5/18/15 | MAYFIRE

Hey Family!!! 

This week was great!!  had zone training which went well, president showed up and enjoyed it a lot.  talked about creating a NEED to find and baptize the elect.  then trained on sacrifice and how when we have a need we will sacrifice to meet our need.  also practiced the new way to teach the Plan of Salvation, too complicated to explain over email, but its a very simple powerful way to teach the 
PoS.  

We were greatly compensated this week as we went out and had a NEED to find the elect.  It was hard at the beginning of the week to find, but God blessed us for our efforts at the end of the week. We had some key clutch plays that helped us succeed this week! 

 All week long we had been praying to find an elect family of 4 where the father was receptive and proactive in helping his family be baptized and that they would all be willing to accept baptism.  We had been knocking doors for hours all week with little to no success in finding the elect, but we didn't let that deter us from achieving our goal.  

On Thursday we prayed and felt prompted to go to a particular neighborhood. After knocking for hours and not finding anyone we felt prompted to keep going but try an area more south in the neighborhood. As we went down there we felt really good about it.  On about the 3rd door we knocked a teenage girl (Jackie) jumped out and started talking with us, then her dad came around the corner and told us to come inside so we didn't let the cold air out.  We talked with the family and immediately knew they were elect! After saying a prayer with them  they accepted church and baptism.  We visited with them yesterday night and taught the restoration with a member family who lives in the neighborhood (little side note, the family we brought was from Nicaragua and so was the wife (Caroline), we had no idea until during the lesson, they matched perfectly! I have a strong testimony of making sure you have the RIGHT member, not just a member) and after the lesson the father (Manuel) said, "I had no idea the apostles were killed off and the Church was lost, I learned so much today!" He hastily agreed to be baptized by the proper authority and was very PROACTIVE in helping his family accept too.  It was just what we had been praying for all week, such a huge miracle!! I know that as we expect a miracle, God will bless us with that miracle as long as we sacrifice for it and keep the faith.

I did a study this week about being creative in the work and creating a "play book."  In missionary work its very easy to be rote in our approaches.  When we're rote its hard to follow the spirit and satan starts picking up on our patterns.  If satan knows what we are going to do, he can go ahead and harden the hearts of the people against what we are about to say. On the flip side, when we "change the game" and follow the Spirit and mix up the questions we ask, the things we say, our testimony, etc. it allows the Spirit to go ahead and soften the hearts of the people so they will accept out message.  This is something I studied a long time ago, but we did a comp study on this and it all came back to memory. This week we've been working hard on making sure we "change the game" and open the "play book" so that the Spirit can be with us more.

Also Yolain, David and Queen and Victor all came to church, they'll be baptized on the 27th of May!!!  very cool Americanized Haitian family!

Random story: went and saw a less-active this past week.  Talked about the importance of Church and the sabbath day.  He stopped us there and said he was only baptized because of the missionaries and he didn't believe there was only 1 church and that we would be awfully surprised at the judgement day when ALL people will live with God again no matter the choices they made.  we listened politely till he ran out of breath, then bore a simple, powerful testimony of the Restoration. You can tell when someone has a hardened heart, this was one of those times, the Spirit bounced back at us, so we took that as our cue to leave.  On the way out we literally got attacked by these huge snakes, no joke!!  My comp stepped on one first, then all these snakes came out of no where and were running into our legs and going over our feet, thankfully they were just garden snakes, such a random experience! we named his house "the den of vipers".

Well thats about all that happened this week, love you all!!! have fun in Cancun mom and dad!

Love,

Elder Spencer Bailey