Friday, November 17, 2017

11/14/17 | I love to see the Temple!

  Another great week in the paradise of Greeley!  We had a wonderful temple trip this morning, and it was incredible to be in the temple once more!  I love the temple with all my heart!  Every single time I am there, I feel peace, love, happiness, and joy!  It is absolutely incredible!
        This week honestly flew by, it’s weird to think I’m writing again...... there was so much that happened!  Don’t know how I’m going to include it all, but I’ll try!  I’ll start it off with our Zone Conference this past week.  We met it the Trilby church building across the Fort Collins Colorado Temple, and had an absolutely incredible meeting!  I think I loved it so much because it was a lot of the same trainings we received at MLC, so it was another inspiring meeting to be a part of!  President McMurray’s starting training was incredible, and it’s what he learned from a meeting President and Sister McMurray attended with a bunch of other mission presidents and their wives.  They had Elder Nelson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and a bunch of other members of the 70.  One thing that stood out to me that he shared was two things that will always protect us is 1. Read The Book Of Mormon every single day and 2. Follow the council of the modern day prophets and apostles.  Those two things are honestly the two key factors that we need to have for our testimonies, I know they can protect us!  It’s so awesome to know that we have modern day prophets who guide us through these rough times, and to have The Book Of Mormon to lean on to always have that spiritual nourishment every single day.  What a miracle!  Later in Presidents training, he mentioned how important it is to send a weekly report/letter to him each week.  He said he counted up how many missionaries had written him every single week for the past ten weeks, and he said there were 17 missionaries in our whole mission who had.  He recognized the ones from the Greeley Zone, it was Elder Michels, Sister Olsen, and me!  I honestly didn’t know that missionaries didn’t do that each week.... but President McMurray gave each of us these two nice fancy pens.  The little things pay off!  In this case we got nice pens...... but applying it to the Gospel is pretty much the same.  Little things like reading The Book Of Mormon and praying every single day brings forth blessings that may not be apparent immediately, but they do come!  Throughout the Zone Conference they had members from Walmart Pharmacy come and give flu shots to all the missionaries, or all the ones who weren’t scared to get them..... haha.  President McMurray told us before hand to consider the safety of little kids and old grandparents, so if we didn’t want to end up causing a death we would get a flu shot.  This was very persuasive for most of us!  After all the missionaries had gone, we finally went and got our shots with President McMurray, it was probably the funnest flu shot I’ve ever gotten!  We were all just joking around and having a good time!  The rest of the Zone Conference was a lot of training for using Facebook.  Elder Nally bore his departing testimony because he is leaving to Australia, and he did a great job, we’re totally going to miss him....... It was a really good inspiring meeting!  
        After Zone Conference, we started exchanges with the Sterling and with one of the Assistants Elder McFadden.  I went with Elder McFadden, and we were on foot the rest of the night.  We had dinner on UNC’s (University Of Northern Colorado) campus with a YSA Member, and we were able to speak with a ton of people on campus.  It was so fun to talk with people our own age!  We gave all of the referrals to the YSA sisters, so we hope they all pan out for them!  We had a good rest of the night and had a nice chilly night Tracting!  
        We had another good lesson with Nyssa this past week, and we finished reading 2 Nephi 31 about baptism, and we finished explaining to her importance of it.  We told her that she needs to make the decision and the commitment to progress, so if she isn’t sure and hasn’t kept commitments by the next lesson, we may have to stop visiting her as frequently.  It’s always sad to stop visiting Investigators, but sometimes it’s just not time for them to have the heart to change.  It may take time but hopefully someday those people will decide to come closer to Jesus Christ and follow Him.  We also weren’t able to get in contact with the people we have tracted into, but we are visiting them this week to set up a time to meet!  On the brighter side, we were able to teach Parker Bentz and his family, the referral we received last week.  We actually had our lesson cancel earlier in the week, but we invited them to attend a YSA baptism with us and they said they would love to!  They came an hour early for a lesson and we taught them the Restoration.  It was a very powerful lesson, and the kids loved it!  I can’t wait to see this family come back to activity!  Our ultimate goal with them is to get them to the temple to be sealed as a family!  It will be so amazing!  I love it when the Lord sends us elect people to teach, what a blessing!  
         Funny thing that happened after the YSA baptism.  The person who baptized the YSA girl forgot to pull the plug in the font, and you couldn’t reach it from the edge of the steps.  I volunteered to try and fix our problem, so I ended up taking a little dip up to the knees, but then it got jammed so I had to stick my whole arm in to reach and fix it.  Haha, that was an experience!  While everyone was congratulating the girl on being baptized, two missionaries were watching another take a quick dip to fix the problem!  Just another day in the mission field I guess! 
        Yesterday we had exchanges with Elder McFadden and Elder Reiswig in Windsor, and it was a pretty sweet exchange!  I went with Elder McFadden, and we put in the work!  We had a little crazy morning due to some issues picking up President McMurrays new car, but we were able to go Tracting for the rest of the evening until dinner.  Our goal was to tract 50 doors, and we did that!  But it was a little hard because the people in Windsor are a little hard to reach.  They aren’t to open to learning more about the church, but we put in the effort and we were able to hand out a few copies of The Book Of Mormon!  Later that night we had a long deep doctrinal lesson with a less active member, which was very long and interesting.  It was a pretty sweet exchange!  I love doing missionary work with Elder McFadden!  He’s super legit!
         I was reading in the first part of Ether, particularly Ether 3, and verse 9 really stood out to me, (this is when the brother of Jared see’s the finger of the Lord, then the Lord reveals Himself to him.)
9 And the Lord said unto him: Because of thy faith thou hast seen that I shall take upon me flesh and blood; and never has man come before me with such exceeding faith as thou hast; for were it not so ye could not have seen my finger. Sawest thou more than this?
         I love how great of Faith he had in order to first see the Lord’s finger, then to have such exceedingly great faith that the Lord couldn’t withhold showing Himself unto the Brother of Jared.  I hope and pray we are all striving to have a little bit of the faith that the brother of Jared exhibited to further our testimonies of our Savior Jesus Christ, I know that as we do so, by doing the little things such as praying and reading from The Book Of Mormon daily, we can be blessed beyond our comprehension!  I would encourage you all to watch President Uchtdorf’s Mormon Message “Shower Of Heavenly Blessings”.  Heavenly Father has blessings to give us, we just have to be ready to receive them.  I love you all so much, and I’m grateful for each and every one of you!  Hope you have a great week!  

Love
Elder Bailey 

Also thanks mom and dad + the fam, jenna and mike, and Grandma and grandpa for the birthday presents, can’t believe Im only going to be a teenager for one more night...... crazy stuff!  Haha love you guys!  :)
         
         
Pics:
1-3: temple trip!


 

No comments:

Post a Comment