October 2015 General Conference

October 5^th, 2015

Dear Elder Bailey,

We hope you were able to enjoy General Conference this weekend.  Although we will miss the former Apostles, the newly sustained Apostles are wonderful, too.  I got to know Elder Rasband while on tour this summer.  He had been a missionary and later a Mission President in the New York, New York North area.  I got to ride on a bus with him giving us a tour guide of places in his mission.  He has some great stories that I think I may have shared with you already.  He is a powerful witness of the Savior and His gospel.  I am looking forward to getting to know the others, as well.

Just learned this about Elder Renlund, too.  He was once a Bishop in the Baltimore Stake in the 1980's.  This page is from the The History of Baltimore Stake:

Someone posted this beautiful picture of the progress on the Provo City Center Temple on Facebook.  I thought you might enjoy it.  Such a beautiful building and captured at a beautiful sunset.

President Allan Ostergar will be the new Temple President.  So, our newly called Stake President is Jim Blair, former Bishop of the 1st Ward.  He will be the one you'll report back to when you come home.

Last week was such a blur for me.  We spent time every day, but Wednesday, in Salt Lake City rehearsing music for Conference or performing at the Funeral of Elder Scott.  That was a lot of music to learn and memorize.  I don't really remember anything else that happened last week except teaching my drama classes at the elementary school.  It was a very focused week.

We are all well here.  Carolyn and Jake are successfully 

Hurricane brought shark to inland road during storm.

moved into their new house.  BYU won their home game on Friday night.  Little Isabelle lost her first tooth because of a bump into Emilie's knee.  Now she has a cute window in her smile.  Michael and Stacie got their sewer troubles fixed.  The Rock family's little Thomas is finally a walker!  (He was just holding' out on us!)  The leaves are beginning to change to Autumn colors, but not very quickly.  Your Uncle Bill in Charleston, SC is dealing with massive flooding that brought sharks to a road near their house and an alligator to their back yard.  They are safe, but wet.  Aren't hurricanes fun?

Hope you have a wonderful week!

Love, Mom

----From Elder Bailey:

This week has been good.  We found several over aged youth that said they want to be baptized, but either the parents want to baptize them and are not active or they have no parental support to make it to church enough to get baptized.  So that's where the Ward gets involved.  What we need to do is get people getting them to church, that's the easy part.  The hard part is getting appointments set and keeping them to it.  Setting up lessons is hard.  Nobody wants to have a specific return appointment, which makes our job go no where.

General Conference was really good.  Elder Anderson’s talk was about one of my friends that I played football with at Timpview.  He is on his mission in the Marshal Islands.  I thought that was cool and a touching story.

Happy 20th Birthday, Elder Bailey

Dear Elder Bailey,

Happy, Happy Birthday!  Hope you had a wonderful day.  Did you get the package we sent?  Are the pedals the right ones?  Do they work on your bike?  Matthew chose them and I ordered and sent away for them.  Hope they got to you by your actual birthday.  It was such a rush job, I think I forgot to wrap them in wrapping paper.  Please forgive me for not giving you a wrapped present to open.  

We stayed up last night watching the total eclipse of the moon.  Did you see it at all where you were?  It was unusual because it was a Harvest Moon (closest position to the earth, so it seemed larger than usual) and it was a Full Moon.  This is what we saw and we had to get down towards the lake to see it because of the mountains.  It looked hazy red because of the refracted light it continued to get through the earth's surface when earth blocked the sun.  It was called a Blood Moon by superstitious ancient peoples.  They thought it was an omen of strange and awful things shortly to happen.

Pretty cool, huh?

In a little while I will be going up to the Tabernacle to sing for Elder Richard G. Scott's funeral today.  He was such a fan of the choir.  He would come up to the choir loft after each session of Conference to shake hands and thank us for the beautiful music.  We loved him so much.  I think most of the choir will be in the loft today.

Should be an historic Conference this weekend with having three new Apostles being sustained in one meeting.  I don't think that has ever happened before.  Could be wrong. I understand that whenever Apostles are called on the same day, they have seniority by their age.  Interesting.

Michael got the walkways poured this week in his front yard.  Don't they look great?  Unfortunately, they may have tamped too hard on the pipes below the cement while they were pouring because it caused a flood in their basement.  Too bad.  Now they have to do some excavating to fix the leak.

Just an update about Elder Race Acheson:  He has had a rough time with pneumonia.  He even lost 15 pounds.  He seems to be doing better now.  He is not back to work yet, but the outlook is good.  He appreciates all of the prayers on his behalf.

Well, have a wonderful week.

Love, Mom

From Elder Bailey:

The new pedals are awesome and exactly what I wanted.  Thank you so much, Mom.  I saw you in the broadcast of the funeral and pointed you out to everyone that was there.  I’m sorry to hear about Race and hope he gets better.  We saw the moon last night and as we were riding home we met a lady and were talking to her about it.  Then she tried to argue with us about how we were wrong about thinking we were the only true church.  I’m the kind of person that can’t let them have the last word.  She was that way too.  I proved her wrong out of the Bible over and over and over,  but she just wouldn't drop it.  Afterwards my companion says to me "you were casting your pearls before swine" and I said "... I know."  But we had a couple miracles on Saturday where we found some people that are prepared to hear the message.  And a girl I helped reactivate got her mission call, but I haven't found out where she is going yet.