Charles' baptism did happen on Friday, which was a great lift of a burden. We've been working with him since we got here, with all sorts of ups and downs in between. It was a good service. We did it at the Petersburg chapel instead of the Hopewell one cause of the font problems we had last week. There weren't as many people there but when he got confirmed yesterday he had a lot of people shake his hand and congratulate him and apologize for not being there so that was nice. But he didn't care who was or wasn't there. He just wanted to be baptized. He did have to be baptized twice though cause I didn't get his hand all the way down the first time. I told him to plug his nose with his free hand but he didn't for some reason so he had a nose full of water. Oh well, it happened eventually. He's ready to go too. Our branch president talked about work in the church at his baptism and afterwards he told me he was ready to work, so that's good, right?
Other than that the week was a little slow. Well, just lots of preparation for the baptism and everything. And now that our two progressing investigators are baptized we don't have much in the way of people to teach. We had a lesson with one of our other investigators but when we asked him what we had talked about last time, he said "You asked me why Jesus died, and I said that he died for our sins", when we really had talked about the Restoration. When we decided to read from the pamphlet with him, we read the first two paragraphs, and asked him what they were about. He then went on a 20 minute sermon-rant about Jesus lifting our burdens which told us was not retaining anything we taught him. So basically we're a little desperate. We're just gonna keep working with the less actives and recent converts and members and hope the referrals start coming from them, cause tracting out here is very unfruitful. We're just gonna work through it.
Hm, something I forgot to tell you guys about a few weeks ago. There's something that happened in our mission a month or so ago called the "Sudan Miracle", and it's pretty cool. In the Innsbrook ward up by Richmond here the missionaries baptized a guy named "Sunday" (his nickname) who's from Sudan. He just happened to be at his friend's house, who was a recent convert himself when he ran into the missionaries. He just loved the church and everything and it was good. His wife still lives in Sudan though, and is the leader of this female political group of about 2,000 women. When Sunday told his wife about the church, she called him back and said that she wanted to be baptized and so did her 2,000 female followers. President Perry said that if just one fourth of the those women's husbands were to join the church and get the priesthood, they could have enough members to organize a stake, when all they have now in Sudan is a single branch. Coincidentally enough, those Innsbrook missionaries ran into the wife of the branch president of that branch at a Goodwill, and were able to tell her about the whole thing. In addition, I guess the country of Sudan split into North and South Sudan, and so the country of South Sudan is trying to find a Christian religion to base its beliefs around, and because both Sunday and his wife have pretty high up political power, the church is just all over this. I don't know what's happened since I heard about this but I thought it was worth mentioning cause it all came from a single convert here in Virginia. Crazy!
Oh, and we were invited by Raymond's family to go to this really fancy seafood buffet in Williamsburg last week and it was really good. I had crab legs for the first time. Wasn't super impressed but it wasn't bad or anything. Definitely gave me some stomach problems though. Whatever. Williamsburg is a nice city, too. Everything has an old colonial look to it.
Anyways, I can't think of much else to say about us. Transfer calls are this upcoming Sunday, and once again we have no idea what will happen. We're pretty sure one of us will go but we've definitely said that before. I think this time's a given though. We shall see!
-Elder Parker
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