Hello hello. This was a good week. Most of it was spent outside of our area but that's okay. On Monday night we went to Williamsburg and spent the night before splitting ways. I went to Richmond and Elder Gaunt stayed in the Jamestown ward. From Tuesday to Friday I was in Colonial Heights (again!) with Elder Haley (again!) and Elder Jones (who was in the MTC with us) and Elder Logan (new to me). Yeah, 4 of us, I know. The idea was to have me bring a bike down so we could have two companionships in the area but I was the only one that had a bike in the area so we just had the four of us go to their dinner appointments and stuff. During the day we had the leadership conference which was really really good. I had a lot of "why haven't I been doing that all along" and "wish I'd known that sooner" moments. It was all about the 8 fundamentals that were introduced way back in July, which we're kinda still struggling to apply. It was great though.
We learned a lot about how well our mission's doing too. We've been baptizing one out of every 10 investigators we find, which is down from 1 in 45 a year ago. Plus we're one of the strongest missions in terms of finding new investigators. All good news I guess. We heard a lot of stuff about some of the miracles happening in other areas. There was one lady who had been investigating for 25 years but could never follow through with baptism. So the missionaries got everything ready for a baptism earlier in the week and then later in the week invited her to go down the street and be baptized in a river. She said yes, and they did. Crazy. And then there was a guy in Colonial Heights who finally decided to be baptized after like 20 years or something cause someone in high priests group said we should always put the Lord before everything else we do. That just clicked with him for some reason and he was baptized that Saturday. It was cool just to see amazing stuff happen around us and know that if we have the faith we can do the same thing. Definitely a pick-me-up.
But it really was a fun week. Got to see a lot of missionaries I haven't seen in a while. Elder Christensen wasn't there but some others were. Me and Elder Jones got along really well. He's the one I told you about a long time ago that had surgery and had to go home early. Now he's back out and doing super well in Colonial Heights. We had a fun time with the 4 of us, to the point where going back to just 2 was a little sad. But it's nice to be back and in my own bed and everything. We're at the branch president's house again and we'll probably play more pool and foosball. This morning we used their eliptical machine and their sauna for exercise. Elder Gaunt was super excited but I just don't think I care for saunas too much. It's just a super hot room. Maybe if I had worked out more it'd be better but I was just uncomfortable.
Oh, it snowed like crazy yesterday. It came out of nowhere. They thought about cancelling church but all the PEC were already there so they just did the first two hours cause none of the primary presidency was there. It all melted by like 2 so it wasn't even that cool. Just really cold.
Man I think that's all I got. I'm doing pretty good here in my current situation. I only have like 10 months left which is nuts but they're already going by real fast. Transfer calls are this Sunday so I'll know next week what my fate is. We're not expecting a change but stranger things have happened.
So long so long!
-Elder Parker
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