Men at Work

All is well here in Fillmore. We moved apartments just across town.  I had yet another awesome week with Elder MacKay. We have grown a lot together. I am really grateful for him.  I would trust him with my life. We've had a lot of lows and a lot of highs (lots of sores and bruises as well) every single day if you can believe it,  but i would not want to have spent them with anyone else.  Saturday was our Fillmore Ward Open House/ Chili Cook-off.  There has been a ton of time and effort the last 3 transfers that we have spent planning, preparing, weekly follow ups and assignments, passing out flyers, spreading the word, exciting the members, etc.. even talks in sacrament meeting! Basically it was like planning our 14th ward Valentine dinner fundraiser thingy all by ourselves.. but it was really neat and rewarding to get to see how successful it was.  According to what we counted, we had at least 29 non-members there!! It was a really good turn out.  Every one loved it and a lot of people brought their friends. Elder MacKay and I were the judges, as well as an investigator from Santa Paula, so we ate a lot of chili!   

We were able to give tours to a lot of our investigators that came, including C--- and her whole family! We have been teaching C---- for a couple months now, but have never gotten her to come to church and have never gotten the chance to talk to the whole family- until they all came to the open house. So we were able to eat with her and her family, and then afterwards give them a church tour and introduce them to the bishopric. In the chapel, we had "I'm a Mormon" clips playing from mormon.org and the whole family sat in there and watched several of them, as most people just walked in and out, not really paying too much attention. and then to top it all off, yesterday they came to church and absolutely loved it! They want to come again next week and we have an appointment with them on Tuesday evening.

    

F--, who we do service for every week is the one who basically did everything to get the mormon.org videos playing in the chapel for us!  so he brought his wife and grandson to the open house and we gave them a tour as well.  Like always, he was asking a lot of questions and was very pleased to see how well his video and the whole event turned out, because he knows how much time we spent putting it together and how much he contributed as well. They found a couple members who they already knew, but had no idea were members of the church, so it's exciting to finally have some fellowship established with him and his wife.

B--- was not able to make it to the open house or church yesterday because he was pretty sick this weekend, but he is still reading the Book of Mormon and progressing.  Yesterday he texted us and said he really missed coming to church. He met us in Santa Paula on Thursday (which was a miracle in itself that he was able to travel that far) and when we showed him the baptismal font, the spirit was super strong! We asked him, if he felt it and he said yes.  Then we taught the plan of salvation on the chalk board and it went really good.  He has a pretty good understanding of the gospel.  Then last night as we were leaving he asked us "Wait, How did you know i could feel something when we were at the baptism room?" We just smiled, testified of the Holy Ghost, and assigned him some homework to go and study about the Holy Ghost. We are very hopeful that he will choose to be baptized very soon.  

Love, Elder Parrish ******

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