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Monday, December 30, 2013

12/30/13 | White Christmas (sort of), Back to the Ghetto, Hebrew Israelite's (yuck), and #bikingfordays

This week was fantastic! Skyping my family was the highlight:) Christmas was super weird though, it felt like we were opening presents on a nice summer day, we even roasted marshmallows at the Bishops house that night.  It was basically a Christmas in July party.  But there was a miracle that night, we had a white Christmas. kind of.  It rained all Christmas evening, and we figured that if it were 40 degrees cooler it would be snow, so we took it as a white Christmas:) 

Also there was  huge surprise on Christmas, I had just finished talking with my family and I was minding my own business eating a sandwich at the Bishops and the phone starts ringing.  We look at the area code and it says it's from Philly.  I thought, "Oh no, alyssa is calling me and that's not allowed in this mission."  I kept hearing "Be the exactly obedient missionary" and "100% obedient"  well those thought's didn't work, and then I thought, "What if this isn't even alyssa, what if it's a member that just moved from Philly?"  so after this internal struggle, I answered the phone, and I heard Alyssa's voice.  I said, "Alyssa, this is against my mission rules! I can't talk" She came back rather fast as if she had rehearsed this scene in her mind and said, "well my President said I can, so i'm going to talk to you!"  Well, I decided to obey her mission President, so in a sense I was still being obedient:)

This past week Elder Woodard and I have been biking A LOT! (hence the #bikingfordays in the title)  For example on Tuesday we biked for 10 hours straight , with a little lunch break and 1 lesson within that 10 hours, since our area is huge and Elder Wood used up all the miles on our car.  But biking is fun, so I didn't complain, for the most part:)   Biking makes it more adventurous since you never know when you might crash and get some awesome road rash, or get hit by a car, which happens frequently here, since Flo-rida's don't know how to drive.  so biking is awesome!!!

Last week we decided to go back to knocking in the ghetto, since the middle-class area we were knocking hasn't been delivering.  I love the ghetto!  Ever since we went back, success started to happen.  We found an awesome family of 5 kids ranging from ages 14-23.  We went back to teach them and it was going so well, until this Hebrew Israelite came out of nowhere and crashed the lesson.  (Hebrew Israelite's are crazy, they are racist against whites and absolutely hate Mormonism, and Mormon missionaries.) The guy was the kids dad, and when he saw that 2 white, Mormon missionaries were at his home, well to say the least, he flipped out.  So after getting chewed out, threatened and having our belief's bashed upon for 30 minutes, this other guy came out of no where and started fighting with the first guy. Elder Woodard and I took this as our que to get out of there.  After we left we just kind of laughed at the whole situation since it was ridiculous, and super unexpected. 

Since we have been biking so much we see a lot of people on the streets.  Elder Woodard and I committed to talk to EVERYONE we rode past.  So we did and the miracles started coming in.  In one night we got 3 referrals for the Spanish Elder's and 1 appt. for us.  The Lord blesses those who open their mouths.  We are teaching, or trying to teach, this guy named, lets say Tanner.  We saw tanner riding his bike past us and we hurried and stopped him and said a prayer with him right there, he was super receptive to the Spirit and wanted to be baptized and know more, unfortunately we found out later as we tried to visit with him that his dad is Hebrew Israelite.  Oh well, Tanner will receive the Gospel at some point:)  

Well, that's about all that happened this week, since we biked every where we didn't get to see a whole lot of people since our area is huge, but it was still a very good week and we have been blessed a lot this week. Oh yeah I just remembered.  The Creole missionaries who live with us were walking down the street the other night and this guy approached them and said that he was prompted to talk to the 2 guys in white shirts. So he did and he told them that he wanted to be baptized and he would do whatever was necessary to do it.  It's a blessing for us because he doesn't speak Creole so they had to hand him over to us:)   I believe in miracles!
Love,
Elder Spencer Bailey


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