******* LANDON J. COOK ******* Melbourne, Australia Mission April 2015

Heya everyone!!! So as of now I have less than 100 days on my mission... So sad, but I get my two year stint just like everyone else does, but at the same time I'm excited that home is close by. So first question that you have is "Was Meredith baptized???" The answer is YES SHE WAS!!! But I'll get to that in a mere second!!!

Elder Erickson holding a very deflated family

history balloon at our tiny little booth

Elder Van Wagoner, Meredith and me

So first of all we had our Zone Convention, which if you remember is a Zone P-Day and Zone Meeting back to back that always takes weeks on weeks of preparation, but it turned out to be really good. I'd love to talk about how that went, but I'll let the hoard of pictures do that for me.

Most of this week actually has been all about preparing for two things: setting up the family history booth down in Wangaratta so the other missionaries can use it, and for Meredith’s baptism. And plus, we are going down to the Melbourne areas for a bajillion meetings next week, so we had to prepare for that. It's about 200 miles away from where we are, and because we've got a k limit we've been spending a good amount of time trying to figure out the dynamics of getting train rides, places to sleep, ect. All figured out for the Zone. It's been a headache, but at least we'll all get to see the great Book of Mormon advertisements down at Southern Cross which will be AWESOME!!!!!

Presenting the newest member of the Finley Branch!!!

Meredith is absolutely awesome!!!

Me, Meredith and Elder Van Wagoner.. Baptism Day!

So Saturday was the killer day of us and our schedule. A lot of truth goes into Elder Van and mine's favorite statement: "We can't schedule worth beans". Saturday morning we had the family history booth, so we had to get up early for that to get it all set up by 9:00AM. It was alright, but it felt like a bit of a flop because it was in this little rinky-dink town of about 3 people. Nah, but there were only about 12 other booths at this "market", but hey this family history booth is gonna have to have a LOT of trial and error runs before we can get it down. After that we drove two hours up north to Finley (we do a lot of driving in this area let me tell you) to prepare for Meredith's baptism. I feel like out of all the baptisms I've had this was probably the one that was least prepared for, but it turned out to be great. Elder Van Wagoner got to baptize her in President Orro's back yard pool since there's no font in the Finley chapel, so that was pretty cool. I have to admit though, I was pretty envious of Elder Van getting to baptize her, but hey that's life and I'm over it now. She was confirmed on Sunday by the Branch Mission Leader, and she'll be really strong in the church!! It's awesome, she's the first person that came to baptism that I was there for who isn't under the age of 12!!! Go me!!

This week will be killer because we're going down to Melbourne on Wednesday, having a meeting on Thursday, having another meeting on Friday with Elder Nielson of the 70, and on Saturday we're going on exchanges with the Assistants. So basically four days out of our Zone. We can't schedule worth beans. But that's okay because it's all stuff that we need to do anyways. PERKS OF ZONE LEADERNESS IT'S SO MUCH FUN!!! BARELY ANY REAL MISSIONARY WORK GETS DONE BUT WE SOMEHOW STILL BAPTIZED SOMEONE HOW DOES THAT EVEN WORK??????

The Radient Meredith, Elder Landon Cook and
Elder Landon Van Wagoner on her baptism day

So yeah, that's my week. I'll send a ton of photos. I love you all, and as always, God be with you till we meet again.

-Elder Landon Cook

Ponderize: Psalms 103:11-14

P.S. Donald Trump is now the President and people are literally RIOTING over here, especially some of the super feminists. All I can say is #DonaldTrump2017