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Another quick week. Things are just flying by now and I can't even keep up. It seems like a lot of you are very concerned about my new area, or at least at how I'm handling it. It's really not that bad. It's more populated than Wakefield was and even smaller than Wakefield was. The big difference is that everything is just so spread out. In Wakefield we could drive to Waverly and spend the whole day there if we had to but now we can only get anywhere by driving. We could walk around Kilmarnock but my companion would rather ride a bike, even though the town is super crowded and busy and biking would just be a pain. We've had a lot of talks about biking and I think we'll have to do it in the more country spots but I still think we can walk around Kilmarnock or White Stone without any problems.

My companion Elder Gaunt
 in what we call the "No Use Room".
Right now it's where the music is played from

The branch itself is bigger than last week's showing. A lot of people weren't there that should've been. But it's still smaller than Wakefield is and probably 55% Primary. It's good though. Some more younger families instead of the middle-age families in Wakefield. We've been having a pretty easy time getting into member's houses for dinner and stuff and meeting people in the area. Last week we struggled a little with getting appointments but this week looks a whole lot better.

We had something pretty cool happen yesterday. Well, on Friday we had zone meeting and it was pretty good. We had this sort of a "pump up" talk from one of the bishops in the stake who is on fire with missionary work. He was sent to Iraq as an eye doctor for like 6 months and made a goal to baptize someone while he was there, and ended up baptizing someone in Saddam Hussein's palace swimming pool (one of them at least). It was cool. But he also told us about how his ward set a goal to have 20 baptisms from October to December of 2009 and how they achieved it. It was crazy. So we all left and were like "well gosh darn it we can do that too", but we didn't really know who exactly we could set. On Saturday we were looking through the area book and found this couple that lived in the outskirts of our area and we decided to see them on Sunday. We joked around about setting them for baptism right there but we both wanted to. We got there and they let us in cause it was raining and we started talking. She's been reading the Book of Mormon like crazy and said it filled in all the gaps of the Bible and she had watched the Together Forever DVD like 8 times and the Joy to the World DVD twice on Christmas. We got the natural missionary "holy crap" reaction and were instantly thinking of exactly the same thing. We taught the restoration and then asked them if they wanted to be baptized and they said yes, which was surprising cause she had gone off earlier about how spiritual her baptism was into another church and how it was in a river and stuff so we were like "oh man here comes the authority card" but she completely accepted it. They have to get married first or have one of them move out but we were just amazed that we had joked about getting a baptismal date and then actually getting it. It was a miracle.

Arteries!

The rest of the week wasn't as miraculous but we're seeing some promise here. We think that the sisters had a habit of going really really slow with some people and not really getting to the point (not a diss on them cause they did a lot) so we're excited to roll things a little faster.

Oh, another thing. The restaurant here that's owned by a member has this food challenge called "The Farm" and it's basically 5 pounds of food (giant burger, big plate of cheese fries, and a 32 oz milkshake). He decided he could do it cause he's done food challenges before, but this one beat him. I got to eat the bottom half of it and it was really really good.

Don't know what else to say. I still appreciate the consistent e-mails. I'm surprised how some missionaries don't get regular e-mails like I do. I'm happy with them.

Well I'll talk to you next week.

-Elder Parker