A Fun MS Fun Run; and a Letter (or two) from the Missionary in My Life!

Last Friday afternoon my friend Missy called and ask if I wanted to do the MS Fun Run with her - the next day! With such a great cause, raising money for MS research, how could I say no?

But it was with great fear in my heart that I said yes, because, even though I have been running (well, for me it's a really slow jog) for over 15 years, I have never run in 'public' like this, nor have I ever run with a partner.


Nope, just me all by my lonesome.


(So, with these fears in my brain, about being able to keep up or being embarrassed by how I look when I run, that I took the before-posted personality test. I think that's why I scored so low in the 'Openness to Experience' category)


So here's my beautiful friend Missy, and me as we started the race. (I know, I look like I just rolled out of bed. Because I did!)
The crowd that we had to navigate around before we could run!

We finished the 5 mile run in a pretty decent time, for me. So I was happy about that, and it was a good experience! The route we took was through beautiful neighborhoods with old, refurbished homes, along the waterfront of Lake Coeur d'Alene and the mansions there, and through the park that wraps around North Idaho College. It was a gorgeous run and a perfect day. I think I could do that route at least once a week.

Yep.

I'm addicted.

***************

Here are a couple of my son's latest weekly letters home. For those of you who have been living under a rock, or maybe you're just a new reader of this little ole' blog here, my son Chad is on a two-year mission for our Church. He is a long, long, way away, down in the Rancagua, Chile area.

April 20

Hey family-
I just got changed out of El Sembrador! Out of the ghetto! Now I am in a rich area called Maestransa, which I think is going to be fun. To be honest, I'm glad that I got switched. I had done a lot of work in the last area and was ready for a change, and I will miss a lot of people there, but it is a relief to leave. That’s partly because my greenie was impossibly disobedient to the rules of the mission, slept until 9 (we get up at 7) didn’t study much, didn’t want to do companion studies either, got ready to leave the house at 5 when we are supposed to leave at 3 after lunch. He wasted a lot of our time. But I have a good feeling that his next companion can change that. Kind of a relief to finally have a companion that can help me run the sector because I have spent the last 4 months working, doing all the teaching alone. Now I get a little break. But I definitely want to leave this area better than the way I found it.
My new companion’s name is Elder Hall. He has 6 months in the mission, and still has trouble speaking Spanish, has a bit of a stutter, but a lot of missionaries actually have problems with the language the whole mission. To be honest there are still a lot of things I'm still not comfortable with, and I work on the language every day. It is probably because in Spanish there are about 42 huge word changes for just the word "have" with like 50 more sub-changes relating to sentence form determined by which "have" you use. It is like doing high level math in your head at 100 words a minute. But I like my new comp a lot. Just a good humble guy. I think we are going to work great together. Also it’s cool to see that you finally sold the house! It looks nice now! I actually kind of want to live in it.

Love,
Elder Carey

April 27

Buenos dias tontos (jk!) (can someone translate this for me?)
This week has been great. I’m liking the new area a lot. People are a lot more relaxed and treat us like human beings here, and it is great to find out the Chilean culture isn’t exactly the same as the ghetto culture. I was actually wondering if it was going to be worse, because all the people in la Pintana always say that the richer people are jerks. And I figured coming from some of the people it had to be pretty bad. But the truth is the people here are nicer, the members are more united and work harder, parents teach their children to do things, and the people complain less. So I am a very happy to be here.

On the down side, the area has been pretty hard to find people to teach but the people we do have are great! We should be having a baptism very soon, too. And we are setting goal to better the area and we have had progress so far! Normally they find maybe 1 person per week. We had 0 investigators when I got here, but we found 7 last week, and have a guy that is getting baptized as soon as possible. So things are going to get better.

My companion is cool; he is a ton of fun and diligent. He gets up 30 min early every day to study the language.
Apart from that, not to much to report this week. I’ll write more next week.

Chad

(PS I am getting a DVD ready with all my pictures from the mission, should be on the way next week)

So - I am hoping that next week I will have a fun pictorial of his mission, from January through April. Yep, it's been 4 months since I have gotten a picture from him. I think it has more to do with the area he was in than anything else.