October 8, 2012

Dear Family,

  We watched the saturday morning session of conference in our landlord's house, and we literally started yelling when President Monson changed the ages for missionaries. BYU will never be the same. Plus, it's gonna be weird seeing 19 year old sister missionaries.
  Taylor, 5 temples have Moronis holding gold plates: Jordan River Temple, Washington D.C temple, Seattle Washington, L.A Temple, and Mexico City Temple. A temple patron told me the doctrine behind the temples with gold plates but I gotta ask a Temple president before I believe it. Also, the RM I met had served in Australia and he only said the two words that you said aren't considered swear words in Australia.
  Well, to be honest, I'm not a fan of planning for district meeting. Also as a district leader I need to go on exchanges with the every missionary in my district (there is 6 of us total) during the transfer. The purpose of the transfer in to learn from the District leader, which I find odd for obvious reasons.
  Mom, from District leader I can go anywhere. I can be a zone leader, go back to a junior comp, a senior comp, or a trainer.
  So in our mission, the missionaries who have been out longer are the ones who are allowed to go to conference. However, since we received over 70 missionaries in 18 weeks, I'm classified as a veteran (with 8 months???) so I got to go to Sunday afternoon session! It was awesome to go there again. I saw Brother Bednar, from wells branch but he couldn't hear me calling for him. Also, the Hancock family was sitting 4 rows in front of me but they didn't see me either. However, someone that found me was my awesome MTC teacher!!! He came up behind me and surprised me. It was so cool to see him because he helped me a lot in the MTC. Found out too that he had found a girlfriend and was already engaged, where he wasn't dating anyone 6 months ago when I left. It scares me to think about getting married a year after my mission. Speaking of dating, I've had a few families ask me if I had a girl waiting for me back home. When I say no, they try to set me up with their daughter or cousin... it's kind of awkward. They get this idea that I'm some sort of millionaire who will give them money.
  My favorite talk from conference was President Uchtdorf. He got to fly with the Blue Angels!!! I liked his notion for us to just decide to be happy. I need to work on that, this past week has been kinda rough but we did find some golden investigators! They hate the catholic church, and want their kids to have good morals. Plus they loved conference and want to be baptized! Good stuff is starting to come.
   That's all I got time for now. Hope y'all have a good week!

Love,
Elder Parks