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

I'm comin' home to you

Every night

Comin' home to yooouuuu

Every night

-Imagine Dragons

So why did I start with that? Well I'll get onto my week and I'll tell yas later on in the email!

Well this week was a great week, it always is, and it was a great week to finish the transfer off. Last P-Day was basically working on the computer all day getting that all done. Pretty boring. The video is all done, and even though I COULD send it to everyone through a Google Drive, I think I'll just wait until I come home to show everyone. Teehee. So then we took a two hour nap. It was great. After that we went GQing out in the park and if you know me I hate going up to strangers on the street and talking to them because they see white shirts and name tags approaching them and they just say "Bloody Mormons on the port bow approaching". BUT we've now learned to talk with YSA (young single adult) aged people, and in that hour and a half block we gave a Book of Mormon to a Muslim man about my age and a group of three girls about our age as well. It was dang awesome. I still hate GQing but I think now after 21 months I've finally got it down. Whoot!

We also went to Waggawagga and back in one day which is like four hours away from us so that we could watch the worldwide broadcast for missionaries, so basically it was a road trip day. Awesome.

During the weekend we went up to Finley, but it's so dang hot up there like holy cow all you can do is just sit and sweat. And it's basically the sleepiest town in the whole mission and for some reason no one's really ever home, so all you can do is just sit and sweat. It's great. But the branch is awesome, and after church we visited a couple of the members and played Catan with the Branch mission leader and his family.

Our incredible Zone

But while we were up in Finley we got the specific transfer news from President Vidmar, and he wanted to talk to me and said that he's got a "special assignment" for me. Ah crud, coming from the Mission President that's never good news. So he told me that I'm leaving down to be a Zone Leader in Braeside Zone, and Elder Van Wagoner is staying ANOTHER transfer in this blessed Zone. I have mixed emotions about leaving this place and this amazing Zone, because collectively this Zone has some of the best missionaries I've ever seen in my entire mission. But now I'm leaving which makes me sad, but my new companion I hear is pretty dang good. Now comes for the part of why I started my email with that song….Braeside was the Zone I was born into the Melbourne Australia mission in with Elder Worsencroft in Hastings, so now I'm “going back home” before I go back home. Two transfers left, I really can't see myself moving from there before I come home. But strange to think that I have less than three months before I can finally walk on American soil again, shop at Walmart, spend only a third of the money there that I do here on food, have stable weather... I'm not trunky.

So that's been my week, and it's been great. I'm really going to miss this area and especially the missionaries in this Zone, but of course that's why I've taken so many photos: to always remember the awesome stuff that happens on my mission. Braeside will be fun, and now that I'm so much closer to Melbourne I get to actually benefit from the crazy amounts of advertising that the church is doing at Southern Cross train station! Get this: according to President Vidmar, ever since the play and ads came out, visitors to Mormon.org.au has gone up by 900%, and this time last year we had only 60 internet referrals, and in the past month we have received 300!!! Missionary work is going to explode down there! And I get to be a part of it!! Whoot whoot!! Love you all, and as always, God be with you till we meet again.

-Elder Landon Cook

Ponderize: Alma 60:21

Jared Sakalia. He is one of my greatest heroes
and inspirations on the mission

Ok so this picture was taken this morning out in front of our gym set in our back yard, but I
want to show you this guy. His name is Jared Sakalia. He is one of my greatest heroes and inspirations on the mission. He's recently returned into activity, and he really wants to get to the temple to get his endowments and do baptisms for the dead. But a goal that he had was that he wanted to lose weight before he goes so he feels more comfortable in his body. And so a few weeks ago we started exercising with him, slowly at first, and it was just simply walking laps around a field and talking.

But then we started moving up the intensity bit by bit until we were doing sprints with him and other exercises to get his heart and body working. Since I first met him he has made so many changes in his life, for the better, and he now finds joy in listening to hymns, reading the scriptures and the new Gordon B. Hinkley book, and listening more and more to the promptings of the spirit. From where he was three months ago, he has done so great spiritually, and even though he's a big guy his desire to change inside and outside is real. I've never felt a more sincere desire to change from a person, and he is willing to put the work into it. Out of all the members I've come to know out here, he's the one I'll miss the most. Elder Van Wagoner and his new companion, Elder Vaes (from Chile), will keep exercising with him, but I've never been prouder to say that I know him and that I've gotten to know him so closely. Even though he was born in the church, his lifestyle changes to come back into the gospel have deeply inspired me. I love him to bits and I'm so proud to say that he has become a great friend of mine.