Week 16 - Double Rainbows

Chatting with Brayden this week was great. Although it was a slower week it sounds like he's been able to learn a lot and he and Elder Phelan have been making good impressions on the wards that they cover. They seem to continue to have a great relationship and Brayden has a lot of respect for Elder Phelan.

I'll add some extra info into the email from some of the information we get in our weekly calls:

Hey Everyone, it's the first week of transfer three! So far it has been super cool. We did so much stuff it was pretty neat.

On Wednesday we traveled 2 hours (traffic) to Brisbane so that we could go to the temple and do baptisms for the deceased. It was so fun to go to the temple and be with my district. While we were there I was really able to feel the spirit and I felt like some of the people that we preformed the ordinances for accepted them after we finished taking pictures in front to the temple we were about to leave, when all of the new missionaries that just arrived that morning came. It was kinda funny to see how awkward they all were and how tired they were after the 15 hour flight. Butt it was weird to think that I was in their shoes like 3 months ago.

*Brayden said that as they were leaving the temple they got to see the Mystery Machine! Haha. Cool enough to be picture worthy. He also said that the 2 new Elders that joined their district are great. The one from Vanuatu is in his last transfer and the American is hilarious.

On Thursday we had to travel an hour to Brisbane for a leadership training for my companion. It was pretty cool to see all of the leadership and how amazing all of the other missionarys are. The training went on from 10am to about 4pm, but we got pizza so it was great! The biggest thing that I learned was how to show disappointment in a Christ-like way.

*Brayden mentioned that it's been nice to learn with Elder Phelan. Since this is his first time being a District Leader he's finding out his leadership style and figuring out how manage these other missionaries while keeping them motivated and happy to do the work. It's great that Brayden can get a glimpse into the different areas of leadership within a mission.

On Friday we didn't have a meal for that day, so we hit up the WML (ward mission leader (he is extremely rich)) for Tweed Ward and told him that our dinner canceled and we were going to be in the area for the afternoon and evening. So we went around and visited some members and families with un-baptized children. After that we went to this super fancy Italian restaurant. I got a spicy salami pizza, and it was so good.

*This gentleman from Tweed Ward is a successful businessman who loves to share his knowledge and has had the opportunity to be a guest speaker for the business program at BYU Hawaii so it's been awesome for Brayden to pick his brain and ask him questions. Such a great resource and also a great example for these Elders on what a Ward Mission Leader calling should look like. This guy is always willing to go out with them and make visits. It's awesome. Plus he lives right across from the ocean so it's a nice chance for Elder Beattie and Phelan to see the water.

On Saturday we went out with the WML for tweed again and visited with lots of people. After the visits we were able to teach the plan of salvation to two unbaptized boys. It was really cool to be able to do that with them. One of them asks alot of really good questions, which is awesome. Today we played some basketball and after we shredded up the court, one of the Elders RM friends was vacationing over here, so he took us out for lunch. It was at a burger place called uncles. After that we went to Tweed Heads and walked around one of the parks by the ocean and threw around an Australian football. It was really fun.

Last Tuesday, I was able to have a really cool experience. I was on an exchange with Elder Fesola'i and we were going to a little sit down place while we called a couple of people, when all of a sudden this man ran by without shoes on, crying. We thought that we should try to check up on him, but we made a call instead. After about 10 minuites we felt that we really needed to go and find him, so we set off on an adventure. We went down so many streets based off of the feelings that the Holy Ghost were telling us. We were eventually led back to our flat, which was a little discouraging, but we decided that we were going to go down this one road and if he wasn't there, we would stop. About 3 minuites walking down this path, there was a little gap and as we walked by it, I spotted him! I was shocked. We ended up talking to him about his situation and we comforted him with some McDonald's then dropped him off back at his flat. It turns out that he was from Belgium, and has had a very hard life.

That experience really testified me of the power of the Holy Ghost. He will lead us to where we need to be and can help us through our trials.

It reminds of a scripture in Luke 1:37:

37 For with God nothing shall be impossible.

I truly know that nothing is impossible with God, especially because we were able to find that man after a long time of looking for him. He helped us do the impossible.

Thanks for all of your prayers and support! I appreciate it.

Emoji of the week: 🤑

Slang of the week: Clobber (Clothes) ex. nice clobber (clothes), you got there.

Love you all ❤,

Elder Brayden Beattie

*I'll just finish this post with 2 quick pictures. Bowling from their P-day last week and some super strange apartments that look like they should be in some space show like The Jetsons cartoon.

Week 15 - Transfer 3

This week Elder Beattie told us about a cool pilot program his mission is participating in. Right now there are 2 different types of missionaries, proselyting and service. Service missionaries stay at home and serve in different capacities locally (temple service, local food banks, bishop store houses, things like that) while the proselyting missionaries serve as Elder Beattie is doing. Both super important.

His mission has it set up right now where the Mission President is in charge of both proselyting and service missionaries in his area instead of the Stake President directing the service missionaries. They are all put on the transfer board on transfer weeks so that the missionaries can see if there are service missionaries serving in the wards they are over. That way, they can reach out for help when needed, either to sit in on a discussion, help with a service project or whatever it is. They can help each other out. Super cool. 

Onto his email:

Howdy everyone, 

I hope y'all are doing fantastic over there. Down here has been pretty fantastic, Transfers are happening today which is great. I am staying here with the same companion, Elder Phelan, and the same flat members, and in our district we have the same sisters as last time. The only thing that changed was that we got 2 new elders in a small town called Lismore about an hour south of here, so we probably won't be seeing them all that often. 

But this past week has been pretty average, not much has happened. On Tuesday we had a district meeting where we talked about how the areas are going, it was the last one of the transfer, so one of the sisters made the district some brownies, They were really good, not as good as moms though... not even close. Later in the day we made a Facebook post relating volleyball to life, it is pretty sweet, I recommend watching it and sending it to all of your friends. *The shares and views have surpassed the previous video and this one has a great shot of Elder Beattie getting smoked in the face with a volleyball. 

Wednesday was really busy, we had 2 services scheduled. The first one was for a guy named Monte and we did alot of digging gravel at his house. It was pretty hard, but it was fun. The second service that we did was helping someone move some of the things in their apartment to a storage unit. It was pretty easy. On Thursday we got our MSF (the money we get every 2 weeks) so we did an Emergencey Shopping, because we desperately needed dish soap and laundry detergent and later that night we did a deep clean because flat inspections were the next day. 

On Saturday we were supposed to have a normal day, we were about to get ready when one of the sister missionarys called us because she needed the keys to the chapel to fill up the Baptismal font. So we raced over to the chapel in a hurry, because it was 8.45 am, the font normally takes 3 hours to fill up and the baptism started at 11.00 am. We were on a time crunch. We got there, started to fill up the font and got a hose that could be attached to an outside tap (for extra water). When we started to turn on the outside tap, the top came right off and soaked me and Elder Phelan. So he tried to fix it for like 5 minuites. After that I saw that there was a peice on the ground, so I picked it up and put it on and it stopped. So we sat outside for a minute for us to dry off a bit before we got back in the car. The rest of the day was normal. Just visits and finding. 

Emoji of the day:🈲️ 

Slang of the day: Mossy (mosquito) 🦟 

TTYLXOX, Elder Beattie

Brayden did mention a couple of other things in his call worth mentioning. It was haircuts this weeks and an inactive member will give the missionaries haircuts for free so they went to take advantage of that deal. Sadly Elder Phelan became subject to an eyebrow accident and has had to resort to a bandaid to hide his unwanted, but sweet, eye brow slit.

Another adventure to share was they made it out to a dinner appointment early one day and so they drove a little bit down the road to a stream and got out of the car to explore a little bit. Elder Phelan lifted up a rock to find a startled tarantula jumping at them. After a little manly scream from Elder Phelan, Elder Beattie got his camera out for some pictures. He did say that he was watching the spider through his camera screen while recording and at one point the spider jumped and he lost visual totally freaking him out. He had to leap back and give a massive shutter making sure it wasn't jumping on him. Haha. Reminds me of the Philippines. 

I can't say that this was the most situtaionally aware position to put themselves in but it's a refreshingly normal activity for young men their age... right!?

Week 14 - Ocean and Snakes

你好 everyone. Its the last week of the transfer😬 It is flying by. This past week has been a pretty good one, alot of things happened that weren't normal to the regular week. I have learned lots this week. Some of the things that I have learned are: badminton is hard, making Facebook videos is harder then it sounds and the Mission Presedent is very kind. 

 Last Tuesday, we had a district meeting early in the morning at aroumd 8:30. It usually starts at 10am but this week had to be early because they were playing badminton in the gym during the regular time. Everyone was so tired and could barely function. There was a training that was done by some Sisters that was really good, it was on Hope. The biggest takeaway that I got from their training was that we can recieve blessings from hoping. Their training definitely made me want to have more hope in my life. 

After the District Meeting we played badminton at the church because there were alot of non-members there that we were able to talk to. One of the had alot of questions about the church, but she had to leave so we got her number and messaged her later in the day. Sadly she hasn't responded to our texts. After badminton was over we made a Facebook video relating basketball to life on earth and how having teammates like Jesus make it alot easier. It took alot more effort then it looks. After about aroumd 50 tries, we finally made a good video. It was worth it though. The video has gotten almost 2k views already.

On Thursday we did a service for the other Elders because they said that they needed help with it. It was really easy and took like an hour, it was just alot of weeding. After the service we got cleaned up and drove 40 minuites to have our interviews With the President. My interview went great. It turns out that he Is a super nice guy and his son is a rock climber as well. The son apparently climbs mountains so big that the rope isn't big enough for the wall. 🤯 

On Saturday, we went out and did some visits with the Ward mission leader from the Tweed Heads ward. It was really fun. He is very successful, so he took is to lunch at some fancy restaurant and I got some weird huge chicken burger thing. It was pretty cool. We went and visited some less active members and some members with some unbaptized kids. All of the people we visited were quite nice and all listened to the things we had to say. One of the old lady's that we visited gave us some chocolate cake. It was really good. 

Today (Monday for me), we did quite a bit of stuff. We first went to the chapel and called the family, which was awesome. After that we went to a place called the spit, which was like right on the ocean and we could see surfers Paradise 🏄‍♀️ It was beautiful. After that we went and checked out Chinatown, it was a little disappointing, but it was still cool to see all of the Chinese shops. After that we went to the bottom of the tallest building that there was to see if we could get in, but it costed $30 to get into the building. So we just took some pictures from the bottom. 

We finished the day at a dinner appointment and they had an albino Darwin carpet python. We got to hold it around our necks and it started to wrap itself around my neck and that literally freaked me out to death. I'll throw in a picture below. 

Anyway, that was the interesting parts of my week I hope your week was well. 

Emoji of the day:🏝 

Slang of the day: Eastwa: sweet. Ex) how are you doing? Eastwa 

Thanks for reading, Elder Brayden Beattie

Week 13 - Ocean Views

As you will read below, Elder Beattie claims to have had a super chill week but there are so many pictures that we can see they have been out and about. 

One thing not mentioned in the email is that the AP's drove out to the Gold Coast and were able to deliver some mail. The Beattie family does a calendar each year filled with fun pictures of everyone. Our 2022 calendar went to Australia with Brayden and after having him mention it was a sad day when the year ended and the calendar was done I was able to enlist the help of Aunt Meg (the maker of the calendars) and we were able to order him a 2023 calendar. Bonus, they have a printing office in Australia and so the shipping was reasonable and now he has loads of fun family pics to check out. 

Apparently the weather has started to cool down now that summer vacation is over and students are back in school. According to Elder Beattie instead of daily temperatures in the 30*C+ range it's settled now to high 20's for most days. 

The church members are still treating them really well and filling up their meal calendar so they've been getting great opportunities to connect with the families in their wards and get to know them. 

Also the wildlife views are still going strong. We didn't hear about any nasty spiders this week but huge lizards and last week there was a vibrant green frog that reminded me of the ones I'd find in my washing machine in the Philippines.

 

Getting into his weekly letter:

Hello everyone, 

This week was pretty chill, not much happened. We did a lot of finding this week and we did a service as a district, it was super fun. For the service we did some gardening and yard work for an older inactive lady who was super kind, she used to live in Chile and she made a nice meal. It was like a chicken and bean stew, it sounds kinda gross, but it was super good. 

Her daughter is also inactive amd she is kinda like a psychic 🔮, she read cards and depending on the cards that she chose had something to do with what the gods wanted to tell you, I think. For mine she was way off, I don't remember what she said, but I remember being like, what does that even mean... Anyway it was kinda funny. 

On Friday we did 5 hours of finding, and it happened to be the hottest day of the year so far. It was insane, I had a pretty alright sunburn and I was super dehydrated by the end of the day. We were able to find someone at the place we ate dinner right at the end of the day. That testified the truth of when President Nelson said "the Lord loves effort." 

We put in all that effort and were able to find someone on the last day. 

It was kinda cool Today I almost dunked a basketball on a 10 foot rim, I need just a couple of inches added onto my vertical jump. I'm so close! 🏀 

Sorry this email is short, I am pretty short on time. 

Emoji of the day:🏄‍♂️ 

Slang of the day: Slide - it is the same thing as drifting in a car, they just call it sliding. 

Peace out ✌️ 

Elder Brayden Beattie

One of the reasons Elder Beattie was so short on time was because he and Elder Phelan were going to take the other Elders to this sweet spot where you watch surfers on the ocean without being around the beach. They had gone the day before while visiting with a church member that lived across the street from the pier and wanted to be able to share it with the others. It looked like an amazing area. He really thought the surfers were fun to watch. Hopefully it was just as great when they took the other Elder companionship.

I have a few other fun pictures that were uploaded to share:

I'm not sure if this road sign was made for these Elders but if not, it should've been.

I'm also not sure what the count is for Wallaby's and Kangaroo's is now but this little one was cute:

Brayden also mentioned that his last companion seems to be doing well. They were able to spend some time catching up in the last week or two and things were good between them which is great to hear.