Dear Family and Friends,
Wow this week has been a crazy week.
I found out Saturday that I am leaving Essex. Elder Parry will be staying here
and I will be shotgunning a new area with a new Zone Leader. So that was a
surprise. I dont know where I will be going but I will buy something on the
home card. So watch out tomorrow for that.
I am really going to miss this area,
and I am going to miss Vermont. I am bummed to be leaving. It snowed from Tuesday
to Saturday. So now we have about 2 feet of snow on the ground. That messed up
a lot of our work. We had a lot of appointments cancel.
We dropped our only investigator
because he wont keep his commitments, although we were able to find a couple of
new less actives to teach.
We spent a lot of time this week
shoveling the snow. This week was a whole lot better than last week. I really
appreciated all the letters of support encouraging me to keep working hard. It
has helped and this week I felt a lot better about the work.
We had a cool experience this week.
So last Saturday a family in the ward, the Fellows found out that their young
daughter Sophie has a brain tumor. They had to rush her down to the Boston Children's
hospital. She was supposed to play violin with her class of violinists at the
Christmas concert. So the whole group of violinists went to the hospital to
have their concert there. She was able to play with them. They put it on the
news Thursday night for the Burlington area and the story is in the Boston
Globe. You should look it up.
Well Thursday night we were tracting
and we knocked on a door. The lady said, "Nows not a good time I am just
about to watch Sophie." We had no idea what she was talking about so she
clarified that she was talking about Sophie Fellows. She asked us if we wanted
to come in and watch. We dont usually watch TV but we made an exception. So we
watched the short segment she is in. It was amazing to see the faith of the
family and of her. The Fellows are the family that we built the fire at and had
smores. If you could pray for them that would be great. Sophie is about 9 years
old. She had her first surgery on Friday. She was in surgery for 8 hours. We
have a lot of medical students in our ward and one of them described the
procedure. He said that it is dangerous, especially since the tumor is in the
back of her brain. It is about the size of a plum. They were able to get most
of the tumor out but they weren't able to get all of it. She goes back into
surgery tonight to get the rest of the tumor. It is really amazing to see all
the faith and prayers of the Essex ward here lately.
Well wish me luck with my new area.
I am pretty nervous to shotgun an area.
Elder Jensen
Note: Shotgunning an area is where both
missionaries are new to the area. Often
one missionary has been in the ward/branch with one missionary being new to the
area.
Also interesting Carlton's brother Casey
is serving in Vancouver Washington and both of them sent an email home at
almost the exact same time. They have a
3 hour time zone difference.