Good Week with the Hench Man

As the title of the email states the word "hench" in slang here means "buff" or "huge". My current companion Elder Evans is a weight lifter, and he's quite fit. Kinda makes me jealous. Well, that's something I can work on later. I got rebuked by Shannon just barely, and I realized that I don't really send enough stories... but it does take some time to type them out. Plus when I get home you can just ask me about anything I'll have dozens of stories to share with you guys. Its just not really practical to write all of them down you know? So I'll share one with you from this past week.

Its starts a little like this, We were meeting with a good Sister. She is from B--- and she has lived here in England for nearly 3 years. The missionaries happened to find her and her (previous husband) walking down the street. Obviously her husband just kept walking, but she stopped and listened to what they had to say. Changed her life forever. Due to lots of details and information that follows previously in her life prior to this experience, I can't relate everything that she spoke to us about. Sufficeth me to say that her husband emotionally and physically abused her for nearly 18 years. Way to long for anyone. Well, she didn't do anything about it because that was the culture that she has grown up in. Its normal in their society. To some extent that is. But in England physical abuse is illegal and her colleagues at one of her jobs found out about it and got her husband locked away for a few months. She began to have the missionaries over during that time in which she than joined the church very quickly. My companion and I heard that story from her after she had borne testimony of the Book of Mormon to an investigator that we had brought to her home. That was probably one of the best member present moments on my mission.

So I have had some great experiences here in Wembley, though I may not relate all of them just know that I do have things to share with you :)

So I'll describe to you a little bit about Elder E. He was born in California, grew up in Las Vegas, and spent his High School years in Missouri. His family has just recently moved to Highland in Utah, so they are like next door neighbours to us. So that makes four Utah companions that are going to be coming over for dinner mom. We'll see how well that goes :) As I said, Elder Evans likes to lift weights and he loves his cars. We talk about that all the time. Tis quite fun. We've been working hard, hopefully we might have another baptism this transfer but everyone hosed us at church this past week so we are still figuring things out on how to get people there... but that's all missionary related problems. We've been teaching a lot of Romanians... interesting and peculiar people. Lots of them in this part of town. We've had our Romanian members out with us recently, so there have been some good experiences there as well.

Well, I hope your week is going well. I like the pictures with Shannon and Whitney doing the strange bridge thing... and then having Hazel and Delores in the corner just chilling there. Such a classic look on our family. Anyway, I'll catch you all next week.

Love, 

Elder Bradley Smith

PS, 

You are getting my pictures I send you right? from Google Drive? just let me know :) Yes, I do.

Bright Day for London P Day

Well another bright week has come and gone and we finally just had our two baptisms. So we've enjoyed decent weather for most of the week after that massive storm, but its been quite chilly during the night because our heating system has been broken for the past week or so and our landlord has yet to fix it :P Lovely how motivated these landlords are to fix your problems :P

Well I did receive the garments on Friday, and the are blessedly amazing! Freedom of the chaffing crotch... that is for now. So far I haven't had any problems with them, but lets just hope that all goes well with them. I bought some great new shoes, though breaking them in is not always fun, but they are quite comfortable. They come from a store called Clark's, and they make some great, durable shoes. So hopefully with these shoes will last until the end of my mission, which they should.

As for the sports clothing, I haven't found anything here for a decent price... we are going to through Wembley and they have a new outlet Mall there that we want to check out and I'll see if I can find some good under armour there for a good price. I'll let you know next week how that goes and whether or not you should just amazon a pair to me. I'll just take a sniff in there, and find out if there is any good deals. I know mom loves good deals :)

Our baptisms went well, notice how I am wearing the white in the pictures I sent you. Lovely to see that those white trousers actually have gotten used since I was in the Temple in Preston. Its been a long time since then... Well now we need to continue to find more awesome people like the family we just baptized.

If everything goes smoothly here, the end of the transfer is this next week, so I won't be writting until Tuesday probably. So don't be shocked because I think we've been through this process about 10 or 11 times now. So I think everything will be going just fine, I'll probably stay here in Wembley all the way till after Christmas this next transfer, but President might surprise me and drop a bomb on me or something and I could end up in Norwich or something like that :P Nah, I'll probably just replace my old district leader here as the new district leader, but I may just end up being a regular missionary again for another transfer.

Well I hope to catch you guys next week, its been fun here and Halloween was interesting. Well I'll fill you in on that. People here are not big on Halloween like they are in the states. I think society is just changing so much that people don't bother to go door to door anymore on this holiday here... I can imagine why. Well we did tracting on Halloween and didn't get the responses we thought we were going to get. But that is just life :)

Well love you guys. 

Elder Bradley Smith

PS 

Shannon that was a hilarious story. I started laughing here in the library :) Probably not the most reverent thing....