Elder Chase Jensen: I don't know how to title this week . . . it was nuts

Happy Groundhog Day errbody!

First and foremost, I would like to apologize to anyone that has written me an email that I haven't responded to. I've been absolutely SWAMPED with craziness the past month and haven't had as much time as I used to to write people back. I'm working on it though so don't give up on me!

This week has been one of the craziest weeks on the mission so far and I don't even know where to start. Let's go with right after Pday got over last week. We got a referral from someone who was asking for a Book of Mormon. That's usually pretty good stuff. When we called to set up a time with this guy, he was AWESOME! We had like a 20 minute conversation over the phone with him just going off about how great he thought the church was and how excited he was to meet us. We scheduled him for Saturday to get the party started. We'll get back to that though as the week progresses...

Tuesday was a crazy new experience too; Missionary Leadership Conference in Eugene. We drove up to the 18th Street building at 10am and had meetings until about 3 or 4 o'clock. All of the Zone Leaders and Sister Training Leaders from around the mission, 40 in all, came up to learn about how we could be better leaders and what we would be teaching our missionaries at ZTM that Friday. The meetings were great. I really started to feel like I was making a difference as a Zone Leader. Also I got to see Elder Redding! Elder Earl, Elder Wells, Elder Thurgood and plenty of others were all there too.

So then there was Wednesday. A bit of a foreword, the Book of Mormon musical as been playing in Eugene this week. Tuesday night the Eugene missionaries handed out 200 copies of the Book of Mormon in less than10 minutes. It was incredible! President Russell really needed to get some more scriptures to Eugene so Elder Black and I rounded up three HUGE boxes of them and gave them to President as he was driving through. That was also the day we tried to rake a 2 acre property covered in leaves, in the rain. Not fun.

Friday we got to teach the ZTM, which was actually a really enjoyable experience. I taught about prophets and the priesthood and then Elder Black and I tag teamed to teach about prayer. It was spiritually uplifting and my testimony of the simplicity and truthfulness of this gospel grew immensely.

Right after ZTM I got to go on an exchange with none other than my MTC companion Elder Zilles!!! Holy cow, it was so much fun! It was just like old times (even though those times were only like 6 months ago). On our exchange we got to teach Kat a little about the Plan of Salvation, which was really cool. We also found a river and went on a bit of an exploratory investigation.

Saturday and Sunday are when things really started to get nuts. We went and visited that referral from earlier in the week. We ended up having a 3 hour long discussion with the guy and were able to put him and his girlfriend on date for baptism!! Mark your calendars folks - March 19th Ray and Robin are getting baptized. He also decided to feed us with was a major plus. Later that night we had so many different things going on that we needed to go on splits with the other elders in our apartment. Elder Murphy and I went out to Cave Junction to teach an investigator named Ed who'll be getting baptized this Saturday. It was a great lesson and we were excited to keep him going.

During the split Elder Black and Elder Blackwelder went to teach Joe. They say the lesson went really well. But they got back from the lesson and Elder Black went and lost his iPad. It's been ... not pleasant.

This week we taught a ton of lessons, found eight new investigators, and had ELEVEN IN SACRAMENT ARE YOU KIDDING THAT NEVER HAPPENS! It was such a great week and really was humbling to know that the Lord will always provide for us even when we're super busy. There is no way that we could do the things that we've been doing if it weren't for the the Lord. I'm super excited to see what happens next week.

Cross your eyes and dot your teeth.

Love,
Elder Jensen