Hey Everyone,
I'm here in the New Roads library and it's bigger than I was expecting because of how small the town is. The area I'm in actually covers four small towns but I can't remember any of the other names of the towns except for New Roads. New Roads is a really pretty place. I'll have to send some pictures of it. It is a pretty small town but it probably seems smaller to me than it really is since I'm coming from just serving in New Orleans. I'm excited though about serving here. My companion Elder Willmuth is pretty cool and we're going to do a lot of good work together. He and his last companion, Elder Waters, pretty much hated each other and so there wasn't much work done last transfer here in New Roads. So there is a lot of work to be done, but I'm looking forward to it because it seems like there is a lot of potential here in New Roads. Elder Willmuth told me that we'll probably try starting a group in a couple of weeks. A group is smaller than a branch and my comp. and I would be pretty much running it. Elder Willmuth said we would probably be giving a talk every week! But it'll be a good experience I guess. There are some pretty cool people here. One of the investigators, Ivory, is ready to be baptized right now but he has to get married first. He and his girlfriend are planning on getting married in the summer though so we'd have to wait to baptize him. There is also an awesome couple, John and Kate, who are more friends to the missionaries then investigators right now. But we're going to try to change that and they have watched the Joseph Smith a Prophet of the Restoration video and were pretty interested in it. They're some of the coolest people I've ever met and they let us call home for Christmas at their house. They also run a Dry Cleaning business and do our laundry and dry cleaning for free. So hopefully they will start to have more interest in the gospel and we'll be able to teach them more.
We'll I hope everyone had a great Christmas. I had a pretty good one here in New Roads. We ate over at the Dedon's. They're members in the ward, and they had really good food there. Later that night we went back over to John and Kate's because we ran out of people to see and had a nice visit with them. It was good to hear that the Cardinals won and hopefully they'll be able to do better next year. Hopefully the Suns will be able to do good this year and make the playoffs. I'm kind of hoping the Saints lose thier first game in the playoffs so that we will be able to see more people during Sundays. Everyone here in Louisiana watches the Saints game. They're definetly one of the most loyal fan bases in the NFL. Well, I don't have too much more to say. I'll just say that I love this gospel and I love missionary work even though it's hard sometimes. I hope you all have a great week and a Happy New Year!
Love,
Elder Cooper
