8/25/14 | "It's a great day to be alive"

Dear Family!

What an INCREDIBLE week!!!! My testimony has grown in the power of unity in a companionship. On Tuesday morning Elder D'Addabbo and I got into a little fight, but we resolved it and figured out how to get along for the next transfer and what we were each going to do to have more unity. Ever since then we have seen so many miracles in our area!

Our first set of miracles occurred Tuesday night. We created an "If, Then" statement that if we walked quickly and with purpose from door to door, then we would get 4 new investigators. As we did that, we saw so many miracles. The first one was when we found Christina. Her husband committed suicide a year ago, and she lost everything, so life has been pretty rough for her. We said a prayer with her and invited her to be baptized and she accepted. She went on to explain that her son had been baptized into our church many years ago and had since gone inactive. She also said that she used to have missionaries over all the time but wasn't interested in listening to the messages. Over the years though, she noticed that she has had 7 major tragic events and each time the Mormons have showed up. She said that it was no coincidence, and we testified that God had always sent us to help her. She was in the process of moving so we were able to help her many times this week move stuff to her storage unit and each time we shared a message with her. She came to Church yesterday and in Relief Society she bore her testimony about this Church and how it is the Church of Jesus Christ, she is amazing and so elect and she will be baptized this Sunday!

Heres a story of how our weekend went: the sisters that are in our ward and live in the same complex as us have had a huge cockroach problem, so they deep cleaned their apartment and accidentally mixed bleach and ammonia. But they didn't figure that out until yesterday, so they had been breathing it in for 3 days. And on top of that one of the sisters turned on a bug bomb as it was pointed at her face, so she inhaled all the poison. so we talked to them on Sunday and they said they had been throwing up all night and couldn't breathe and they wanted blessings, so we went over after church and walked through their apartment to get to their porch and it smelled so strong of bleach. so we gave them a blessing and had them evacuate their apartment and we opened up all their windows to let it air out, then we took them to our apartment and had them study in our room while we studied out on our porch.

we had them call the mission nurse and she flipped when she heard about what they had been cleaning with, and called Sister Richardson who came real quick and took them to the ER. then we got a call from the mission nurse telling us that we needed to rush to the ER too since we had been in the apartment too. so we start heading to the ER but then we get another call from Sis. Richardson telling us not to go because they said they couldn't do anything for the sisters. So we thought they were going to die! then she explained more that they could only give them some medication and have them breathe fresh air so we didn't need to go since it wasn't too severe. So our weekend was crazy!

The other miracle occurred not too long after we met Christina. We kept knocking doors in this neighborhood and met Lydia. She had just moved here from NYC and was living with her son and grand-kids. We said a prayer with her and invited her to be baptized and she said that she really needed to be baptized again. We have been able to meet with her this week and she came to Church yesterday and loved it! We taught her the message of the Restoration last night and Elder D'Addabbo and I have been really trying to teach with unity by switching off quickly. The Spirit was super strong because we taught with unity and she believed the message and will also be baptized this Sunday!

I also realized that it really does just take a seed of faith for miracles to occur. This week has been the best week this area has had in a long time and the best week Elder D'Addabbo and I have had as a companionship. We went out this week expecting to find miracles and we were so greatly blessed by God! I have been studying in Helaman and have studied the pride cycle and how to overcome pride. That has been one of my weaknesses on my mission is pride, so I've really been working on that and it's really helped the work progress and our unity increase as I've humbled myself.

Also we had new ward and stake boundaries last week, we got a big addition to our ward and we are now in charge of covering it all. We go all the way out to the ocean so our area doubled in size it goes out an extra 12 miles then what it used to be, so they gave us a loaner car to use until they figure out the mile situation since we can't really bike out there since there aren't any roads that you can bike on to get there.

wow, that's a long email, and I gotta go! I love you guys and have a great week!

Love,

Elder Spencer Bailey

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These pics are from a Sister Gifford in his ward. She loves having the missionaries over. She's a new convert and gets the new member lessons often. So Elder Bailey and Elder D'Addabbo see them a lot.

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