The Art Festival - 05/18/15 (Belleville, IL)

Dear Friends and family,

I hope that all is well back home! Another week has cruised on by and I can't believe we are about to start the 3ed week of the transfer. It is weird how fast time goes out here, and I am starting to see how people say that The Mission goes by really fast! I am trying not to blink.

I feel like I am getting settled into my new area of Belleville Illinois. I love the Eastern side of the St Louis Metro area. We picked up a few new investigators this week, and they seem pretty solid. I am starting to get to know the ward members and build solid relationships with them. I am learning the area and where things are located, although I still rely on the GPS most of the time. 

We met Kisha, our new investigator on Wednesday. We had a lesson with Sister Wilson who is  less active in the ward. We go over every week and read with her in the Book of Mormon. this week we had a great discussion and decided to get her ready to go to the temple! We invited her friend Kisha to start taking the lessons, to come to church, and to be baptized. She was excited about everything and agreed to each invite. So we are going to meet with her and sister Wilson every week and spend some time talking about the Temple, then having a lesson with Kisha. We are hoping that they will motivate each other to get to church and to progress together!

We had a lesson with Logan, he is a awesome kid. Logan is 11 years old and his Mom is active in the ward. The kid is ready to be baptized and knows so much. He will be a new member of the ward in June sometime. 

We met a guy named Sam who is an old retired Army veteran from East St Louis, he met wit missionaries a while back and said he is ready to start meeting again. He dropped our last appointment, but we are hoping we shows for our lesson on Tuesday. 

Belleville had a huge Art festival this past weekend, in fact most of main street was closed. But we decided it was a great time to go and meet some people. I have kind of discovered just how much of a people person I am. During the art festival I was able to just spark random conversations with people and just chat with them for like 5 minutes. There was a surprising amount of people not from Illinois who where there. But we were able to hand out some cards, talk with people about the church and about what we do as missionaries. It was a great opportunity to be seen by the public and to also see some way cool art! 

I think that is about it for this week... We are heading into St Louis today to go hang out at the Science center, I really look forward to spending some time in the city. This week we are going to be focusing our time on finding and talking with less active's in the ward roster! We plan to work a few days just down in Mascoutah and a day or so on Scott Air Force base. It is just hard to get into the base sometimes, and we aren't really allowed to proselyte there. It pretty much has to be by appointment. But hopefully we can use some dinner appointments there to our advantage since a large chunk of the members live on base. 

I hope everyone has a great week! The church is so true!

Elder Chase Peterson