Meeting an Angel

Today was a day of decisions.

I hate decisions.

But they had to be made.

I went to the place of decision making:

the Oakland temple.

I got stuck in rain and traffic.

It was obvious I was a little flustered and emotional

when the worker saw me come in

and she had to break the news that I was too late.

But then she told me it was going to be okay.

Becasue I was really early for the next session.

And I could help in other ways until that session started.

The whole time I was there,

I kept running into this cute little lady.

And every time she did something else to help me

and make sure I was okay.

You know what the greatest thing she did was?

She loved me.

She didn't even know me.

But she loved me.

That's an angel if I've ever met one.

So Long, Farewell

Hey!

I don't have much to say this week..everything is going really well in
Stamford. We love it just as much as always. All of our investigators
are doing awesome and Claudio is officially reactivated! He's doing so
well and this past Sunday, he came to church in real church clothes
and payed his tithing. He's the coolest.

We had Ward Conference on Sunday and despite the fact that church was
four hours long, it was a really awesome meeting. In Relief Society,
we talked about ministering to others, specifically less active
members. They told us about a women in the ward who is a single mom
and lives in an apartment without heat. Without heat!! In this 20
degree weather! It broke my heart to hear that. It made me think about
all the many blessings that I have that I don't even think about on a
daily basis.

Okay well...that's all really. Maybe I'm just being lazy this week
because I can talk to everyone in real life next week. Yay! This will
be my last email of the mission as well because we're not going to
have any time to email next week. Thank you all so much for all your
love and support while I've been on my mission!! I love you all!

Love,
Hermana Parkin

Polar Vortex, Part Two

Hey!

I feel like there's not much to report on this week. We got so much
snow yesterday and we couldn't drive pretty much the entire day. We
were going to walk to Claudio's house but he wouldn't let us come over
because he didn't want us walking in the snow. Haha He's the nicest.
But he ended up getting home from work super late anyways so we
wouldn't have been able to get over there. I'm really not a fan of
snow days upstate. In the city, you just put a bunch of layers on and
go about your day as usual. But up here, there are very few places
that are close enough to our apartment that we can walk to. So we end
up trying to find useful things to do at home. Luckily, we're able to
drive again today so we're not stuck in the house all over again.

The missionaries who are going home were supposed to go to the temple
with President Morgan today but it got canceled because of the snow.
Now we're going on Friday and then we have interviews with him on
Saturday. And then on Tuesday we have a sisters conference with all
the sister missionaries in the mission and then it's Wednesday again
and I'll only have a week left until I come home. It is so crazy! I
doesn't even feel like I only have 2 weeks left...it's going to fly by
and then I'm probably going to have a heart attack or something
because it'll all have ended without me realizing.

We went into the city again last week. We were going to do Statue of
Liberty but then we ran into some of our missionary friends at the
temple and decided we would rather hang out with them instead of go
see a statue. So we just hung out with Sister Barker and Sister
Wankier all day and it was the best! We did go down to Battery Park
and take pictures with the Statue of Liberty so I included one of
those pictures here.

I hope you all have a great week!!

Love,
Hermana Parkin

Blessings in Stamford

Hello!!

So this week has been awesome!! We met with Claudio on Thursday and he
is literally a different person. He has really been trying to get his
habits of prayer and scripture study again and he's working hard to do
it. When we met with him on Thursday, he was already in 1 Nephi 18 and
he'd only been reading for 2 days! When we all looked at him with
faces of shock, he started to apologize for not reading more. Haha We
had to explain that we were excited not upset that he had read so
much. And yesterday, he told us that he was almost done with 1 Nephi.
He's so great. He said he feels so good and he feels like he's changed
so much,which is totally true. He seems so much happier and more alive
than he did when we first met with him. He is such a great example to
me of someone who really wants to love the gospel of Christ.

We also are working with these cute little sisters. Marisol is 9 and
Marlene is 8. The English elders we're teaching them for a while but
their mom doesn't speak any English so they couldn't really
communicate with her and explain about going to church and all that
stuff. So they decided that we should teach them and that way we can
talk to the mom and also try to teach her. So we had a lesson over
there and the bishop and his wife were coming so that they could meet
the mom and see if the mom would feel comfortable if they picked up
the girls for church on Sunday. She was and all went well and they
came to church and it was awesome! The elders have been trying to get
them to church for a long time and they finally got there!

So at this same appointment, we were waiting outside for Bishop and
his wife to get there so we're just standing outside the house. This
guy is driving past and he just stops in the middle of the street and
asks in broken English if we need a ride. I respond in Spanish that
we're just waiting for someone. And then before he can hit on us
because that's what it looked like he wanted to do, I explained that
we were missionaries and only talk about Jesus. And then to my
surprise, he said, well I would love to talk about Jesus! So he gave
us his number, which we then gave to the elders in case he was a
creep. And then he set up an appointment with the elders. It was so
crazy! Another cool blessing we received in Stamford.

Yesterday we went on an exchange with the Sister Training Leaders.
Ours are sister Brog and Sister Keanini, who are serving in Danbury
and I got to go up to Danbury with Sister Brog. It was so much fun to
serve with her again for the day and see how much she's grown since we
were companions. Plus she had appointments set up that day with all my
favorite people! So I got to see Pamela, Ingrid, Isamar and Orquidia!!
It was the best thing ever!

So basically life is great! I hope it is great for all of you as well!!

Love,
Hermana Parkin

It's Officially Cold!

Hello!

This week has been so coooold! I think winter finally came to New
York/Connecticut (since there's where I actually am). I'm really sad
about it. My dreams of making it through January without getting
frozen have been destroyed. :( I also discovered that they do this
weird thing upstate called 'grounded' and if it's snowing too bad,
then we can't use our cars. So on Thursday night, there was a bad snow
storm and we got grounded. But on Friday, we didn't want to sit at our
apartment all day, so we walked 2.85 miles to the church in huge piles
of snow that went up to our knees almost. Have you ever walked that
far in that much snow? It's really exhausting. I'm not sure why it
took them so long to let us be able to drive again but we couldn't
drive until 3:30. Some of the elders were at the church too so we did
some online proselyting and tried to use our time effectively. We were
just about to walk to an appointment when we got the okay to drive
again so luckily our roommates could pick us up and we could get our
car and be on our way. Also, did I mention that we're driving the
little red corolla again? The same one I had in New Rochelle! I
thought maybe I would kill it in the snow storm on Thursday because I
don't really know how to drive in the snow, but we all made it out
alive.

I got a phone call from one of the elders the other night. He starts
out the conversation "Sister Parkin, I have a serious question for
you." And in my head I'm like, uhhhh okay? What's going on now. But I
just say "Okay, what's up?" And then he's like "You've seen My Big Fat
Greek Wedding, right?" Me: "uh, yeah..." Him: "Okay, so you know how
the dad thinks that Windex can fix everything. And then it actually
does get rid of a zit?" Me: "yeah..." Him: "do you think that actually
works in real life?" At this point in my head, I'm like "is this for
real happening right now? An elder is calling me to find out if he can
fix his zit with Windex" but I don't say that to him because that's
rude. So I just say "well, I don't think I would ever use Windex on my
zits...but if you need something to fix them with, I probably have
something to help you out. Just don't use Windex." Hahaha it was legit
one of the funniest calls I've ever gotten. I'm glad that the elders
feel comfortable coming to me for help, even if it is just to know if
Windex cures zits.

We are literally seeing so many blessings everyday here in Stamford.
There are so many potential people to teach. It's crazy and so
awesome! My favorite person is still Claudio because he's just the
nicest ever and is working so hard to get back into everything. But we
have some really awesome potential investigators too. And the cousin
of a member in New Rochelle started talking to me online about the
church and so we got to teach him the Restoration. We're trying to get
him to contact missionaries in Texas, where he lives, but until then,
we're excited to be able to teach him a little bit through Facebook
chat.

I think that's about as exciting as life gets right now. There's lots
of work to do and I love being a missionary! I hope your all doing
well!

Love you!
Hermana Parkin

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

I hope you hall had a great 2013 and are excited for a new year! I've
officially been a missionary for all of 2013! So crazy!!

This week was pretty awesome. We've had so many miracles in this area!
We're working with Claudio a lot. I don't know if I mentioned him last
week but he's a less active member who just moved here from Peru in
July and he referred himself through Mormon.org. He is so awesome!! We
just love him so much! He came to church on Sunday and he's been
praying and gave us two referrals for some of his friends in Peru that
he wants us to teach on Facebook until they feel more comfortable
having missionaries come visit their house. He's more awesome than I
can even explain. He just has so much desire to come back to church
and get his life in order. It's awesome!

The elders convinced us to go to lunch with them at McDonalds the
other day and while we were there, we saw this guy named Reggie who we
talked to at both of the caroling things we did before Christmas. He's
homeless and most likely a druggie. He looked at us like he remembered
us so I said "Hi Reggie! how are you?" And then he got this face of
shock and was like "How do you know my name?!? What the h***?" And
walked out of the store repeating that phrase. It was SO funny! Maybe
it doesn't sound so funny now that I'm trying to repeat it in a
message, but he was literally so confused and here we were just
thinking we were being nice and we probably scared him to death.

That's about the most exciting thing I can think of sharing this week.
Sorta lame, sorry about that. I hope everyone had a great holiday time
though!

Love you all!
Hermana Parkin

Merry Christmas!

Hello!

Sorry I was a super slacker last week and didn't email but we were
suuuuper busy with transfers. I am serving my last transfer back up in
Connecticut. I'm about an hour away from Danbury, in Stamford. I was
sad to leave the Bronx but I'm excited to be here too. It's kind of
bittersweet. Sister Tirado is training a new missionary so I'm super
excited for her. My new companion is Sister Hansen. She has been on
medical leave for 7 months and before that she was only in the mission
for 6 weeks so she's a newer missionary. It's kind of a weirder
situation for both of us because she has some experience but she's
been gone for so long so both of us are trying to figure out how much
she remembers and what she's not super comfortable doing yet. But it's
been a really good change for me and a good transition for her. The
ward is super awesome. The most functional ward I've been in my whole
mission. We actually have most of the ward council at correlation and
everyone is super willing to help us with lessons and we've already
had some referrals. It's awesome. They are super on top of missionary
work and we're super grateful. For some reason they think it's okay if
sacrament meeting goes 35 minutes over though. And apparently that's
an every week thing. Plus sacrament meeting is the last meeting so it
makes for some really long church meetings. Oh well. Life can't be
perfect.

I'm pretty sure the weather is confused as to what season we're in
because I didn't even wear a jacket yesterday. It was so warm! I love
it! Makes me feel like I'm back on the west coast. Speaking of west
coast, I saw Sister Nielson at transfers last week, as you all
probably saw on Faceboook. It was so fun to see her and I'm super
excited for her to be here. She's serving in Scarsdale and opening up
an area in the ward President Morgan attends. I know some of the
people in the ward from having served in that stake most of my mission
and I think she's going to love it there.

I got a note from Sister Tirado and she told me that the Reyes family
went to the ward Christmas party that they had in the Bronx the Friday
after I left. I literally almost cried. I am so excited and happy for
them. I mean I know it doesn't sound like much that they went to an
activity but they've been offended by a lot of people so the fact that
they were willing to go to this activity means that they'll be more
willing to start coming back to church one day. I'm so excited for
them!!

Christmas is going to be crazy! We have so many appointments for
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I think we'll be eating like 6 times
between the two days. Which now that I think about it, that's a normal
number of times to eat in two days. But when your eating at members
houses, especially Hispanic members, that's a lot of food. Plus we've
had a dinner appointment every night since we got here and we have one
every night this week. People really love to feed us here. We're
grateful though because it's helped us to get to know ward members
more quickly and start to develop relationships with them. Also super
crazy event for Christmas is that our dinner appointment is with a
family that is related to Fernando, the investigator I taught and gave
up cookies for in New Rochelle. I'm secretly hoping that Fernando is
planning to spend time with his family that day so that I can see him
and see how things are going.

I think that's pretty much all for now. I hope you all have a great
Christmas and remember what this season is really all about - Christ.
I'm so grateful for that birth of our Savior and for all the comfort
and help that He gives to me each day. It's been amazing to see on my
mission how aware The Lord is of my needs and how He is involved in
everything that I do. I'm so grateful to have the knowledge of the
gospel in my life so that I have more direction and more peace. I love
you all!
Merry Christmas!
Hermana Parkin