Wud up.So sorry for forgetting to tell you that we wouldn't be able to e-mail yesterday... we had a mission conference with Don R. Clarke who is the head over missionary work. He's going to be here all week and we have Zone leader council with him tomorrow up in Santa Clarita. Anyways, so we changed our P-day to Tuesday this week.This week has been so insane i literally don't even know where to start... its even been taking me a while to organize my thoughts at night when attempting to write in my journal. I guess the first thing to mention is the highlight! That Rhenz's baptism went perfect! I will be confirming him next week at church during sacrament meeting! He is doing amazing and his baptism was definitely a day to remember. It was probably one of the most personal baptisms i have ever witnessed. So to explain why, we play basketball with Rhenz and a bunch of Filipino kids every Wednesday night. About 30 kids show up to play with us every week. So we organize tournaments and out of all these kids that we are hanging out with, only like 6 of them are members. Rhenz has made a lot of friends by coming with us and he invited them all to participate in his baptism. It was so awesome to see all of his new friends supporting him by speaking/praying/and witnessing his baptism. We are all now teaming up to baptize everyone who comes to play basketball at the church Wednesday nights. You can tell most of these kids have rough backgrounds growing up in the valley and are involved in gangs with tattoos/piercings and stuff of that nature... but it is awesome to see how they change when they come to play ball with us. If one of them accidentally swears or says something inappropriate, they all get on their back and they feel super bad and keep apologizing to us. It's just a fun positive atmosphere that is great for these kids to be in and you know they feel the spirit.Other things that have been on my mind this week is how wicked this valley really is... we live right by the Burbank Airport so planes are always coming in and swooping right over our apartment to land every 15 minutes. We have pretty much tuned that out and don't even really hear it anymore. But the other night we hear a helicopter that was hovering above our apartment and spot light glimmering past our windows along with cops on megaphones making announcements... pretty common noises as well, but this time it wasn't going away so we finally got up around 11:30 to see what was going on. We look our our window to find the road outside our apartment blocked off by cop cars surrounding a guy who was stealing a car right out front of our apartment and took him to jail. Then another instance, we were driving down the freeway to our appointment a couple nights ago and we were stuck in traffic. We knew something big was happening because there was 3 helicopters(or commonly known as ghetto birds around here) spaced out hovering above the freeway. As we got closer to some flares at the scene we see a lady get taken away in a stretcher and thinking it was another accident, but we were super shocked when we see the car all shot up with blown out windows... Then i got sick to my stomach when we saw that there was a car seat in the back of the car and this poor lady got shot. We did some research at our appointment and told them and turned on the news to find out that the baby was unharmed. Thank goodness. Here is the article about it that we just found about it.Anyways, this is a super sketchy place and we still hear about tons of crazy things people have done around here. We had dinner with the Haro family and Brother Haro witnessed the "1997 North Hollywood shooting" from his little kiosk across the street that still has bullet holes in the walls that protected him as he was hiding... Here's one about that one too...We have life so easy in our safe little draper bubble in Utah. I definitely want to raise my family in Utah.Sorry probably too much information, but just to share a little bit of how much my eyes have been opened on the mission and how much i appreciate growing up in a safe environment with an amazing family active in the church that raised me with good morals.Concerning our zone, the Granada hills zone is leading the valley in baptisms! At least one of our 5 companionship's has been baptizing someone every week since Elder Johnson and I have been here! They are on fire. We have been on some baby sitting Arron's from Pres. Hall this last week and last night we were with some missionaries until 4am and one of them is probably going home this coming week due to bad decisions he made... We are so sad and worried about this missionary and have done all we can to help him out. We love him so much but now we are turning it over to Pres. Hall tomorrow and he'll probably go home this week... I feel like i am going to cry. In Valencia, a quote i heard about being a good zone leader is" no matter how many sheep you find, don't lose any of the Shepperd's!" -Brother Richard Rich. Now our powerfully strong zone of 10 missionaries (smallest in the mission) will be down to 9 and we might be in a tri-panionship covering 3 wards again... definitely hardest time of my mission. I'll have lots of details to share when i get home. But still trying to stay positive! :)I love you all! Thank you again for the packages! The homemade salsa is amazing and a huge hit when i made nachos for the missionaries in our zone. They say thank you!Love, Elder Brady`~`~ NO REGRETS ~`~`
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Intense eye opening week
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