8 February 2010

Hey everyone,

I hope this letter finds everyone well. I'm doing good here in Floridablanca and of course, its still hot! ha ha. Not much new is going on. We've got a family that the dad is in the states working abroad, there's a lot of families like that here in the Philippines, but they usually go inactive when he's not here to make them go to church. So we've been going there every week and sharing with them. Last week when we were sharing I got the impression I needed challenge them to do scripture study everyday. So I did and they all accepted it was cool.  Then when we will go there every Thursday we will do it with them and if they have questions and whatnot we can help them. We'll see how it goes but I was feeling pretty good about the whole idea.

One of our investigators, Cyrene, has a mom that is a member. When Elder Lebbon was here she was always so shy but we went there the other day it was the first time with Elder Alvarez and she seemed a lot more open with him. I think she might have just been intimidated having 2 americans teaching her. It was neat to see how she opened up. I hope we are able to commit her for baptism and have her accept this time, but we'll see.

On Friday we had a community service project. One of the members has a friend that has horses, and of course I wanted to see them. Come to find out, his horses were about starved to death and he used to have 3 but now he's down to 1.  Last week he had 2 but the one ran into a fence and cut itself up pretty bad and ended up dying. So we took some weeds to the one he still has to try and fatten it up a bit and i went to try and pet it but it tried to bite me! ha ha I'm glad I went slow. It was just a dumb colt but its the only horse I've seen over here like that. It was cool. Then come to find out the guy had tigers! Yes the big Black and Yellow cats! He has 3 of them! But they were really skinny. I felt really bad for them but it was cool to see them. Then he had some big ol snakes and a big monkey, it was cool.

One of the members mom died last week and on Wednesday we had a Funeral Service for her. It was really neat to see how the whole branch got together and rallyed around this member in his moment of grief. It was a reassurance that this is the Lords church and it should be like this. He gave a talk and after he comes up to me and he was like, I'm usually really scared to talk in front of crowds but I wasn't there, I told him that it was the spirit and he was speaking with the spirit. It was a really nice service and Elder Alvarez and I were very excited to be able to participate in it..

Well I think thats about it for this week

Thank you everyone for everything

Until next week

Elder Chase