Eades, Oakley P

Skip to the end of this email if you're only here for the funny stories. I promise it's worth it. But spiritual thought first. One night we were finding and just trying to talk to everyone we passed on the street. There was a woman walking in front of us who me and my companion both had a prompting to talk to. For some reason we both ignored the prompting, and we talked to another person who was passing us instead. She was not interested, and by that point we lost the woman in front of us. About 30 mins later I had a very clear prompting to go knock on the door of one of our old friends. This time I didn’t ignore it and we went to the house. No one answered. But we turned to leave, and boom, right in front of us was the woman from earlier. We went up to her and she told us that she has been searching for the true church. She has been going to all the different churches and none of them felt right to her. We told her we have a very special message about a boy named Joseph Smith ...

I'M TRAINING!!  Thursday was transfer day and so I got to spend the whole morning and afternoon at the mission home with the other trainers and trainees. My new companion is sister Peras from the Phillipines and I LOVE HER! She is so so sweet, loves pink, loves chocolate, and loves rocky road ice cream. So yes, we get along great haha. I also feel like I'm having to relearn the culture of the Philippines. This whole time I thought all Filipinos were awkward and quiet and so I became awkward and quiet because I thought that was the culture here. Lol it's not. My last companion was just awkward, which made everyone else awkward haha. Love her but people skills weren't quite her strongest trait. So it's been so refreshing to have a companion that can actually talk and be friendly with people! I was super scared to be training because I literally just got out of training myself! And it means I have to know how to teach all the lessons! I feel so unprepared and inadequat...

Transfers are this week which means I'm done with training! Time is flying by I can't believe it. I’ll keep this email short, not much happened this week. We started teaching a family of 6 kids and their names are Cristelle, Crystal, Criswell, Cris Laurence, Cris Leon, and the moms name is Kristina. Like bruh. Haha how am I ever supposed to remember who is who? Haha I found rice krispies at the store so I taught my companion what rice krispy treats are and we made them for some of our friends! …until our friends weren't home so we ate them instead. And as always, the gift of tongues is REAL! This week we had just finished a lesson with a husband and wife. After the lesson the guy started talking to me. He said a bunch of stuff I didn’t understand and so I looked over like I usually do to let my companion answer or translate for me. I looked over at her but she was in a conversation with the woman. So I was on my own to talk to this guy. I focused extra hard on what he was s...

I have 2 spiritual stories from this week, and both have to do with someone named John haha!  The first John is John Dave! Yesterday we extended a baptismal invitation to him! John Dave is 20 years old and his cousin just got baptized a couple weeks ago. We have only taught him like 2 times because of the typhoon and such, but he has been coming to church every week for the past month! In our lesson yesterday, he basically taught us. A few weeks before, our Sunday school lesson in church was the same as our lesson yesterday so he was so excited to learn it again and he had so much to say and so many questions. He was literally grinning ear to ear for our entire lesson. Then, we extended a baptismal invitation to him and he said “Yes! Yes, Sister! Yes!” with the biggest grin on his face. Second John is John Paul! This week we had one of the most spiritual lessons I've ever had. We found John Paul about a month ago, he is 58 years old and has been a Catholic all of his life. He alway...

Hi! Been a sec! Quick update from the past 3 weeks… -We had 7 friends come to church last week!  -Jay and Denielle got baptized last Saturday and it was such a good day!  -AND A TYPHOON! I have never seen so much rain in my life. On Wednesday, it was pouring all day. Every time we came home for meals I had to change my clothes because I was drenched. It kept raining all night long and the worst of it was on Thursday. We went out Thursday morning and it was so fun I was enjoying that storm way too much haha. At one point a car drove super fast by us and it sprayed us with water and literally drenched us. It was so funny. The weather kept getting worse so unfortunately we had to go back inside and stay in for the rest of the day.  A few streets away from us, where some members live, was the worst of the Typhoon. The water went to the second floor of their house and they had no way of getting out. Very scary. But luckily the rain finally stopped and the water went low enough...

The title says it all! Rocky road, buffet, and a baptism! How much better could this week get?  Our friend Khiro got baptized on saturday and it was such a happy day! He showed up 30 minutes late to his own baptism, but that's just Filipinos for ya. Everyone runs on Filipino time here. They are the most laid back, do things when they feel like it type of people. It's awesome. It was such a happy day, Khiros the best! One of our friends, Mary, is the cutest little old lady ever. She has a little fish shop on the side of the road and while she sits and waits for customers, she reads her Book of Mormon! We just barely started teaching her and she already loves the book of Mormon! We teach her at her fish shop and sometimes people will come up and try to buy fish while we are teaching and she gets so annoyed. One woman tried to buy fish during our lesson and Mary goes, “Weigh it yourself we're having a bible study!” The next time we went to teach her, she was sitting with her f...

Hi everyone! So many small miracles happened this week but I'll just share my favorites. We were walking to a lesson of one of our friends a couple days ago and we completely walked right past his house. We had walked for like an extra 10 minutes before either of us realized that we had walked wayyyy past this guys house! Once we realized, we turned around to go back. On our way back, we found a man sitting on the curb and so we started talking to him. He was drunk and crazy, but his friend came over and was SO interested in our message and we taught him and gave him a Book of Mormon! Then we kept walking to go to our actual appointment and we found ANOTHER guy on our way who we started talking to. He said he had seen us walk by every day and he had been waiting for us! He is very lonely and has lots of struggles and he loved the message we shared with him! If we hadn't “accidentally” walked past the house we were supposed to go to, we would have never found either of those men...