Finally a letter! 2 of them!!!

I'm sorry to all of you who have asked why I hadn't been posting Kiley's messages anymore... the truth is, I hadn't received any! The first week that Kiley was in Texas, her letter didn't come through. :( We were all quite upset by it, but Dave and I had to laugh because that happened to both of our first letters too on our missions! So it was funny to see that it happened to Kiley too. :) Anyway, here are her two posts.

Letter from February 7, 2011

Dear Momma,

Hi MOM!!! I miss you! It was so hard saying goodbye to you at the airport the other day because I just wanted to keep on talking to you! It is hard to say goodbye! I love you so much and think you are the most amazing mother in the world! I don't know how I got to be so lucky!

Well Texas is great. I came into the freezing cold. My second day here it snowed 2 inches and we had to stay inside all morning to wait for it to melt. President Sagers orders. Luckily it was our planning day and the Lord blessed us by making it melt by the time we finished planning! Pretty dang awesome! It is starting to warm up but they say they think it will snow again on Wednesday! Sad. So I grabbed a warm shirt and sweater.

I guess you already know I am in Waco. Hahahahaha I laughed so hard when I found out that was where I was going. What are the odds that I go there my first transfer?! Seriously! I keep thinking about how many times Sister Denham told me about this place. I bet she was just happy as pie! Brett and Lindsay are great and we are actually going over there to eat tonight. I hear she is a great cook so I am excited! She comes out on exchanges with us and she is awesome. I really like her.

My companion is so great and I am so happy about it. She works hard and is so obedient, but she is also pretty chill. We have fun together. I was going to see if you could maybe send me a CD for V-Day. Its Mo-Tab Come Thou Fount. It is gospel music and I really want it! There is no place to buy Mormon music here and that makes me sad. They dont have a rule on music just as long as it is religious! Yay!

Well I got "Anti'd" for the first time yesterday! I feel like a real missionary now! We walked up to this very nice and cute looking old man. We offered to help him wash his car and he said no and was cracking jokes. I was like oh he is so nice maybe he is the elect...um no. Next thing I know he is telling us what a dangerous relgion we are members of and that we are in a whole "heap of trouble." I seriously said, "Oh dear," out loud. He went off and we didn't fight him as we went to leave he said, " Y'all read the real bible ya hear." We just said that we do believe in the Bible and that we were currently reading it and smiled and left. The thing is when they start being mean they don't make any sense! He told us that you didn't need to be baptized to be saved and asked us why we would think that. We just said that we follow Christ's example and that Christ was baptized. He said its nice if you get baptized, but not important. All you need to be saved is to believe in Jesus. I so wish it was that easy. But if it were that easy, what was the point of Christ Suffering for us? Why should he have been the only person in the whole world who needed to suffer? People have the weirdest logic. Why would Christ be baptized if it wasn't important?! Strangeness huh?

We have so many great things going though. We tracted into a girl yesterday named Stephanie. We taught her the whole first lesson on her porch and left her with a Book of Mormon. She said she was so excited to read it and we set up an appointment to come back next Sunday. I was so happy after that! It was an amazing feeling. We are also teaching a lady named Sandra. She has decided to get baptized on the 19th! We told her that her kids can also be baptized on that day and asked her if she would like us to teach them, and she said yes! I think they will all be baptized and I am so excited for them! They are such a great family and her kids love the gospel! They have so many great questions and they just soaked it all up. We were worried because you need to go to church 2 times before you can be baptized but Sandra hadn't been yet because she works Sundays. We needed her to come. Well it was stake conference so we knew she couldn't come to Sunday's meeting but they told us that Saturday night adult session counts as church. We prayed so hard she would be able to come and she did! It was a miracle! We were both so excited!

This is the "Transfer of Miracles" (Said like Austin Burtenshaw.) At least that is what I have named it and Sister Terry agrees. We are seeing so many miracles it just blows me away! It is amazing how the Lord provides a way for all things to happen. My teacher Brother Terry told us on our last night that Faith=Miracles. And it is so true. If we have faith that God can do it, it will happen. 1 Nephi 7:12 talks about that. And God can do all things in our lives if we just have faith! I love it! I know our Heavenly Father loves us and that as we strive to serve him in all ways He will bless us in ways we can't imagine. We can have such a great relationship with him if we just strive to have one. You should read 'Our Search for Happiness' it is amazing and Elder Ballard puts things so beautifully. He talks about communication with God and it is my favorite part. He says that God never closed the heavens, we did. My favorite line is: "How presumptious of man to tell God that He cannot communicate with his children!" How true that is!! God wants to communicate with us. We just need to pick up the reciever! As they say in the south, "God is Great." He really is! It is so sad to me when people say, "No thanks, I am happy in my religion." Because I just want to shake them and say, "What I have to say will make you so much happier than you can even imagine! Do you love your family? Do you want to be with them forever? I can show you how that's possible." I think I would get in trouble if I did that though so I restrain myself and just smile. I am so blessed to be with y'all forever! I can't even tell you how amazing it is! We are so so blessed!

I love you too much mommy and I miss you! I look at our family picture and just think man I have a great family and I miss them, but I know you will all still be there in 18 months and right now I need to help other families learn how they can be eternal t0o. I need to share my blessings with others and not selfishly keep them.

I love you TOOO much!! Stay safe! Keep me updated on life! I love letters; they are amazing. Oh that reminds me, send everything to:
Sister Bailey
1700 Breezy Dr. Apt # 289
Waco, TX 76712

I love Y'all!!! And as they say in the here in the south, "Have a blessed day!"

Love,
Sister Bailey

Letter from February 14, 2011

Dear Mom,

So life here is good. We have once again seen so many crazy miracles. Seriously, sometimes I just sit there and think, "Wow did that just happen?" One way cool story: We went to see one of our investigators Tamyra. She wasn't there so we went back later that day and there was this Mexican guy outside her house. We started talking to him and he said he didn't speak any English, just a very little bit. So Sister Terry starts saying, "Jesu Cristo y familia is muy muy importante." That is seriously a direct quote, and then she smiled. Haha it was so funny! I love her. Then she looks at me and says, "Do you have a Book of Mormon pass-along card?" I said, "Yeah but it's in english." She was like, "Whatever, just give it to him." So I pull out my last Book of Mormon pass-along card and flip it around to look at the words on the back and guess what.....IT WAS IN SPANISH! It was so crazy! I was like, "Uh this is spanish." Me and Sister Terry just looked at each other. We sat in the car for a few minutes just stunned and laughing. It was so crazy! That is awesome! Especially since I checked everyone of my pass along cards to make sure they weren't spanish! Miracles are awesome.

We met a guy named Bruce on Saturday. He walked up to the Elders in Walmart last Monday and asked for some scriptures. A direct quote from Bruce is, "I just wanted my daily bread." Well we went over Saturday to give him a Book of Mormon and we taught him the first lesson. We invited him to church and he was a little iffy. He said he had been to alot of churches and didn't like them. He felt like they were all fake. (Oh P.S., backround on Bruce-- he has had it pretty rough. Spent some time in jail for I think drug dealing, was into drugs, alcohol, not good stuff. He said that he was trying to turn his life around.) Ok, now back to my story. So we finally talked him into coming. He was nervous because he has tatoos on his arms he felt like people were going to be looking at them. We assured him that no one was there to judge him.

Well long story short, he came to church yesterday!! YEAH!! And he said he liked it. We will pump him for more details tomorrow when we teach him. But he told us that he is on 1 Nephi 22. That is awesome. We were pretty excited about it!

Sad news is Sandra--our investigator who was supposed to get baptized this week--has disappeared. I have no idea where she is. I am worried about her. I hope that everything is ok and that she and her kids are ok. We are sad. But it will be ok. We will find her and make sure she is good.

More sad news: Our investigator Tamyra was going to come to church yesterday. When we didn't see her we went outside to call her. She was bawling on the phone and said that her and her husband had gotten in a fight and he had beat her up. She didn't want anyone to see her face. We offered to come by and she said no. She didn't want us to see her but that she wanted us to come over on Tuesday. We wrote her a card and got some heart shaped candy and put them on her door step. I was heart-broken for her. I cannot even imagine somebody doing that. It is awful!

Well I am sorry to depress you, but the work really is good out here I promise! I love it here. The awesome thing is that sometimes we do get waves of sad and bad news. Yesterday while tracting, not one person wanted to talk to us. One person actually told us that there was a high population of Mormons in Utah and that we might be happier there! Me and Sister Terry laughed about that for a little bit afterwards. But after all that, after Satan tries his hardest to make us want to stop and we keep going forward, we see the greatest miracles. Like Bruce coming to church and reading, or that Spanish pass along card. Seriously that was crazy. But sometimes life is hard. Satan wants us to fail so he puts everything he can in our paths to make us stop. Sometimes we have such great things ahead of us that Satan will try even harder to make us stop. But if we push through all the hard we get the most amazing rewards!!

I have been reading this talk called the 4th missionary. I bet Dave and JaRelle have read it. It talks about the 4 different kinds of missionaries.The first 2 are super disobedient and they get nothing but sadness and regret. The 3 and 4 are super obedient and worthy, but the 3 still gets sadness and do you want to know why? Because his heart wasn't right. If we only do things because we have to and because we worry what other people will think, it benefits us absolutely nothing!! What a waste of time. The 4th one surrenders his whole heart to the Lord and because of that he is changed into a person far better than he ever could imagine. A quote is: "God creates a masterpiece. We ourselves can only make a smudge." I think this applies to everything in life not just missionary work. We should always be serving with our whole heart. That is what is so amazing about you mom. You serve with your whole heart. You don't do anything begrudgingly. You are the most amazing example of giving your heart to the Lord. I am so grateful to have you as my mom. I think that every day. How lucky I am to have the most amazing family in the world! I love you all so much! You are all wonderful. I will talk to you again next week and I hope you get this. Sorry, I dont know what happened last week. I sent it and I guess it didn't send. Oh well. Hopefully it works.

I love you mommy and miss you!

Love you always!

Love,

Sister Bailey

OH P.S. HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!!!!!!! I love you and also tell Aunt Nell thanks so much for the card and the gift card. They were so great and she is so sweet!! I Love you momma!