10/28/13

Alright, first off I'll say that marijuana stinks, and it is all over the place!  You know youve walked into a sketchy neighborhood when you can smell marijuana just from being in the neighborhood.  And it's always awkward when you interrupt someone's drug exchange (happened twice this week). 

I guess I'll start off with a spiritual story.  This past week we met with an investigator, let's call her Betty, so we are teaching Betty and she's understanding and then out of nowhere she pulls out a Bible and starts Bible bashing, up to that point the lesson had gone really well, and I thought, "What the heck! Where did that Bible come from and how did it escalate to this!"  So I started praying before I started arguing (as we saw from the wal-mart bible bashing story, I may have a tendency to argue:)  As I prayed I heard in my head "Be the bold and testifying missionary".  So I stopped Betty and said "Now Betty we could argue all night, or I can just testify and tell you how it is." so I just bore my testimony and the spirit came so strong, I don't even remember what I said. I could feel the Spirit trying so hard to pierce her heart, but I felt the Spirit come right back to me, her heart was hardened.  Even though nothing changed in her countenance, I was affected.  I have never felt the Spirit so strong, it just reminded me that testimony is grown in the sharing of it.  There is power in being bold and testifying.

Also this week I went on an exchange with our DL Elder Comstock (also from Utah)  it was awesome!  I got to experience my first big rainstorm while biking!  Biking in southern florida is adventurous and it is as close to living on the edge that a missionary can get because the drivers here obey no traffic rules, not even stop lights.  Its crazy!  And after it rains you get thoroughly drenched and instead of 100% humidity it is 120% humidity.  One thing I found out is that my hair gets curly poofy when it gets extremely humid like this, so does Elder Comstocks, so we looked extremely weird, since we both had mini affros.  But that exchange really helped me, i was having difficulties with my comp and Elder Comstock really helped me out and things have been running much smoother since then.  He gave me the advice that I can only change myself, I can't change those around me.  So ive been working on that alot and that is what brought more success this weekend, like yesterday we had one of our investigators come to sacrament!  that's only happened once before and that investigator dropped us, so it was awesome to have this investigator show up!

This weekend Elder wood and I were in one of the sketchiest ghettos weve been through (this is where we interrupted the drug exchanges).  Saturday morning we were harvesting this area and came back to the car and there was a nail in the tire, I thought, "Great, we are stuck here in the ghetto, and i'll probably become one of those statistics of missionaries killed in action".  It was a dark thought but it ran through my head, then I remembered that we were missionaries so we would be safe:)  We jacked up the car and took off the bad tire, as we did so the jack buckled and the car slammed to the ground.  Now we were sitting ducks in the ghetto with a bunch of gangs hanging about.  So we called in the Creole elders that we lived with to have them come and bring their jack.  Eventually we figured out how to jack up the car and we put on our spare. only to find out that the spare was flat as well. Eventually we got it all squared away without being shot or kidnapped in the ghetto.

I'll finish off with this story, the other day we went to visit an investigator and her son answered the door.  I immediately liked the kid, he had braces on both ankles and was missing some fingers and he seemed like the nicest little kid.  he was in 4th grade and I was prompted to ask him is he liked reading.  He said he loved it and i was like, "Well, I've got a free book for you!" His eyes lit up and he smiled one of the greatest smiles ive seen.  That made my whole day.  I explained the Book of Mormon and asked him to read it and he said he would.  Hopefully the kid has a pretty good vocab and a good understanding of words:)

I lied I'll finish with this story.  We received one of the best surprises this week.  We were all sitting around talking after planning on Friday night and there was a knock on the door.  We all were scrambling to put shirts on so we didn't answer the door in our garments.  Then I answered the door and there was a papa johns pizza delivery man.  I was like, "What the heck? who ordered pizza?"  Then I looked at the receipt and saw my moms name on it:)  Best surprise ever!!! So thanks mom for being the best missionary mom in the world!!

Well I love all of you who are reading this letter!

Love, 

Elder Spencer Bailey

10/21/13

This week was pretty neat!  Fall is coming so it's been cooling down a lot, it was 85 degrees yesterday!  Fall doesn't even exist in Florida, neither does winter or spring, it's always summer.  We got 4 new investigators this week!! That's 4 more than the whole previous month!!  So things are finally starting to pick up!  We just hope that they will stay solid and be baptized and go into the Temple in the future.  So not a lot happened this week, except that Elder Oaks came!  He is very funny when he isnt in the Conference Center.  His whole talk talked about how we shouldnt wait to get married once we are home from our missions.  Here are a few of his quotes, "the missionaries come home from there mission, and doggonit they don't get married!  They "hang out!", Now if hanging out isnt a sin, its darn near close to being one!"  It was pretty funny.  He talked alot about what to do once we are home from our missions, so it won't really apply to me for 2 years.  But it was still a really good talk.  He also talked a lot about the Temple and how we will see the growth in this area once it is completed this Spring.  He challenged us to teach more about the Temple, since the Temple is the end goal, not just baptism.  "Baptism is just a step to get closer to salvation, the Temple is where we receive salvation" -Paraphrased from Elder Oaks

I also went on an exchange with one of the zone leaders, Elder Samuelian from Alpine Utah.  He knew Alyssa and I knew his sister who is serving in Tallahassee right now.  It was awesome!  he is a Spanish Elder so I got to use a lot of my Spanish.  Oh wait, I don't know any Spanish, so I didn't say a whole lot when we came to the Spanish homes.  But we came across a couple of Haitian homes and next thing I knew I was having conversations in Creole!  That was a blessing because that hasn't happened since, I'm still at the very basic level.  The gift of tongues is real!  Later we went to a Spanish ward correlation, apparently the gift of tongues only works in Creole for me:)  They also had mutual that night and all the youth were saying "Gigante!" which i think means giant.  So I was pretty popular that night, some kid thought I played for Miami Heat, then his friend was like, "There aren't any white guys on the Heat!"  Spanish kids are funny.

Also this week I've been able to use my knowledge of basketball in many ways.  I somehow taught a whole lesson and related it to basketball.  It worked, we were teaching these 2 teenagers who play bball.  I don't know exactly how it all worked but they understood the gospel and are more interested now!  They were just surprised that a white boy knew how to play basketball, that's when i told them to google Lone Peak Basketball, that'll show them a lot of white boys that know how to play ball.

Also ive been teaching kids how to play basketball, that's a great teaching opportunity.  We stop, if we have time, if we see kids playing street ball.  Then we show them how to properly shoot and how to dribble, since a lot of the time they are younger and don't know the fundamentals, then we teach them a little lesson! It's awesome!

Oh man, I had my first Haitian meal this last week.  I couldn't believe what we were fed, the thought ran threw my head that this couldn't happen in America.  But it does!  Like i said in a previous letter, Haitians live as if they are still in Haiti, that also means they still eat like they are in Haiti.  I don't know what we ate, it was tasty, I just know that there was a lot of different parts of different animals in this stew stuff that you put over Haitian rice.  And Haitians use every part of the animal, so all the bones were in it, all the fat, some hair (either it was animal hair or human hair, i don't know) It was interesting.  I think I heard the hostess say that she put in chicken, duck, goat, cow, and some other animal I didn't recognize.  And Haitians get really offended if there is anything left besides the bones.  So we had to suck the bone marrow out and eat all the fat, eww, i wont go into anymore detail.  But in the end it was still a pretty good meal:)

Also this week i've seen a lot of what prophets have foretold, that is the crumbling of the family unit.  Parents are very abusive here and most parents aren't even married.  The woes of serving in the ghetto.  It just breaks my heart to see this everyday, in Utah and growing up I hardly ever saw this.  But now I see it everyday.  So instead of moping about it and doing nothing, i've been studying the "Family: A Proclamation to the World", it has a ton of good stuff in it that I can share in lessons.  Also the Gospel of Jesus Christ is what blesses families. So ive been emphasizing that in the lessons to try to make them wake up and see how important family is.

well my time is up so I gotta go!

Much love from the ghetto:)

Elder Spencer Bailey

A family in Spencer's home ward has a missionary in the same mission (Elder Harral, left). His dentist (second on right) visited Florida last week and was able to hand-deliver these packages! 

10/14/13

Alright, to be honest I don't really remember what went on this week, it flew by!  So i'm sitting at the computer with my journal open trying to remember what happened.  It just hit me that I've been out here in Florida barely longer than I was in the MTC.  That seems like it was forever ago!  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention conference last week. Conference was awesome!!  It takes on a whole new meaning when you're on a mission.  They talked a ton about families and about member missionary work.  Here in the ghetto we see broken families at every door we go to.  Most couples are "co-habitating" which is an abominable practice.  And we see a lot of young single moms with multiple kids.  And the kids in almost all of these families are abused, you can tell if a kid is abused if they try to hide behind you or if they are trying so hard to get your attention.  It breaks my heart because as missionaries the only thing we can do is give them a picture of Jesus and give them a hi-five, we aren't allowed to play games with them or anything like that due to legal issues.  So what I got out of Conference is how me, as a missionary, can spread the message of the importance of whole families, meaning a mother and a father both in the home that are married.  People here don't understand why marriage is so important, so we've had a lot of marriage discussions.  I'm only 18! I don't know hardly anything about marriage except that it's a commandment, so that's what I tell people.  

Second thing from conference is member missionary work.  Elder Wood and I have been trying to visit a member every night and teach them the Restoration, then we leave pamphlets with them and commit them to hand them out to neighbors or co-workers and have them call us if they are interested.  We are trying to get the members to help out a lot more since before this conference, there wasn't a whole lot of support from the members, but now everyone is asking us how they can help, it's awesome!

This week Elder Wood and I gave 53 harvest blessings!  That's a lot of praying with random people!  One cool story happened that I remember of, we were harvesting this apt. building and not one person answered the door, wait nope one white person answered the door and slammed it as soon as he saw we were missionaries.  One thing I learned here, is that white people in Florida are very mean.  I know this is wrong, but every time a white person answers the door, I think " Ah man, Get ready to hear some inappropriate language and get the door slammed in your face"  and I also think, "Not again, why do they have to be white?"  I am practicing on getting these thoughts out of my head and thinking instead, "What can I say that will make this person want to be baptized?"  Sorry back to the story, so basically no one was answering the door.  So I turned to elder wood and said that we should go try somewhere else.  He said that we felt right about it earlier so why not try one more building?  So we trudged on and again not one person was answering their doors, then on the last door we were going to knock, this cool British woman answered the door.  She was very hesitant at first but after I said the prayer, she was just smiling, and said that we were an answer to her prayers, she just didn't recognize that until after the prayer.  So we committed her to baptism, but one problem is that she in in Miami until next week.  So hopefully she will remember the Spirit and when she comes back we can teach her and help her prepare for baptism. 

Also this week I was reading in the Book of Mormon mainly in 1 and 2 Nephi, and i realized it talks a lot about the gathering of the lost tribes of Israel and I realized that, that is going on right now.  With the surge of missionaries and with all the different countries we, missionaries,  are in, the gathering is going on right now!  I thought "How cool is that!  I am apart of the gathering of the lost tribes of Israel"  and it also talked about how the obedient will be blessed and saved and the unrighteous will be destroyed.  It just reminds me as a missionary to be exactly obedient and the blessings will follow.

Random fact of the day: People in Florida are short.  I don't know what it is but I fit in more in Utah, here Elder Wood (6'4) and I (6'6) kinda stick out since the avg height here is (5'5).  And everyone is afraid of us even though we are both tall and skinny!  It's kinda funny though seeing these ghetto guys who are really strong, yet short, tell us that they are afraid of us because we're tall.

Also the biggest accomplishment of the week was I learned how to tell jokes in Creole! They are more like riddles and hey aren't even funny but Haitians have a different sense of humor. For example one of them translated is "Little by little it fills the room" the answer is "lamp". they get the biggest kick out of them.  I don't get it.  I think they are laughing more at the fact that these 2 white guys are trying to speak Creole.  I dont know. 

And I decided to start doing highlights of the week since this email is really long and I dont have much time and I still have some stories, so I'll just make a bullet point list of the highlights.

-I saw 3 iguanas

-received the best packages from the best missionary mom:)

-received letters from my some of my best friends, shout-out to Carly Schiess, Nate Quist and Matt "swag" Pettit

-met my first bible-basher in wal-mart, and since he was talking to Elder Wood and I we both got kicked out since you can't proselyte in wal-mart (even though he started it and we were trying to end the conversation multiple times, and we weren't even proselyting:)

-ate at Chick-fil-a on multiple occasions. . . for free:)  (the benefits of being a missionary)

Well that's all for this week!  Hopefully i'll have more investigators next week so i can share some more missionary stories.  And this Saturday Elder Oaks is coming to speak with the missionaries!  (Take that Alyssa, who has the better mission now?)

Love,

Elder Bailey

10/7/13 | Coconut Creek, FL

This week flew by!  It was a pretty good week.  Although we still don't have any investigators, we are trying to build it up, so we harvest a lot and are still praying to find those who are ready.  Well a lot as happened this week.  First I accidentally got a super short haircut, I'm not familiar with the sized of hair razors, so a 5 sounded pretty good.  Turns out a 5 is really short, so my hair is extremely short now:)  Probably the shortest in my whole life(i'll send a pic later).  We also switched out our Chevy Malibu for a 2011 Toyota Corolla, the creole elders living with us got a 2014 Toyota Corolla!  It's really nice.  On Tuesday we had district training and the Mission President showed up.  We later did role-playing, and Elder Wood and I ended up being assigned to role-play with him, that was terrifying!  But he said we were doing good so that was a relief!  Later that day we went to one of our investigators and we caught her smoking weed, she was super high, so we said we would come by later.  The next lesson we taught was the Word of Wisdom:)  Hopefully she tries to stop her addiction.  

By the way I've never seen so many drugs, we see someone smoking weed everyday and see drug exchanges and such all over.  Those are the perks of serving in the ghetto I guess:)  But the people are very humble and very willing to listen.  They struggle with commitments though, so that's why we don't have many investigators. 

I went on an exchange with my old MTC comp, Elder Taylor on Thurs.  That was fun, but he's changed, in a different way.  He tries to talk like a black man from the ghetto and it just doesn't work since he's white and 5' 2.  He became kinda weird since the MTC.  But it was fun, I got to ride my bike for the first time, which was awesome!  All of his appointments fell through so we decided to Harvest. I offered a prayer and asked God to guide us and direct us to where we could find the elect.  As we started walking down this neighborhood that I had never been in, I felt like I was being gently tugged in the direction I needed to go.  After taking many turns and walking for a while I saw straight ahead of us some women unloading a car full of groceries.  I felt like that was what we were being guided to.  So we offered to help and unloaded the car and after talking for a minute we asked if we could say a prayer with them.  They accepted and while giving the prayer, my thoughts and what I said were coming straight from the Spirit, that has never happened to me before.  The ladies said that, that was what they had been looking for and they said it really put them at peace.  We invited them to be baptized and one accepted and then sent us to her daughters house down the street because she knew her daughter has been looking for a religion like this too.  

We went to the daughters home and she was very excited to see us and was very thankful for the prayer we offered.  She also accepted baptism and a return visit.  What a miracle day!  But that was all while I was on a transfer so I'm unable to follow up with them, but Elder Taylor said he will, so I'm very excited to hear what happens.

That was one of the most successful days I've ever had in the  mission field and I can't even follow-up on those people!  It's frustrating, so I thought maybe it was who I was with that made the difference.  Elder Taylor and I worked hard and it worked out.  Elder Wood is pretty layed back, we work but I know that we can work harder so I think that's one of the reasons why we don't have much success and why I had so much success with Elder Taylor in the hour I Harvested with him.

I can only try harder and keep working and I know the Lord will provide us with success.

Also this week, Elder and Sister Collins, in charge of housing, came by and gave us a new dresser.  Then he asked if the bed was long enough for me.  I told him it was a wee bit short:) thats an under exaggeration. He said that he will buy me an XL bed and whenever i'm transferred he will come pick it up and move it to my new place, so i'll have the bed the whole mission.  Super nice and kind of him, he says he does it for every tall missionary.  super nice!

Well i'm about out of time so I gotta go.  I love you guys! 

Love,

Elder Spencer Bailey

P.S. I am now able to invite Haitians to baptism in creole, it's a cool language!