December 29, 2014

Dear family and friends,        Monday, December 29, 2014 at 11:00 a.m. (PST)

 
Thank you to everyone that send me Christmas gifts and cards!!! i very much enjoyed them. Overall this week has been good, and bad. good because i was able to skype my family! bad because we did not have that many lessons because no one wanted to be taught the week of Christmas. I have heard missionaries say that Christmas week was their most productive week, tons of appointments and lessons, and i have heard the opposite. it depends on the area whether or not the people want to be taught on Christmas week. this is what my week looked like.
 
Monday - preparation day. we went to lunch at burgerville. we bought some ingredients to bake cookies to give to everyone we are teaching on christmas. we had a white elephant gift exchange with our zone. i bought a cap gun to give away and i received an elf hat and some fudge. we played some volleyball and basketball. we expected to do exchanges with the zone leaders tonight, but it did not work out, we will do them tomorrow.
 
tuesday - today we had district meeting. afterwards we did exchanges with the zone leaders. i went with Elder Rothwell to his area (fern prarie)  We went to Mod pizza (an awesome pizza place where you can tell them what to put on your pizza, like subway with pizza) for district lunch.   Elder Rothwell and i visited an investigator. We showed him the "He is the Gift" video and he enjoyed it. 
 
We also visited a less active family. we taught the wife a short lesson. They have an awesome garage. We taught her in the upstairs of the garage. The husband was working on a car in the garage. it is a three car garage and it was full of engines, transmissions, etc. i talked to him a little about cars. then we went upstairs. upstairs is her sewing room. (I thought it was cool how they built a building that had both of their hobbies in it.) She has a firm testimony of the gospel, but says she is to busy to come to church. At the end of today we participated in a service project with about half of the missionaries from our zone (our zone has about 20 missionaries in it). we where helping someone move. We ended our exchange.
 
Wednesday - today Elder william's ipad randomly deleted a few of his apps (gospel libary, facebook, skype), and would not let him redownload them. a lot of today we where figuring out how to fix it. we finally figured it out. 
 
We had an appointment today, but they were not really expecting us.  We taught him a 5 minute lesson about the 10 commandments and the word of wisdom. 
 
We also went caroling today with the zone at an assisted living home again. We had dinner with a family tonight. We were there for 4 hours! we had dessert and they gave us christmas presents including shirts. they gave me a denver broncos shirt. overall, awesome dinner.
 
thurday - Christmas!! thank you everyone who gave me christmas presents. We had a zone christmas party in the morning. We played signs and mafia as a zone. After the party Elder Williams and I tried to make cookies. We do not know if the recipe was bad, we left something out, or what, but they did not turn out good. They tasted fine, but they did not cook right. they stuck to the pan and did not cook in the middle. We ended up not giving them out to investigators... We had dinner with a family. We played some board games with them and gave them a christmas spiritual thought. Great christmas, but with little actual missionary work.
 
Friday - today we did weekly planning for next week. that took a lot of time. 
 
We taught the restoration. the lesson went better than we thought it would. He gave a prayer at the end of the lesson (with help) and prayed to know what was the truth. 
 
Did not do much else today. we are running low on our monthly miles, so we are not as productive as we used to be at the beginning of the month.
 
Saturday - Today we did some walking because we are running low on miles for the car. it was raining all of today. We got soaked, but met a few good people. We had dinner with a family. they took us out to eat at a mexican restaurant.
 
Sunday - nothing happened today of note. both ward mission leaders were gone, so we had no missionary correlation meeting or ward council for either ward. Not much to report for today.
 
Overall, we have not done a lot of missionary work this week. Mostly because of chirstmas. also we are running out of miles so we can not drive as much as we did. We get 1000 miles a month that we can drive.
 
Elder Casey Jensen