super fast. And so has my computer time...

Highlight of the week. I have become really good friends with one of the biggest drug dealers in Cocori and he always likes it when we come over. His girlfriend is really anti mormon but has been reading the book of mormon like crazy and every time we go over she has a page of questions for us to answer. This week his son had his 5th birthday and he wanted us to come over. We went and it was a huge party with all of the roughest from the neighborhood and a bunch of little 5 and 6 year olds. haha it was so strange! But hopefully good things come from all of this.

Also... there is a rumor that President is taking me out this change (one week) and is sending me to the Zona Sur. It's suuuper hot there and is about 9 hours away from San Jose... it's not a for sure thing, but if I get sent out there its going to be crazy!!

Sorry for no long stories... I ran out of time. But watch the Christmas video for this year if you have time! And accept the challenge to serve every day in December until Christmas!!

https://www.mormon.org/

Love you!

Zone Conference

Dental experience in Costa Rica amongst other things

Still sick... but this week I bought some cough syrup that supposedly is pretty good... we will see!

This week has been a week filled with strange experiences... Here are a couple:

1. One of my fillings fell out. I decided to go to a local clinic to see what they would do to fix it. The dentist said, well it'll take about 15 minutes of your time and 40 bucks. 15 minutes seemed like a very short amount of time to replace a filling, but I said okay... and she sat me down and said, would you like anestesia? I thought about it for a little bit and decided, well that's usually the worst part, so I opted to go all natural. I'm pretty sure that was a good decision on my part... the drilling didn't hurt too bad and there was no swelling afterwards! I think American dentists should give the option too!

2. I think I told you about the family that we were teaching that said that we were angles sent by God to help her out of her drug addiction.. right? Well she smoked crack this week... and went into a deep depression. It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out.

3. Speaking of drugs... a recent converts daughter is a huge druggie that lives in the street and always walks around drunk. Well this week she over dosed really bad and came to her moms house and passed out and started having a seizure. The police came and she called us and had us give her a blessing. It was pretty nuts. I wish I could say that stuff like that hasn't happened to me a lot on the mission, but for some reason crazy things like that just seem to be normal here.

4. I had to come up to San Jose to get a package out of customs... and it is freeezing here! I forgot just how hot my area was. I can't wait to get back to the humid air! Also, Costa Rica changed their rules and if you send candy in a package it gets stuck in customs... so just don't write candy or food on the package labels... just missionary supplies (suministros misionales) and other stuff like that, because it's hard traveling 3 and a half hours to go to the city.

That's about all I have time for... since I'm in the city I dont have my camera with me... sorry for not sending pictures for such a long time!

Love you lots!

A mission farwell, and a future baptism

Well this week I have been sick with a really annoying cold... it's not too bad, but it's really been hard to focus. It seems like every time I have to take the trip up to San Jose I always get sick afterwards. In between Perez and San Jose there is a hill called "Cerro de la muerte" or death hill. It's called that because its so cold there that when the people were building the freeway through there lots of people froze to death. Whenever you go to San Jose the bus stops on the hill for 30 minutes and I think the big temperature change always messes me up.

This week I have been focusing a lot on a cool video that I watched talking about the importance of adapting to the changes that the Lord gives us. Here is the link if you'd like to check it out:

https://www.lds.org/blog/seeing-green?cid=HP_TH_3-11-2016_dOCS_fBLOG_xLIDyL2-3_

In life and in the mission sometimes the Lord throws some curveballs at you. Just when you think that everything is going in the right direction and everything is cool, Boom, something happens. I have had to learn to adapt to the changes that He gives me and move forward with what I have. It really doesn't matter what others think or say about me, as long as I know that my Heavenly Father is proud of what I'm doing!

In other news, this week one of the youth from our branch left to go to his mission in Peru! I got to talk at his farewell party about my mission and what I thought about it. It was pretty fun! And then later that night he baptized his cousin that we have been teaching.

Also, the Phillipino lady that we have been teaching...? Last week I put a baptism date for this month and she said that she would talk to her boyfriend about it. Well, she went to the baptism this week and said that she talked to her family about her own baptism. She said that she wants to get baptized!! BUT her future in laws say that they want to be there when she gets baptized.. so she will get baptized in a couple of months when she goes to the States. It's a bittersweet feeling haha she's going to get baptized which is awesome, but I was really looking forward to having an English baptism here in Costa Rica. haha

Mission Correlation Meeting