Well, I think it would be safe to say that this last week was...tiring. We went running every other day (about 2-3 miles each day), and did some in-house workouts on the off days. Elder Zander would love to be running every day, but the weather is most certainly still classified as "Winter" here. The best one was a Nor-easter that came in around 2 am, dumped about 9 inches of snow by noon, and then turned into a nice little rainstorm just to make sure that everything was completely soaked and that all the snow had 3 inches of ice at the bottom of the slush. Elder Zander and I spent about an hour and a half shoveling that stuff on Friday, and between that and the morning workouts/runs, we were pretty tired. To give you a description of Elder Zander's running habit, before his mission he said he would average 15-16 miles a day, with 1 long run a week that was usually about 20-21 miles. Somehow though he says he's never actually ran a marathon. His Dad was a professional runner, and when Zander was 4 years old, his Dad told him he would pay him a quarter for every mile he ran, and that's how elder Zander got started in running. He has a goal now of running to the temple and back before he goes home (8 miles). He could honestly do it anytime, it's a matter of him training his companion to be able to do it.
I'll share something that most of the Zone haven't found out yet. Elder Williams was transferred. He got a call last night, and he and Elder Cook left with his bags at 6:30 this morning. They didn't know where he was going, or who his or Elder Cook's new companions were. It was pretty sad though because he flies home 1 month from tomorrow, so he most likely won't come back, and he didn't get the chance to say goodbye to anyone, including most of the missionaries.
We have a baptism this Sunday, Xxx Xxx was a referral from a less active member who first came in October while I was upstate. He's pretty cool, kind of quiet, but really funny. He's also decently tall for a Chinese man, I think he's about 6'2".
It has occurred to me that weather seems to go crazy when someone of our family is around. Remember when we went to Washington DC during the hottest week they had had in 75 years?
I got to go to the temple! It was a translation session, so the old video in English with some people wearing headphones, but I didn't even care, it was just nice to go through the temple again after so long.
I got the exercise bands you sent Mom, they work pretty well, although I think I might be giving away the lighter bands to some of the sister companionships. Probably not Sister Palmer though, she broke her wrist 2 days ago when she fell off a pull-up bar. If you want to send more mix for those bran muffins, it would be greatly appreciated. So long as you send on Wednesday or Thursday, I'll still get it by the next P-day, barring bad weather preventing the office Elders from bringing it down on Tuesday, but that can't keep happening for too much longer, winter is going to have to give out at some point.
To the best of my knowledge, you can't get in trouble for buying fake name brand stuff, just for trying to sell it. At any rate, the missionaries do it quite a bit, and president seems to be okay with it.
We still contact a bit, but we are waiting on the weather to improve before it really starts to become effective at all again. Nobody here calls it "streeting", in English it's contacting and in Chinese it's 接觸。
I'm sorry if my letters seem less than packed, typing on an iPad is slower than typing on a computer, and honestly, during the winter at least, not as much stuff happens, we spend more time inside calling people or warming up before we go back out again. We also still seem to average about 6 missionary meetings a week, which tend to take up some time as well.
With Elder Williams leaving, the set-up for Chinatown is a little unknown, but I can give you what we currently have. Elder Williams leaves with Sister Khong in March, Elder Blonquist and Elder Zander leave at the end of April, Elder Murray leaves in June with Sister Chan, and Sisters Lee and Mackay leave in July. Sister Chen leaves in August, Sister Dong leaves in Nov/dec, and I, Elder Cook and Elder Wang all leave next Jan. We got one new Sister in this last transfer, and we had several others come in while I was upstate (Sisters Toronto, Astle, Palmer, and Elder Atkinson) but currently we have no reports on new Elders coming in yet, which is a problem because we just lost Elder Williams and we lose 3 more by the start of summer. We also have Elder Leung who goes home with Elder Radford in May of 2015, so they have a while still.
One thing that occurred to me this week is that we tend to focus more on temptation than on promptings to do good. We talk about getting tempted by the devil a lot more often than we talk about the fact that God is not going to just sit there on the sidelines and watch us fight temptation on our own, he's going to be actively trying to send his own stuff to us as well. The difference is that the good promptings are a lot easier to not notice or to try and take credit for it yourself, not recognizing that it was Heavenly Father giving you the reminder you needed to do the right thing.
I already saw the stuff on the member Olympians in Sochi, I'm still on Facebook, and a lot of my friends from here in the mission tend to post stuff like that.
Tell Robin thanks for the Christmas card, I finally got it, they found the key for the mailbox back at the 15 East Broadway appartment.
Love you all,
Your son/sibling in service,
Elder Christensen
陳少駒
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