3/9/10

Dear Everyone,

I already replied to all of your emails to me so I'll keep this general letter fairly short. Sorry I didn't write yesterday, but it's transfer week so we had our P-day today. One of the Elders in our apartment, Elder Bowen, is getting transferred to Ocean Springs, MS. He was a really fun Elder to be around and so we're all going to miss him...plus he was a bit OCD so he would always clean the whole apartment for us. :)

Yesterday we went out to a members house who lives out in the backwoods and helped clear some land. Once again there were trees involved, but since it was a large property we could just chop the trees down and not worry about them falling on anything so I didn't have to climb any more trees. (You're welcome Mom.) The member had actually already cleared many of the big trees so most of the stuff we were clearing was just briars and small trees and so there wasn't too much logging going on. Elder Bowen and I spent most of the time splitting the wood that he had already chopped down with a wedge. They were some big logs and I'm definitely a little sore today.

We did have something unfortunate happen last night. We went to go visit Antonio and Lorretta, but she was working and we got to talking with Antonio. As we did, he mentioned that he has to go to a meeting with his Probation Officer tomorrow. This caught us by surprise and made us both pretty sad. For those of you who don't know, if you are on parole or probation you can't be baptized. :( So, he's on probation until September and I guess he'll have to wait until then. We didn't tell him right then because we wanted Lorretta to be there too when we talk about it so we're not really sure what's going to happen. Hopefully they still will want to get baptized, but Lorretta may decide to wait until September as well. Who knows? It's a little disappointing, but the Lord's time isn't ours and we'll try to keep working with them to get them ready for that day. For instance, we're still going to try to get them married on the 27th of March.

Last night we had a FHE at some of the Spanish Members' house with one of our investigator families. We talked about the Family Proclamation and all read it together. The couple said they liked it (the proclamation) which we were really glad to hear because they aren't married either. However, they're a really nice young couple and we're hoping that we can get them baptized next transfer.

Thank you all for your support in your prayers, letters, and everything else. It's been hard to have all the people I've been working with seem to fall through and decide not to get baptized. Still, as it says in Jacob 5, I keep on working with the hope that one day perhapsI may bring some soul again unto Christ.

Dios este con vosotros y concede que se os derrame su Espiritu.

Tu hijo y hermano en Cristo,

Elder Bradley Bishop