November 18th letter

This week was good. I ended up playing piano in the Primary program yesterday. We went to the church building on Saturday morning to make some calls (we have only 50 minutes per month on our cell phone, and the bishop offered the phone for us to use). The primary was starting to rehearse, and we were there talking with some of the kids when one of the women asked if I knew the song they were rehearsing. I told her yes, and ended up practicing the whole program with them. I was really grateful for having learned how to sight read! It was also pretty cool because I was also able to play some awesome primary songs.

So we have Elder Tiago now as part of our companionship! He's from Fortaleza, Ceará, Brasil. He's pretty tranquilo [quiet], pretty relaxed, but he is also pretty creative and funny. So now it's him, Elder Lierley, and me. The two are pretty much like, "yeah, you know what you're doing...we'll just let you take the reins". So, I'm thinking about what I can do to help them be more independent, self-sufficient. Maybe I'll designate one of them to act as senior for a week.

One of the pressures of being a leader is that you must be obedient with exactness. Of course, you have to have obedience to have the Spirit, but if anyone following you sees or hears of you being disobedient, they lose confidence in you as their leader and will not ask for or easily accept your opinion or vision. It kind of bothers me that some of the missionaries in our zone hold me up against a higher standard than they themselves try to reach. It's like "well, you're our leader, so you need to be perfect, but I can do what I want and you're not going to bug me about it". I was thinking about that and it came to my mind that never was my zone of missionaries asked to give a sustaining vote, like they do with church callings, with the right hand for me to serve as zone leader. Neither was I interviewed or set apart by the laying on of hands specifically to be zone leader.

What a blessing it is to have a calling in the church and receive a sustaining vote by every single member of the ward or stake! Any district/zone leader can come in and the missionaries will decide - can I depend on this guy or not? Will I listen to what he'll say or ignore it? Will I tell him what I need or should I save my breath? So as appointed leaders we have to win over the other missionaries, in a sense. I often think this is because of the maturity level of some missionaries, but when I really think about it more, I see that I do this too. I'll keep working on it.

Have an awesome week! Thanks for the Prayers!
Elder Bradford

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We did a family home evening at a members house and we made more of those donuts (like we did for the recent ward party). We had arranged with some people we are teaching to come, but they didn't show, unfortunately. But, it was still good.

November 11th letter

HELLLOOOWW!

Baptism of Renan

So, this week we had a baptism of a boy named Renan. His mom is returning to church. I've included a picture of him - he was baptized by Elder Lierley.

Yeah, sorry for the horribly short email as my time already ran up. I am healthy, happy, working, tired, a little stressed out, but still going good.

We're going to be getting another missionary in our companionship, meaning there's going to be three of us together. Yeah, it's going to be challenging. But if it's happening that means God knows I can handle it. Please pray that I might write a longer email next week :-).

Have an awesome week!!! Study the Book of Mormon!! Help the Elders!!! They deserve it!!! Abraço enorme [big hug].

Elder Bradford

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Renan's family and us

A family home evening that Elder Lierley and I did!

November 5th letter

Yeah!

Sorry again that I won't be able to write a super long email cuz I spent a lot of time working on a T-shirt design for our missionary zone. But I wanted to tell two quick stories. Experiences that taught me something.

The first was with this guy named Emerson that we are working with. He uses pretty much all the types of drugs you can imagine. But he stopped drinking, so that's progress!! We went to an appointment with him and he said that he couldn't stay because he had to go somewhere. I asked him, "well what do you mean?" He said that he 'borrowed' some crack from a dealer, and the dealer told Emerson that he had until 7:00 to pay him or the dealer was gonna send someone to kill him. It was 6:10. I was certain that he was exaggerating about the killing part because he only owed him 5 reais (R$5), which is about US$2.20. But even so, Emerson didn't have 5 reais. So I said, "well, what are you going to do?" And he said, "well I'll have to find someway, I don't know...maybe stop a car or a motorcycle and rob from someone...I'm gonna have to do something". So I thought...we did have 5 reais, but I had this feeling that if we continued walking down the dirt road we were on that we would find the money on the street.

I asked Emerson if he had faith in God. He said, "well yeah, you have to have faith". I told him that we would find 5 reais on the road. So we started walking along and I'm like, okay let's find 5 reais. I was looking through trash on the side of road, turning over things, and Emerson was just walking along like 'whatever' with Elder Lierley. We walked some 10 minutes, and nothing. We stop near this one river and Elder Lierley and I are searching in the grass and stuff. I asked Elder Lierley, "hey what do you think...do we pay it for him?". And Elder Lierley responded that miracles don't come until after a trial of our faith. So we kept searching and Emerson starts getting nervous because it was already 6:30. He was like, "look, I gotta get going...I'll try to resolve something with the dealer, maybe do a job for him. If you guys could help me out I would thank you from the heart, but if you can't that's okay, because I don't want to take advantage of you guys...I know you guys are here to help me", etc. So we were like, just give God 10 more minutes...your 5 reais will show up. We kept looking and the whole while I was thinking, do I have enough faith for this to happen? During this the whole time Emerson was complaining. But then it hit me. I told Elder Lierley, "I think the one that's lacking faith here is not me or you", and he said "yeah, you're right". Emerson didn't have the faith to believe that God would provide the money even though we did, and he was the one in need of the miracle. Well, Emerson did get the money he needed...we ended up giving it to him. This was a learning experience to me on the principle of faith.

So, the other experience. We fasted for a family of three we've been teaching so that they would come to church...the last two weeks they were sick and they didn't make it. The husband ended up having an appointment at the hospital and his wife and daughter had some excuses for not coming. So, that was really disappointing and got me a little upset actually. But God was merciful and recognized our sacrifice, and at church we received a bunch of referrals of individuals to teach, and Anthony's mom [Anthony was recently baptized] visited church to see her son's confirmation as a member.  These were great blessings to us.

About Christmas, I don't even know what to request right now...except make sure you send plenty of Reese's peanut butter cups! I love you guys and thanks so much for the emails and prayers! Have a great week!

Elder Bradford

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These three pictures are from the Halloween party we had at the church (the donuts turned out great!)

Here's how my insoles are doin'.