COME LISTEN TO A PROPHET

¿Que Tal Familia?

Ok first of all, let me just say that conference was the HIGHLIGHT of my week and I wanted to cry when President Eyring started to say ¨And to conclude this conference...¨ But I consoled myself with the thought that I will be home with all you lovely people to see it next year, so it´s ok. I was also absolutely beside myself with glee when President Monson announced the new Provo temple. I can´t wait! And when he said ¨We´re all in this together¨ in his final talk I had to seriously restrain myself from breaking into High School Musical singing. Haha. He was so funny this session and it just made me love him even more. We are so blessed to be a part of this wonderful gospel and have an inspired man leading us! I especially loved President Uchtdorf´s talk on how the Lord loves us as individuals and Elder Carl Cook´s talk on ´looking up'. I´m now just trying to put all of their amazing counsel into practice.

We were also blessed to have 5 different investigators attend the various sessions, which was a tender mercy and a great blessing. Basically, I have nothing I can complain about this week...except for maybe the heat, which has been especially fuerte lately, but that´s nothing new. For the moment we still have running water so I just count my blessings. Haha. We also had a really spiritual lesson with Richard these week, a 14 yr old young man whose family we´re teaching. We got to meet with him one on one though and he shared with us that he prayed to know if the Book of Mormon was true and felt his heart skip! He wasn´t sure what that meant, so we´ve encouraged him to keep praying, but he´s really motivated to read the Book of Mormon and pray, so we´re really excited for him.

This week we got to go out with a bunch of members we´ve never gone out with before as well which was amazing. Emmanuel is an RM who served in Florida and shared a powerful testimony with one of our new investigators, Raquel, who´s husband is less active and who has been investigating the church for years but has yet to be baptized. The Spirit was so strong and it was incredible! Then we have continued to find new families and new people to teach, so much to the point that I feel out of breathe all the time! But work is good.

Hna McEntire continues to make me laugh as well...the other day as we were door contacting a woman said ¨Encantada¨ after Hna McEntire introduced herself and poor Hna McEntire thought that was her name and said, ¨Oh nice to meet you Encantada¨. Haha. Oh the mission.

Anywho, today we got to visit the Parque del Este and see all the missionaries in the capital and everyone is now coming up to me and saying ¨Hermana Bradley, you´re STILL here?!?¨ Sheesh...you´d think I was an elder or something. And it doesn´t make things better that another Elder felt the need to yell out today that I´m turning 25. When did I get so old? All of this elders are like 5 years younger than me!!! Oh well, I guess I´ll just be the grandma of the mission for the next 12 weeks. Anywho, love and miss you all, hope you have a nice breezy week!

Hermana Bradley

What's in a Mission?

Helloooo
Well, it's been another week. What can I say? Trials and blessings, every day. That is a mission isn't it? Blessings first though. We had Alexandra and Porfirio's baptisms on Saturday, and even though the ward didn't have a great showout, it was a good service and I love seeing people I love enter the waters of baptism.

Another blessing is that we have a new bishop who is a young RM and really interested in the mission work, so we're excited to work with him! This week we also finally started our Noche de Amistad and had a good turnout of 12 people despite the downpour of rain that day. We hope to see more in the next one.

Another tender mercy has been Elicia, our sweet 73 year old investigator of months who just gave up her coffee cold turkey. She is such a sweet old woman with a tender spirit and we are now preparing for her baptism on the 8th of October. This ward also continues to improve in enthusiasm for the work almost weekly as we continue to receive new references. We're also teaching an amazing family right now that's promised to go to general conference this weekend, so we're praying hard.

Oh and we had transfers...I'm staying here with Hna McEntire and Hna Vera has already gone to her new area of Mendoza. So yeah! That's the week. I won't bother to complain too much about the fact that we're without water again, haha, but just enjoy your showers in my honor for a few days ok? Love and miss you guys, and make sure you all take time out to listen to OUR PROPHET AND APOSTLES this weekend! So excited!
Hermana Bradley

Hola Hola,
So this week was SUPER busy, hard, exciting, exhausting, and great. I´ve found that usually when some really great things are about to happen Satan doubles his efforts to discourage us, but no matter, because we are still seeing miracles! First of all, Felix´s two siblings Alexandra and Porfirio, who the missionaries have been visiting since before I got here, are going to be baptized this week! The Lord really opened doors for us on Friday as we went to go teach them and it was just incredible how smoothly their interviews and everything went, especially since just the day before we were starting to wonder if we´d have to drop them. I love when the Lord just makes things happen!!! We also had a wonderful opportunity to serve with the Oriental Stake in the worldwide service day of ¨Limpieza de Las Costas¨. We got to put on some helping hands vests and pick up garbage for a few hours and it felt SO good to get out there and work! I didn´t even mind the sweat. LoL. Between our little group of 4 we picked up almost 45 pounds of garbage! Aside from that, the Lord continues to lead us to new investigators each day. Yesterday we made an unplanned stop at a new members house and found a neighbor there visiting her who told us just the day before she had this random desire to sit down and read a religious pamphlet in the house, but couldn´t find one. So when we gave her a pamphlet of The Restoration that reminded her of the day before when she had the impression and her face just lit up. So cool!!! Basically, the work of the Lord rolls on! I can´t believe how much there is to do and I feel so blessed to be here right now. We still trials everyday of course, the least of which trying to get things figured out between three of us instead of just two, but with LOTS of prayer and humility, we are learning together and it´s incredible. I am so grateful for all the lessons my mission is teaching me everyday! Love and miss you all!
Hermana Bradley

Become

Familia y Amigos,
Buenas Tardes! Como le va en todo? Buuuueno, aqui en la Republica Dominicana hace MUCHO calor, pero ya ustedes sabes, la mision no es facil. :) Pero....hope you all are enjoying the cool breezes back at home! Things here lately have been fraught with trials, I can´t lie. BUT, each day I realize that these trials are especially designed for me and that I´m learning to overcome my weaknesses. I reread a fantastic conference talk today by Elder Robbins on ¨What Manner of Men Ye Ought to Be¨ and found alot of wise counsel to apply to companions, investigators and especially myself. I encourage you all to check it out. Despite the struggles of fallen through baptismal dates and a lack of ward coordination, the Lord also sent an extra dose of help via our special conference with Elder Cornish. His messages were so incredibly inspiring and based on doctrine that it made me want to go out right away and apply everything. I love being in the presence of inspired leaders and feeling of the genuine love they have for us as missionaries as well as the people. Elder Cornish was actually a mission president here in the D.R. a few years back, so he knows what things are really like and knows how to really encourage us. It was a privilege and blessing to be taught by him this week. Another great blessing this week was seeing the baptism of Elsa. I´ve never had an investigator so excited to be baptized! Every time we visited her during the week she was just counting down, and seeing her dressed in white on Saturday was amazing. No matter how hard the mission gets, NOTHING beats the feeling of seeing people enter the waters of baptism wtih a true commitment to endure to the end. I was writing a letter this week and realized as I wrote it that before my mission I hadn´t really known what true joy was, because I hadn´t really known what true suffering was. But through the refining process of this mission, I have truly come to know both, and I wouldn´t change that experience for the world. It has shaped me into the person I needed to become...and is still refining me. As Elder Oaks explains ¨The final judgment is NOT just an evaluation of a sum total of good and evil acts...what we have done. It is an acknowledgment of the final effect...of what we have BECOME.¨ So true! Anyways, I hope you all have a lovely week, and thank you so much for all the letters and emails this last week, I needed them so much!
Love you!!!
Hermana Bradley

The Almost Perfect P-Day

Hello People I Love!
Sorry I can only send a mass email this week, time got cut short as a result of internet problems. It WAS the perfect p-day...including pizza, frozen yogurt, cultural trips to the park, and lots of air conditioned buildings...until we tried to do our emails. Haha. Oh well, that´s just life. But anyways, on the brightside, this week was a great week for mission work! We had Kenia´s baptism on Saturday and it was pretty neat to watch her son Felix baptize her. Kenia also shared a beautiful testimony in fast and testimony meeting yesterday. I´m so grateful to be a part of this work and see the gospel bring families closer together. Elsa already had her interview as well and will be baptized next Saturday, so we´re all really excited for that. This will be my first baptism of someone I contacted, taught, and baptized, so it´s pretty incredible! We also put a baptismal date with Alfredo, the son of Celeste. After he gets baptized, that will have been 3 sets of mothers and sons I will have taught and baptized on the mission. So cool! As for the homefront, after almost 3 weeks of fighting through waterless conditions, the water has magically fixed itself! I´m not sure if a grouchy neighbor was doing something to our water pump or if it was just a matter of figuring out how to open and close the apartment valve, but as a companionship we now give thanks daily in our prayers for water to shower and clean with. LoL. Sometimes the Lord has to give us trials to make us recognize better the blessings. This week we have some special conferences planned with the new area seventy Elder Cornish that is here visiting, so we´re all excited for that, and yeah. Basically, things are going great. And for the funny story of the week...This week as Hermana McEntire and I were indulging in buying some bread from a street vendor, he started accusing me of being a detective. The problem is that he used a word in spanish for detective that I´d never heard of, so I just looked at him confused and said, ¨I don´t understand what that means¨ to which he replied sagely ¨Oh yes you do! You get to know people really good and be their friends and all.¨ I started laughing and asked him if he´d ever visited the church to which he laughed back and said no. So I told him to visit the church first and then decide if we were detectives. Dominicans can be so funny. Anyways, hope you all have a lovely Labor Day free from work and school! I promise to write more individual emails next week!
Love,
Hermana Bradley

HELLO AGAIN

Buenas Tardes Familia!
Well, I don´t really know what to say because I feel like I just barely wrote ya´ll, but oh well. We had a good weekend and lots of lessons to finish out the week, so that´s great. Kenia and Elsa also were at church with us on Sunday and we´re really excited for their baptisms in the coming weeks. Today and yesterday our companionship has had some stellar study sessions and I am blown away by how amazing the new program is for new missionaries in the field. I feel very blessed to have the opportunity to learn from it with Hna McEntire. This week we started to focus alot on finding new investigators and simply sharing short messages with contacts that were willing to give us a few minutes. What amazing results! One thing I love about the people here is that they are always willing to talk about God. But it can be a double edged sword because alot of times they just want to ¨listen to the word¨ without committing to do anything. Every mission has their trials. Speaking of trials...believe it or not we don´t have water in our apartment again. I won´t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say we could use some prayers! LoL. On the bright side, today we had a great pday together with our zone. We played volleyball again (btw I´ll probably be coming home browner than a brownie, hope you can all recognize me lol), ate some good food, and for the first time in my mission I succumbed to playing the official game of the DR...dominoes. Of course considering my partner was Elder Green from England, we didn´t do so well. Dominicans definitely have more skills in that game. Haha. But it was good to play for a day. Basically, I´m just trying to make every day count instead of counting the days. Each day is filled with new trials, but at the same time the Lord is constantly reminding me of all the wonderful blessings He has given and continues to give me. Some of the new missionaries were talking about the trials of adjustment today, and as I listened, I realized that really, none of the trials can even compare with all of the blessings. Watching people you grow to love embrace the gospel and change their lives is priceless. No matter how much sweat or tears come as a result, the gospel is still is true, and mission work is still the best kind of work any of us can do. Thank you so much to all of you for your love and support. Now go out and do a good missionary deed!
Love,
Hermana Bradley

Hooola!
So my first week training has been amazing and I am loving the work! Even though the trio has trials, Hna Vera, Hna McEntire, and I are seeing amazing miracles! Hna McEntire is from Richfield, UT and learning so fast! It´s so easy to train someone who is so willing to work hard and learn! I feel so blessed, and most of the time she teaches me things, so it´s pretty neat. We are also now doing the new 12 week study program for new missionaries, and it is incredible! Such an inspired program! We can already see the results in our area and we´re determined to keep working hard. This week we put baptismal dates with Elsa and Kenia, both of which made it to church on Sunday to round of a nice number of 7 investigators. I was especially floored when Felicia, a contact from a few weeks ago, walked in right before the meeting started. The night we contacted her I remember I was sick with a really bad migraine, but we were determined to finish our contacts. So I sat down beside her on the park bench and invited her to church. It was kind of funny because she answered my invitation with ¨Can´t you see I´m really irritated right now¨, but I think my confused and slightly nauseous face softened her heart lol. So she came to church and really liked it! So neat! Elsa is another contact from a few weeks ago that told us she´s always wanted to be a member of the church because of the example her older sister set as they were growing up together. She is already making sacrifices and changes in her life and is preparing for September 10th, so we´re really excited. On a funny note, Hna Vera surprised me the other day when we left an appointment and I jokingly said that Satan interrupted the Spirit while we were teaching by making the phone ring. Out of nowhere Hna Vera responded in English ¨Freaking Satan!¨ and both Hna McEntire and I just burst out laughing and asked where on earth she learned that. It was so funny. Anyways, today has been a wonderful pday with the temple visit in the morning and megacentro here in the afternoon. I LOVE THE TEMPLE! Can´t wait to go more often when I get home. We also got to meet some newbies who are coming in next transfer. So crazy how fast time is going by! Well, love and miss you all, hope you have a wonderful week!
Love,
Hermana Bradley

Just a Little Change

Buenas Tardes!
Hope everyone had a good week, especially loved hearing about the reunion at Paul and Pat´s for Tannon´s farewell, wish I could´ve been there! He´ll be a great missionary! Anyways, things this week are looking to change as we got transfer calls and even though I´ll be staying in Villa Carmen with Hermana Vera, we´ll be going to get a new sister tomorrow as I´m going to train! So crazy! Honestly, I´m a little bit nervous as being in a trio has never been a pleasant experience for me, but I´m determined to make the best of it and I know the Lord will help us work efficiently as long as we dedicate our all. Our zone is having almost a complete turnaround as half are finishing their missions, so things will be interesting. I´ve also heard that training is now a very rigid program so we will be doing things alot differently. As long as the work moves forward, I´ll be happy! This past week we put a baptismal date with Elicia, the mother of Celeste, our most recent convert. Elicia is a very special old woman that has a heart of gold. The ward has really begun to reach out to her and we are excited for her baptism on the 27th. We also received a few member references this week and are looking forward to working with some new investigators including a young single adult named Lisbeth and another young man named Guevert who is full of questions and a desire to change his life. I love finding people that have a thirst for the gospel! Other than that, not much else has changed. Just lots of working, walking, and sweating! Haha. Today we finished the transfer off with another zone activity playing ping pong, eating ice cream, and hunting down Chinese food for lunch, all of which I thoroughly enjoyed. It appears that the mission hasn´t rusted my ping pong skills as I still kicked every elder´s trash...well Elder Castro beat me once, but only once! (As you can tell I´m still very humble about it lol) Anyways, have a wonderful week and remember I love and miss all of you!
Love,
Hermana Bradley

Forgetting My NativeTongue

Que tal Familia?
Wow, I almost started typing this email in Spanish without even thinking about it! Ya´ll are going to have to help me assimilate back to English when I get home lol. Anyways, this week was great as we got to see the baptism of Celeste. President Hernandez and his wife even attended the service, so that was pretty neat. Little by little we´ve been gaining the confidence of the ward and especially the bishop through our hard work here in Villa Carmen, and things are really starting to turn around. I love being able to see changes like that. On Sunday we also had a huge blessing as Penelope finally came to church after 6 weeks of our Thursday afternoon appointments. I think she really felt the difference in Spirit as it was fast and testimony meeting. I can´t wait to see her continue to progress. Each day I grow to love these people more and more and it just makes me impatient to help them receive the blessings I know they can receive through the gospel. One thing I´ve had to learn over and over again in my mission is that TIMING is everything, and the Lord´s timing is always better than our own. Hermana Vera and I are also excited for the coming weeks as Kenia, Felix´s mom our next door neighbor and recent convert, told us she wants to be baptized. Felix got baptized a few months back by himself and now his whole family is sharing with us. What a wonderful blessing a good example can be in a family!
We also had a good laugh this week when we went out one afternoon with Michael, one of the single adults in our ward. As we were walking in the street past a bunch of teenage boys playing basketball and purposely ignoring them as they were all staring and whistling, one of them very loudly and bitterly told his friend ¨Ellas no se casan¨ (They don´t marry.) I had to strongly resist the urge to turn around and yell ¨Of course we do! Just not to little boys who play in the streets¨ ... but I decided to hold my tongue and just laugh. I can´t lie though, I´m very much looking forward to returning to my own country where I am largely ignored by the opposite sex. A blessing I used to take for granted.
Today has also been full of laughs and fun as we FINALLY had a zone activity. After playing some volleyball and bruising up our arms good, we played some games and ate lots of food. I made truffles as a dessert and they were a big hit. Although some doubts arose when one of the Elders asked me what the secret ingredient was and I, thinking of the process of making them in our hot kitchen, responded quickly ¨Sweat!¨ Hahaha. But anyways, things are going well and we are working hard and trying to aguantar...yet another word I can´t remember in English...the heat and sun. Hope you all have a fantastic week!
Love,
Hermana Bradley

Little Miracles

Hi There Family!
So it has been a week of work in Villa Carmen! Gustavo was FINALLY baptized on Saturday after lots prayers and trials...including the baptismal font overflowing and flooding the front doors of the chapel. Good thing all the chapels have tile floors! The service went well though and it´s been great to see how Gustavo´s countenance has changed through the process and how the ward is bringing him into the fold. Celeste also made it to church on Sunday so we could announce her baptism, so we´re planning that for this next Saturday, and after that hopefully Cesar´s the following week! I am so amazed at the progress I´ve seen in this area in just the few short weeks I´ve been here. My testimony of how the Lord prepares people continues to grow with each transfer. This week we taught Armando, who we´ve been visiting for a few weeks and always has these great big doubts when we arrive and by the time we leave has a big smile on his face. This week he committed to coming to church and praying specifically about the Book of Mormon, so we are excited to see his progress. We are also still visiting with Penelope, who was a contact from my first week here. Penelope is one special woman. She currently visits an evangelical church, but is searching for the truth and is visiting with missionaries of various faiths. However, yesterday we saw a miracle as we shared about the law of chastity and eternal families. Her husband left her a few years ago and she´s been struggling as a single mom ever since. However, we made yesterday´s visit with Felix, a new convert of about 7 months, and his testimony was JUST what she needed to hear, and is now committed to attending church with us next Sunday. I feel so much love for her and can´t wait for her to feel the Spirit at church! As far as the weather goes...it´s been pretty nutty lately. Lots of sun and heat in the mornings, and then torrential downpour in the afternoons. There is supposedly a hurricane moving our way, so who knows? Nonetheless, the work of the Lord moves forward and I am loving it! Thank you so much for all your love and prayers. Oh and Happy August!!!!!
Love,
Hermana Bradley