Yes. I got the trunky call this last Tuesday telling me that I would be going home on Sept. 5th and they wanted to know what airport that I would like to fly into. I wanted to say Hawaii, but at the last minute I didn't. I haven't got the backpack yet either. Did you send it priority?

Sterling has been awesome so far. It is really different than anywhere that I have been before. It seems that the people here are a little bit nicer than other places. More humble I guess. We are working with quite a few people too. We have been meeting with this one family where the wife is the non member. She is ready to be baptized but the problem is that the whole family has a smoking problem. They set a date to quit this Friday so hopefully everything goes well. My companion is Elder Rodriguez. He is from Provo, UT but originally from Argentina. We have been getting along great so far, but then again it has only been 1 week. He moved to the United States when he was 10. He is a Spanish Elder and so I have been brushing up on the little Spanish that I know. We are living with one of the councilors in the bishopric (the Speights). They are pretty cool, but not as awesome as being at the Conner’s. The Conner’s are not housing missionaries anymore because they have family coming in and out staying there all summer and she is super busy with her catering business during the summer months. We do have a car in this area. The area is huge. We live in Sterling but we cover other towns that can be almost 1 hour away. We only got 600 miles a month in Arvada and we get 1850 a month here in Sterling! We get to drive a Subaru Impreza to which is one of the nicer cars of the mission. I'm the district leader here but there is only one other companionship that is in our district which is Fort Morgan. They live about 45 min away so we only have district meeting every other week. The picture that I sent in front of the house isn't where we live now. That is the farmhouse where I lived when I was serving on the UNC campus a year ago. We took a little pit stop on the ride out.

Things are going well. This is a big week because we get a new mission president on Friday. I'm expecting that there will be a lot of changes coming our way.

Our address:

1616 Pheasant Ridge Rd.
Sterling, CO 80751

Elder Cooper

Homecoming Day

News Flash: Jacob will be arriving home on September 5th! Mark your calendars. More details when they become available.

Transfer Day

Hello Everyone,

I got transferred yesterday! You will never guess where I got sent to....Sterling, CO. Good luck finding it on the map. It is in north eastern Colorado. We are the only missionaries in the town and the closest elders are in Fort Morgan which is pretty far away. We technically are in the Greeley Stake but we are 2 hours outside of Greeley. It is definitely different. Yesterday I drove out with Elder Asay who I know really well because he got moved out to Fort Morgan. It was kind of a road trip. I don't know if we were supposed to or not but we stopped by campus on the way there to bring back a few memories. I will get to go on exchanges with the zone leaders this transfer so I will get to go back to the UNC campus again for the day! Elder Wall, my last companion left our ward too and went to Aurora. Half of the Arvada zone got moved. I think that I will finish my mission here in Sterling. My new companion is Elder Rodrigues. He has been in Sterling for 6 months I think. He has been out for 7 1/2 months and he is the first Spanish Elder that I have been with. So far, so good. He is really laid back which is nice.

Sis. Conner isn't housing any missionaries anymore. We all left on Monday and it just so happens that 3 out of 4 of us were getting transferred anyway. I haven't seen much of Sterling, but it is pretty small. They do have a Walmart though so they are official. This area has seen a lot of baptisms and we should see a few this transfer. We were not able to set anyone before we left Arvada. We met with the teenage girl that we have been working with and are going to hand her over to the YSA elders. She will get baptized.


Elder Cooper

Hello everybody,

This past week was all right. We didn't get to set anyone for baptism like we had hoped. In fact we were unable to meet with any of our investigators and none of them showed up to church on Sunday. It was a little bit frustrating. As far as transfers are concerned I think that one of us will be going. Until a couple of days ago we thought that we would both be going. The bishop was having a hard time finding a house for us to stay at. We ended up talking to a family that housed the missionaries before, but it turned into a bad situation with a set of elders. There was fault on both sides. To be honest I just wanted a place to stay, so whoever the missionaries are next transfer, that is where they will live.

Not much is going on besides that. Pres./Sis. Ely go home in about 2 1/2 weeks. That is going to be really weird, but it should be good. We are planning to start teaching another girlfriend of a boy that is a member of the Arvada 6th ward so that should be good. I will have probably more news coming this next week with transfers and all that going down soon.

Elder Cooper

Hey Everyone,

This last week was really difficult, but also great. It was really hard going almost 2 weeks without a P-Day, but going to the temple is totally worth it. The temple on Friday was awesome. We got there at about 8:30 in the morning and left around 5:30 in the evening. We were able to get a lot of work done as well as the spiritual boost that we needed. The temple is just an awesome place.

This past week we were not able to meet with any of our investigators. That was kind of a bummer. We did go back to a lady that we taught the first lesson last week, but this morning she dropped us over the phone. Well, we did our part. This past weekend there was a stake youth activity that was all on family history. All of us missionaries in the zone went to it. It was pretty awesome. It even got me a little curious about doing family history work. I was also surprised to see 100+ kids show up on a weekend in the summer. They taught them how to use the new family search as well as extracting names, etc. It looked like it took a lot of planning.

As far as the rest of the week went, it was pretty normal. Being the beginning of the month we got our bowling fix in. 5 1/2 hours yesterday and there was only 3 of us on a lane so I don't even know how many games we went through. Still wasn't able to beat the 200 mark. I have got quite a spin down now though.

This week we should be setting our investigator that is 17 for a baptism date since her birthday is next month as well as setting another guy that we have been teaching. We will see how it goes.

Elder Cooper

Pictures....looking for mail and spooning with the cat