A Very Country Christmas - 12/08/14 (Glen Carbon, IL)

Dear Family and Friends,

The weeks are starting to fly by for me out here, I am almost done being a greenie so that is pretty cool I guess! We have tried working our hardest this week as we approach Christmas. People are getting busier and busier, which can make the work for us a little slower. Elder Abad and I are getting pretty excited for Christmas! We have been listening to Christmas music non-stop! We have like 10 CD's of Christmas songs sung by Country artists that we play in the car. Then for some reason we have been driving a lot...  We have been driving over 50 miles a day all week. So I learned to love driving more, and love Christmas country music. Good stuff... 

The one thing that has made our work successful this week is sharing the "He Is The Gift" Christmas video that The Church has put out! It is so powerful each time we show it to somebody. If you haven't seen it yet You NEED to watch it and share it!
The O' Fallon Zone has passed out the most He is The Gift cards than any of the other zones in the mission! We shared 557 cards this week. Our goal is to hand out 1,190 by next week. 

This week we had exchanges with the East St Louis Elders. Since I am going to be taking over the Glen Carbon area next transfer I had the opportunity to run the area with Elder Villalobos while Elder Abad worked with Elder Johnson down in East St Louis. It went well and I feel like I will be ready to run the area in a few weeks, but I am a little nervous. We have exchanges with East again next week, but I think I am going to be going down to work in East St Louis this time so maybe I should be more nervous for that right now! Haha! Just kidding.. I like the Ghetto. kind of...

So We picked up 2 new solid investigators last week named Stephen and Tanya, they are a couple in their late thirty's and they are living in a motel in Granite City. They have a lot of temporal needs and have gone to the church for a lot of help. We met with them to see if they really were interested in learning more about the church and they were. When we went back again a few nights ago I was astonished to see that one week Stephen had read over half the Book of Mormon, all of the pamphlets and reading material we gave him. It is a night and day difference from before. They came to church twice already. This last Sunday I sat with Stephen and Tanya in Sacrament meeting and Stephen was so anxious to get up and bear his testimony! But asked If I would go up with him, which was a great opportunity! Stephen expressed how grateful he was for the love and care the church has shown him, and how genuine everyone has been. He spoke for like 5 minutes and was so sincere! He loves everything we teach him and he wants to keep coming to church and for us to meet with them twice a week! They Both want to be baptized, we have a date set for December 28th!! It is pretty amazing to see that true doctrine understood changes lives, and behaviors so quickly... 

Stephen might be getting kidney surgery this week and he wants us to go and see him, but we are going to have to get permission from our Zone Leaders because the hospital is in St Louis Missouri. Not far from us, but still out of our area!

So our Ward Mission Leader and his family moved to California this week and we got a new leader. Brother Pruett. He is so awesome! The Sisters and us have been meeting with him several times this week. Thursday we even had dinner with him and his wife at their home in Highland. Ya Thursday was weird, we drove from Glen Carbon to Granite, then back over to Troy, then up to Highland and then back to Glen Carbon. I drove a lot that day, and through the thickest fog I have ever seen!

I think that is all for this week... I Chase, having been exceedingly favored of the Lord do make an end of my writings in these days. But Verily I say unto all that the time doth speedily cometh that I shall again make an account of my deelings with inhabitants of St Louis and the coming forth of the gospel in this land. And this record shall be of exceedingly fine workmanship. May the Lord God Bless you in these days. Even so, Amen.

Elder Chase Peterson