Me and Elder McNeil are swapping apartments with the Sister missionaries. They live outside of their area and it would save them lots of miles if they lived where we live now. So, alas, I will not be living in the mansion. My new address is: .... If you have sent something to my old address, no worries! I will be able to get it with ease. This might be a blessing in disguise. We have been wanting to work more in the Vista Ridge Ward and now we will be living over there. And now we will have easy access to wifi and now we will have a gym! What a blessing. On to the good stuff! We have been playing tennis on our p-days as of late which has been fun. But we always had to call members and borrow their equipment. Last week someone at church brought us tennis rackets and donated them to this area. Too nice huh? Serving has been our biggest weakness. Takes way too much practice! We played tennis, had some fun and then went and planned a lesson with a member. Update on Kasey and Clare, the friends of the member missionary. We had a lesson on Tuesday with them and the members about the plan of salvation. We have started to notice a trend of people believing in God but not seeing the need for Jesus Christ. The belief that there are many ways to heaven, not only through Christ. That's what Kasey believes. But she always thinks very deeply about the lessons and always keeps her commitments. We invited her to come to church and she came! And she enjoyed it! We are doing our small part of inviting and the Lord is doing the rest. I think it might take some time but I think someday she will be baptized. The gospel will help us through anything. On Tuesday I had the opportunity to go on exchanges with Elder Iverson! We went over to his area and had some lessons and some fun. Exchanges to another area are always so nice. You get to sit back and relax; watch and learn! He has a lot of apartment complexes in his area so we worked in those. We also stopped by a less active guy who is a glass artist for a living. He makes these glass marbles with galaxies in them. They are pretty darn cool. We stopped by and he showed us all his cool stuff he's made and collected over the years. It was a good way to get in the door, and it was nice of him to show us. It was neat. Then I went on exchanges with Elder Mecham! He is a green missionary. I remember the struggles of being a new missionary. Hard, but the only thing you can do is push through and rely on the atonement. Really that's all we can ever do! But we went to Torchy's Tacos so it was all ok. Not much happened that day. Lots of biking, but not much talking to others. Oh update on Paul! We had our second lesson with him. I wasn't there but it went very well! We brought a member with us and they became instant friends. We even met a couple of his kids. We are trying to get them involved and slowly but surely it's happening. He continues to read the BoM. All because the spirit told us to knock on his door. It was weirdly cold this week, which makes biking miserable. But once again, the only thing we could do is push through! It really doesn't even get that cold but the humidity makes it cut to the bone. We are being way too blessed right now. I feel like we haven't done too much but we are being blessed with people to teach and good stuff to do. The Hester's are going to be baptized on the 30th of this month which is great. There is a child of record that wants to be baptized, we have progressing investigators, the Lord is good. We were biking the other day and some guy pulls over in his car and tells us he was investigating the church for 13 years but was never baptized. He then invites us over and we have a lesson. Hopefully we will be able to help him have the peace and happiness the gospel offers. It was kind of funny because the other people there were devout Catholic and they love their bibles! We ended up looking at their bible collection. They had like 7 bibles all throughout one room, open to different pages. Some people have very different beliefs. It's interesting. We got all our stuff moved today. It really wasn't bad. The only painful part was fitting all our stuff in the car and making one trip. Other than that, it was fine.
Anyways, it was a good week. Life is so very sweet when you keep the commandments and strive to do what is right. I love you all so very, very much. Thank you for taking the time to write me! I always look forward to Monday and reading your emails. It's so ought full and I am grateful for your dedication to do so.
Love,
Elder Christensen
