January 5, 2015

Dearest family,

Happy 2015! It's been a great last week! But I'll be honest, I am dead
tired. 
My new Address is:
315 W. Phoenix Ave. Flagstaff, AZ 86001

My new companion is Elder Madsen! We go home together, and we get
along great. We are both weirdos and the elders we live with are even
weirder. Haha we have a lot of fun. So we cover the University Heights
Ward and the University YSA 2nd Ward together. It's weird being an
English missionary, and not doing any Spanish work. It's nice that I
can stay in the Stake though and still influence the Spanish work.
Elder Fife's new companion is a Spanish Elder named Elder Thiel and
they are still covering all the Spanish work. Overall, the YSA keeps
us super busy. We teach FaceTime lessons almost everyday since a lot
of people are still on break. There are a lot of people we are
teaching who are preparing for baptism, one will be this week! We have
several others who are close. One of them is Ashley who said she
didn't feel ready for baptism. We asked her all the baptismal
interview questions and she proved to us she is totally ready! It
really hit her, and now she is praying about being baptized on
February 7th.

The University Heights Ward is a family ward. Elder Arave actually
served here a few months back before he went home! It is a tiny ward
and a lot of people call it a "dead ward." It's kinda sad to see how
hopeless the ward seems about missionary work. The leaders say that
most the members don't even have testimonies. So one of the things we
started this week was visiting all the members we could. We got over
20 families referred to us in the ward. We are trying to change the
attitude of the Ward by developing their trust. So it will be a
project. But on the bright side our Ward Mission leader is a former
cop and taekwondo Judo ninja guy...so he is teaching us a bunch of
self defense stuff. Haha

Well it dumped snow the night before transfers and continued all day
we were down in Phoenix, so we couldn't come up New Year's Eve. We
stayed with some other missionaries down there, and the next day when
we came back up there was about a foot of snow in Flagstaff. It's been
fun, I decided I better get a coat.

Anyways, I better get going. I love you all! Have a fantastic week!

Elder Collin Christensen