Super Bowl Blessings - 02/02/15 (Glen Carbon, IL)

Dearest Friends and Family,

Another week has flown by and here I am writing again... Today I am writing from SWIC or SouthWest Illinois College in Belleville. We are with the East St Louis Elders because we are planning a adventure to go to the Arch for P-Day! It is a nice day for it, because the sun is coming out now, even though it was snowing this morning. 

This week was a good week, a lot of what we had planned to accomplish didn't actually happen. We were only able to see two of our investigators this week. We did focus most of our efforts on finding new investigators, and we actually found one. Her name is Brittany, and she is the Daughter of Stacy Tasallo who is a recent convert. Brittany is 15 years old, she started taking the lessons with her Mom back in April then decided that church is boring, so she stopped. We had a great Lesson with Stacy this week, and I asked Brittany if she wanted to start taking the lessons again, and she said she wanted to! 

We started working in this little town right above Granite City called Mitchell. In our finding efforts we tracted most of this little town and on the streets Big Four and Fleming we actually picked up a few potential investigators, so we will see what comes of it.

So I am sure everybody remembers the little fire we had several weeks back, well we have still been taking care of the smokey smell that remains in the apartment. With the help from a nice member in Glen Carbon who lent us their heavy duty carpet cleaner, the smell is now mostly gone! :) So we celebrated by having a few pizza's delivered! 

Sunday was Fast and Testimony Meeting and the whole O'Fallon Zone had a zone fast for all of the people we are working with! In church we had a member of the Mission Presidency come to our meeting. Elder Bell and I both bore our testimonies, and we made another young man come with us. There is this Young man in our ward named Devon, and he is 16 years old, When Elder Bell and I got up to bear our testimony we walked over and sat on both sides of Devon, then I leaned over and said "When this person says Amen, us three are going to stand up and go bear our testimonies." So we did! haha! Devon was a good sport about it, and his mom later told us Thanks for doing that, because Devon didn't want to go to church that morning! I really love the youth of the church!

Anyways, this week may or may not be my last full week in Glen Carbon! Transfer calls are Saturday night and I will soon find out my fate! Not sure what will happen, but if I had my choice I would want to stay in Glen Carbon one more transfer! There is just so much more I want to see happen and start to change, and the ward is starting to work well and get more involved. So it is just an exciting time for this area! But If I am told to go somewhere else, then I will go and not look back. This week is crunch time so we are going to work hard this week and baptize like 10 people!! Just kidding.. but maybe a few baptismal dates? I think we'll bake an Apple pie too.. 

I have learned this week that there is so much power in prayer, and that Heavenly Father does here our prayers, and we are always in his watchful care. We are his children and he loves each of us and knows what we need, even when we think we know what we need. God is just so much smarter than us, but we can trust him so we should never be afraid. Count your blessings!

As I am sure many of you know the Super Bowl was on Sunday... I didn't know that until Friday! Nor did I know who was actually playing! We stopped by a family who are WAY less actives in Glen Carbon, Douglas and Karen Garber! They were watching the game, but we felt prompted to go anyways. They let us in and we sat there talking for a little bit and yes the game was on! They let us share a wonderful message, and afterwards Karen said "I am glad you stopped by because Doug needs a blessing!" So we were able to give a blessing for some medical problems he is having. The spirit was so strong, now they want to have us over for tacos next week. so that is a blessing as well! I have never met this family till a week ago, but they are awesome! Doug used to train German Shepard's and compete with them. He is trophies from all over the world, so that is pretty cool.  

Tune in next week for another exciting report of my mission!

Elder Chase Peterson