Heyo Family!!
What a week this has been! We got so close to standards again and I can honestly say we gave our all last week. We did everything within our control to reach standards and circumstances, such as our investigator getting hungover (we need to go over the WofW), and other investigators getting called into work last minute or a grandson getting terribly sick or sleeping through the alarm, prevented them from coming to church. But we were able to visit with them and things will work out right this week! We also had interviews with President Richardson, I look up to him a lot! It took me a little while to switch over from President Anderson to him since they are so different, but I really like President Richardson, he gave me a ton of tips on how to continue helping Elder Garrett, he said he was glad he was with me so we could get him sorted out this transfer so he can progress and not be depressed. It was a very awesome interview! I could talk about it for a long time, so i'll end it here and get to the miracles.
The biggest miracle we saw this week was while we were biking to our harvesting spot wednesday afternoon. We biked past this neighborhood and the Spirit prompted us very strongly to stop and harvest there. So we did and at first I didn't have much faith. The thoughts, "we're going to knock for an hour and not find anyone", "this neighborhood doesn't look too great", were going through my mind. That was the natural man speaking within me. Then the spiritual side spoke up and said, "of course you won't find anyone if you dont believe you will, change your attitude and believe that you will find someone." It was as if a light switched in my head and I recalled all of the many studies I've done about how faith precedes miracles and how for any miracle to occur you HAVE to have faith. So I shut down my natural man thoughts and truly believed that we would find someone in that harvesting time we had. I instantly became happier and more optimistic and knew that we were going to find elect souls, for God had led us to this spot, so there must be people that He was preparing. Within a few doors we found Brandon and he was partially elect, so I won't focus on him, but it increased my faith more that there were people in this neighborhood. We came to the point where we had time to knock one more door, half-way up the drive way to the house we were at, the Spirit again stopped us and without thinking I looked to the left and saw 4 doors down a house with a red car and the Spirit told us we needed to knock that door. We knocked it and found Terri and Joan. We said a prayer with them, got to know them and the Spirit told us to share the message of the PofS with them, so we did and they loved it! They wanted to be baptized again, even though they were Catholic, and wanted us to come back. I knew that that was why God had sent us to that neighborhood and If we hadn't have had the faith, we would've missed the spiritual prompting to knock on their door.
This past week I was studying in Alma and the stories of Ammon. He had prayed the God would pour out his spirit upon the Lamanites and soften their hearts so they would hear the message Ammon and his brethren had to share. At the end of their mission, Ammon looks back and marvels at the goodness of God, he states that God truly had poured His Spirit upon the land and prepared the Lamanites to hear the Gospel. That strengthened my faith that God will do the same if we pray with faith. As we saw from our miracle this week, God does prepare His children to receive His Gospel, that's why we must always heed to the promptings of the Spirit.
Elder Garrett is doing much better. We've found that work is the secret, just as it says in PMG, to overcome any problem. We've worked so hard this week, we didn't allow any time for Elder Garrett to be depressed or anxious. We've really been working at teaching and working in unity, we get along great, we just work and teach at much different levels. Sometimes it feels like 2 oxen pulling a wagon and one of the oxen decides to unhitch and get up in the wagon and let the other oxen pull the team. Its been exhausting, so last night I shared the scripture in Alma when he had just finished preaching to the Ammonihahites and they were about to throw him into prison, that's when Amulek speaks up and testifies and "the people were astonished" that there was 2 people testifying of the same thing. He stressed his concern that he was afraid he would start teaching and go off on a tangent that didn't pertain to the lesson, I told him if he listened to and followed the Spirit it wouldn't be possible to teach contrary to what needed to be taught. We read teaching with the spirit and teaching with your comp in unity in PMG and had a really good chat. We made plans to role-play how to switch of frequently and how to build off what the previous comp had said. I also gave him the talk, "the Atonement and the Journey of Mortality" by Elder Bednar and had him study it this morning, it seems to have helped a lot. (thanks Alyssa for sending me that talk:) I'm very thankful for this opportunity though, its taught me a lot and has helped me grow alot, I've seen the growth in Elder Garrett too. This week is going to be great and we will hit standards!
also random story: we've been driving to our area then biking to preserve miles. We started doing this on Wednesday and while biking Elder Garrett realized he hadn't pumped up his tires for 4 months (yes, he hasn't had to use his bike in 4 months) so he was going antagonizingly slow because he barely had any air and no offense he's a wee bit out of shape from not exercising, so we switched bikes and I rode his bike the rest of the day, what a ride that was! the tire finally gave out as we got back to the car as the stem valve snapped, thankfully the spokes didn't break or bend. So we learned our lesson to always check the tire pressure, kind of like the 10 virgins with the oil lamps and how 5 were prepared and 5 weren't, from now on we want to be apart of the prepared group:)
Well, I love you guys lots! Have a great week!
love,
Elder Spencer Bailey
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