April 7, 2014
Dear Family,
It was conference this week! im so jealous of all of you that you got to watch it! i think ill get to listen to it soon but wow i really took it for granted back home! direct counsel from the prophets every 6 months! how perfect is that?!
This week was a great week for me and from the sound of things pretty great for you guys too! On Monday right after i finished emailing i got my package!!!! i only had to pay a couple bucks on the duty so it was awesome and cheap! thank you soooooo much! i have the best family in the world! elder adjavon and i made the brownies and put in the candles and had a lil bday party that night! the journal is awesome! the shirt is great and fits perfect! and the food oh wow the food! thankyou so much!!!! its all great!
Tuesday was a good day. district meeting went really well and helped me a lot in the instruction again. i also got 7 letters on after district meeting so yeah ive been a really happy boy this week!!!! after district meeting we had a lot of fun, we always go get fufu afterwards:) then we had some real nice lessons with some investigators that night.
Wednesday was just a great normal day of missionary work but during the day i noticed something interesting. i have become extremely cautious in the missionary work. cautious of who we meet with and who we stop teaching. i Just want to be effective in the work. Here in ghana everyone is willing to listen to you whether they will follow or not or even want to talk. thats good and bad for us because its easy to teach lessons. but hard to find serious people willing to take steps to follow. i also think a big reason is that i am just new here and im still getting to know everyone but i know the lord will help us as he has. i just want to work hard
Thursday was also another great workday and on top of it our zone leaders came out and interviewed our baptismal candidates and they both passed so we were really happy. Friday again was much the same. in the morning we went to a little village just outside of abakrampa about the size of nyenasi. We were walking on the road and a guy with a big pickup truck stopped and offered us a ride so we hopped in the back and it was a nice little ride. i havent ridden in a truck like that in a long time!
Saturday was probably the busiest day of the week. We went to another area in the district in the morning to go help a companionship solve some problems they were having. In the end it all boiled down to communication. lack of communication. Communication is so important and when we fail to communicate it can cause some really big problems. so i chatted with each of them and they promised to work on it and as of right now they are way happy. so we came back after that and taught a couple really awesome lessons then in the after noon we went with our baptismal candidates and a few members to the chapel in yamoransa and had a baptism! it was so great! elder Adjavon did the baptizing and it was a sweet experience. Sister Susanna and Wisdom were both baptized and they were both extatic about it. the lord is helping us so much! Also in the course of satruday we went to a funeral for on of our investigators. his mom passed away. but the thing about funerals is that they are just huge parties! they gave us some sprite to drink and then after we finished with that they brought us some vodka! hahaha we thanked them and said we had to leave and we got out pretty quick. so yeah quite the day.
Sunday again was the best day of the week. Church was wonderful and we had quite a few people come. After church we had some really nice lessons. Heavenly father really guided us, we had 3 lessons fall through but thanks to the spirit we found ourselves filling the time with other lessons with other people that were all great. Fasting was also great! i really feel like when we fast our spirit gets to go to an all you can eat buffet and just chow down. i love it! so yeah sunday was great
Today has been nice, we went as a zone to the Elmina Castle Its the oldest and largest slave castle in all of Africa and it was cool to see. it was just like cape coast with much the same story but its a huge piece of history. this castle is one of the main reasons we have african americans today. this is where they all came from. so yeah pretty huge. but everything is going great and im loving mission a lot! its hard to believe a year has gone by!!!! i hope i can work even harder this year and become what the lord really wants me to become.
thats me for the week! i hope you all have a great one! keep having fun and i will talk to you soon! i love you!!!
love, Elder Bradley McGuire
March 31, 2014
Dear Family,
Another sweet week! hahaha. okay so for your questions. Im in a branch of about 300 members with about 60-80 who regularly come. luckily they all understand doctrine and most of them speak english. the challenge here is meetings and activities. and as always tons of less actives so we have our work cut out for us. my new area, called Abakrampa, is about 20 minutes outside of cape coast. its about 3 times the size of nyenasi and is a bit more of a town than a city. Everything is great here though and im really happy. I forgot what it was like to be in a big area. Tarkwa was Huge and Nyenasi was tiny so between the too i got mixed up. ive been sore because we walk a lot more than in nyenasi. In the village when we would walk around all day we would never get very far because there wasnt many places to go to haha. here we have places to go:)
The work here is going really well. We have a lot of progressing investigators who are really close to baptism. we should have at least 2 maybe 3 this weekend so we are working really hard and we are stoked for them. My companion and i are having a lot of fun and we are getting to know each other a lot better. i am still getting to know the area and the members but hopefully soon ill have it down. Being district leader has been fun so far. in my first instruction last tuesday i talked about humility. The lord really helped me a lot and we had a very powerful lesson. Everyone participated and we learned a lot from each other. im hoping i can keep going with that. Our big struggle in our area and the district is getting member present lessons. Working with members is so important out here because it is way more effective! so we are all working to do better on that.
On Friday this week we had some interesting things happen. Firstly our power box was sparking so our power went out and it was down all day. secondly WE had some people form the environmental health and sanitation board come to our apartment. We have a big hole behind our apartment where all of our water drains too and they told us its against health code and as a result we were being sent to court to pay a big fine. they didnt give us any warning or anything just sending us directly to court. This was frustrating because our apartment is part of a big compound of apartments and we are renting. But our land lord wasnt home so they were blaming it all on us. so we went to the city building to talk it over with them and how they needed to give us a warning and time to fix it before they take us to court. They knew that they were wrong but they said they wouldnt take away the court summons until we bribed them ( they didnt actually say that since its illegal but its what they wanted) when i refused to bribe them they got mad and i did too so we just left. we walked around for a while because i was furious so i had to cool off. but then we got back to work and had a great day. LAter that night our land lord came home and said he would take care of everything. he also had an electrician come and fix our power so we were very grateful.
Saturday was a great day we taught some nice lessons in the morning then in the afternoon we played football with the youth and cleaned the church for an activity. it was great and we had a lot of referrals come. After that we went to an old woman in the branch and helped here to clear out her yard. she had a bunch of dead banana trees and leaves everywhere so we worked for a while. this woman is also the mother of our branch mission leader so after we were done we had a meeting with him to talk about the missionary work and how he could help us more.
As always i love sundays. Just being able to take the sacrament is a great blessing and i love being able to participate every sunday. After church we had great lessons and things just were really good. today has been nice, weve washed and now were gonna go shopping and go home. im also getting my bday package today so i am really excited!!!!!
Im glad to hear that everyone is happy and doing well at home. please keep going! have fun!!! its okay to have fun(in the right way)! President shulz always tells us if we are not having some fun during the work then we are doing it wrong. and i know that to be true. it makes everything so enjoyable! i love you all so much! have a great week!
love, Bradley
No comments:
Post a Comment