A Great Week

How are y'all?!

I hope everything is going as well for you as it is for us here in
Tortosa! Elder Cushing and I are really having a great time together
and we are seeing a great amount of success and are truly enjoying the
work out here in Tortosa!

Our miracle from this week was our great friend Oyinda! She is going
to be getting baptized this upcoming week and is very excited! She is
so good and is doing really well. She lost her memory a couple years
so she has trouble remembering things sometimes. So we had a visit
with her late saturday night to remind her about church sunday
and to help her to prepare for her baptism. But the time for the visit
rolls around and she doesn't show up. Then we call her about 15 times
and she is not answering. Then right when we needed to return to piso
for the night she shows up and we were able to remind her all about
church. She came to church and loved it! One of the members of the
congregation from Peru gave her lessons on how to cook and take care
of a family because Oyinda is living here alone! They were together
for about 5 hours after church learning together! It was amazing! She
is amazing and we are so excited for her baptism!

I love Elder Cushing. I have had great companions so far on this
mission and Elder Cushing is no exception. He just goes and does!
Whenever we need to do something he takes initiative and gets it done!
This is a great companionship! I'm super happy to be here!

I know that God answers our prayers. I had to rely on the Lord a lot
this week trying to help Oyinda remember things and trying to help her
move towards baptism and they have been answered! If we ask God, he
will answer our prayers.

With Love from Tortosa,
Elder Bristol

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A week full of Miracles

Hello one and all,

Well it was a week full of miracles here in Tortosa. I am truly blown
away at what I have seen this past week. It could be one of the weeks
where I have seen the hand of the Lord in the work the most. I am
truly happy to be working here and I believe that I have truly
adjusted to the life here in a pueblo!

We were blessed with two wonderful miracles this week! Last Monday
while we were buying groceries during preparation day we were stopped
by a 18 year old girl from Nigeria. She asked what we were doing here
and why we were dressed with a white shirt and tie. We told her that
we are missionaries and got her phone number. Then later Monday night
we found her again in the street and said hello and set up a visit for
the next day. Then the lord put her in our path a third time that
Monday night and we just began to teach her a little right there! Then
in the visit the next day we taught her a little about baptism and she
told us that she wanted to be baptized and explained to us that she
knew there was a reason God had put us in each other's paths. She then
came to church on Sunday and told us that she will be there every
week! We are so excited to be seeing her baptism here in a couple of
weeks.

Our second miracle was a man named Hernán. He is 48 years old and from
Ecuador. We had a visit with another man one day but when we went to
the other mans house he wasn't there. But Hernán was there and he
opened the door! He said he really wanted to meet with us so we set up
a visit with him. We met with him and he said he truly wants to change
his life and that he is so happy to be meeting with us. He also
expressed his desires to be baptized to start his life again. It is so
great to see people with such great desires to start their lives again
with baptism and confirmation! I love this mission.

So we will be seeing their two baptisms here shortly. We are so
excited for them!

Elder Cushing is great! This week I really admired how much he cares
about the people here. He is very sympathetic to anyone that needs his
help its so great! I am learning a ton from him and I'm very excited
to be here in Tortosa!

Elder Bristol
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A Wing and A Good Amount of Prayers

Hello everyone!

What a week we had here in Tortosa. We are working super hard and
seeing a lot of miracles happen in front of our very faces. It is
amazing! I love this mission and I am super excited for my time here
in Tortosa. We are having a great time truly trying to help people
enter into the Kingdom of God!

This week's miracle is an amazing one! When I got here to Tortosa we
decided to really go after this one man named Dani. He has been
attending the church here for 3 years but has never made the decision
to be baptized and join. So when I got here we started teaching him
some powerful lessons about the importance of baptism and they went
really well. But then this week instead of a lesson we decided to do
something a little different. We decided to pray with this man until
he got an answer as to whether or not he should take the step of faith
and be baptized. We ended up praying for over 30 minutes with this man
and little by little he told us that he was receiving more light and
in the end he told us that he would get baptized in the upcoming
month! We were amazing at how God truly answered this man's prayers. I
felt the Spirit super strong when we were praying and I knew as well
that he needed to take the step. So we are super excited for him and
are super excited to see his progress towards eternal life!

Elder Cushing is amazing! He is always super positive and really
happy. It's actually really amazing how happy he always is and I love
to be around him. We get along really well and I'm glad to be here
working with him!

Something interesting I learned this week is that God truly knows us
personally and answers our prayers. So if you ever have a
question...just ask God. He's always there waiting for you to ask him.
Just like any father he just wants his children to communicate with
him! There's no better way than through prayer.

Something interesting about Spain is the amount of people from
countries from Central and South America! Half of the people we are
teaching right now are from Honduras. Honduras is a great country and
I can testify that they know how to cook as well lol.

Love y'all,
Elder Brsitol

 Arm wrestling a man named Miguel from Cuba

Tortosa Here I am

Hello Everyone out there in America!

Everything is amazing out here in Tortosa. It is about 20 times as
pretty as Badalona. But Badalona did have about 20 times more people.
I'm in a nice pueblo in Spain! It is a great place and I love being
here.

Our miracle from this week is a man named Enrique. Enrique is great
and has big desires to be baptized. We found him the first day when we
were together. We then set up a visit with him for the next day and we
had a great first visit with him. We taught him about our purpose and
missionaries and about baptism. He loved it and expressed his desires
to be baptized. We told him that we would help him prepare for a
baptism in the middle of April. He loved it and said he was super
excited for it. We also were able to teach his wife and some friends
that also live in the house. They are a great bunch of people. Oh yeah
and they're from Honduras. I love the people from Honduras, they are
super nice and all have very simple and sincere desires to follow
Jesus Christ!

Tortosa is a lot more of what you think of when you think of Spain.
Most people that live in this city are native Spaniards and they are
actually a lot nicer than the Spaniards I knew in Badalona!

Elder Cushing is great. He's my new companion and he is amazing. He
wants to help the people out here so much and he has such a great
attitude! He is always happy which is amazing! I'm excited for our
time together!

Have a great week and Happy Birthday to me,
Elder Bristol

Tortosa Here I Come

Hello to all!!
Well it was a very bittersweet week! So I'm getting transferred out of
Badalona. Badalona was great! I learned a lot there and just had a
great time! I've seen myself grow a ton there and I've had such good
experiences. Saying goodbye was pretty tough as you can imagine. 6
months is a long time to be somewhere and that's what I just had. I
just had a great 6 months. Elder McNutt, Muncy, and Simon were great
companions and are great men! This past week was really good though. I
got to say goodbye to a lot of people from the congregation and to a
lot of people I helped baptize around here. It was a very bittersweet
moment.

But here I come Tortosa! Tortosa is a land of miracles! Missionaries
have not been in this city for very long so there are a lot of people
prepared and just ready to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ. We are
really excited. My new companion is Elder Cushing and he is from South
Jordan, Utah. He is amazing! He is also nearing the end of his mission
so I think I am going to be able to learn a ton from him!

But yeah there's not a ton happening! It was sad saying bye to the
missionaries I had lived with for the past 3 months but that's ok!
Time marches on.

I just want everyone to know that there is no greater service than the
service of God!

Love y'all,
Elder Bristol

This is Jacob and Miguel, Miguel is someone that Jacob baptized and Jacob thinks Miguel is awesome. 

1 More for Badalona

Here we are! With one more great week here in the promised land of Badalona!

How is everything going? Everything here in Badalona is going well.
Elder Simon and I are truly learning a lot and working hard to help as
many people get baptized as possible here in Badalona. We are truly
working hard but more than anything we are working smart. We are
finding a lot and helping a lot move towards baptism.

Our miracle of the week is one of our Honduranian friends named Betsy.
We found her a couple of weeks ago. She lives in the house of one of
the people we were visiting. In the visit with the man we were
visiting we started talking to her and she expressed her desires to
come to church with us and to be baptized. We were really excited and
we've worked hard to make sure she had a good experience at church. It
was a great. She came and loved it. The members of the congregation
did a great job of saying hello to her and making her feel welcome.
She is really excited for her baptism on the 25th of March as well. We
as well are very excited for her.

We have a lot of people that are really excited to get baptized in
this area. It's amazing how much I have seen this area transfer in my
time here. In the beginning the work was good and everything was going
well but now the work is going amazingly well. The work is exploding.
Elder Simon and I have been swamped with visits these 5 weeks and it's
been so good. We have had a lot of success together and we are still
seeing a lot of success. This has truly taught me that you get out
what you put in. If you put in 100% of your time and effort into a
worthy cause, the Lord has no choice but to bless you.

I have learned so much from Elder Simon. He has helped me so much. I
truly feel like I have improved as a missionary 100% as I have been
blessed with Elder Muncy and Elder Simon.

Here's something I don't think I've told anyone lol. I've been serving
in this city named Santa Coloma for these 5 months. We walk around in
Santa Coloma everyday. It's just the name of the congregation is
Badalona. But yeah it's basically the same city but it just has a
different name. So there's something for ya!Learn something new
everyday!

With love,
Elder Bristol