Unofficial St. Patrick's Day - 03/09/15 (Charleston, IL)

Dear Friends and Family,

I hope you have all had a great week and that all is well back in the warm weather of Utah. Things have started to warm up out here in Illinois. I walked out o my apartment this morning in shorts and a long sleeved shirt and it felt some warm!! It was only 31 degrees, but that says just how cold it has felt the last few months.

This week has been a pretty good one, we went on two back to back exchanges with the Mattoon Elders and the Effingham Elders. Because of that I got the opportunity to run my area for three days in a row. It was a great opportunity because it helped me learn the area much better and helped me take charge of the work in Charleston. 

We had a great lesson with our investigator Joe this week! We is so prepared for the gospel it is unreal. We see him at the university on Monday's before we go Email. We always stop to say hello. Joe is an Archivist for the state of Illinois. He came to Church again this week and really enjoyed it! He tells us that it is much different from the catholic services that he is so used to attending. Elder Phillips and I are planning on setting a baptismal date with him this week.

We dropped several of our investigators this week, and our teaching pool has dropped to only 9 people, so this week we are going to be focusing most of our efforts on finding new investigators. We have spent a lot of time tracting, meeting a lot of cool people, and a plenty of Odd balls. But we have found at least 12 new potential investigators, most of them are really solid. So hopefully we will be having more people to teach by the end of the week.

So here is one funny story to end this weeks email.. Saturday afternoon we were out walking to see some people. We were walking through town square and "downtown" Charleston and we start to hear some commotion. All around us are swarms of  College students dressed in green.. They were on every street corner, and almost ever road we were walking on. We asked one of the nice EIU students what was going on! Because at this point Elder Phillips and I were pretty freaked out and Confused! The student told is that it was "Unofficial St Patrick's day" and that all of the college students pretty much just party all day and walk around from Bar to Bar drinking as much as they can... It was a super strange day to say the least. 

Anyways, I think that is all I have to talk about for this week! I hope everyone has a great week and enjoys the Spring weather that is on it's way.. 

Elder Chase Peterson