A day I'll never forget

On Saturday I woke up, looked outside to see if it was going to rain and then thought, 
"This will  probably be a day I'll never forget."

It all started with Personal Study. In the Liahona for this month (or New Era, if you speak English) there was an article about "what if I don't experience a burning in my bossum?" I personally have never experienced that, so of course I was curious. That led me to read, "It's a miracle" by Elder Anderson. If you have not read that talk, read it, it's great. But it led me to think about how different each mission where we are is. Elder Anderson talked about the faith of the saints in Mozambique, and I thought of all of the marvelous miracles that my parents see daily. But then I also thought of friend in Japan, and Germany, who maybe have miracles that are smaller, but just as grand blessings.

I told Hermana Carias, "Hermana, we are so selfish! We have to see all the blessings and miracles that are here in this area!" 

and so we did.

We looked over the plan for the day, and realized that we had no one to visit in the morning. Hermana Carias suggested that we contacted a joven who is friends with a ward member. We called him up, and he said of course we could come over! So we called the ward member and headed over.

So we start talking with Gabriel who is 19 and SOO nice when his mom walks in. She is really nice too so we were chatting with them when his dad and little brother walk in the door. We were so happy because we were able to visit the entire family and bear a powerful testimony of the Restoration.

All before lunch!

We went to contact another reference who was so excited to see us and excitedly asked when we can come back again. She says her family used to go to our church and believes they were baptized (sadly, so common here). She stopped going when she was 6 or 7 but she has wonderful memories of the primary and now wants her daughter to go.

Well, we visted some other lovely folks, and finally went to Kristian's.

Remember Kristian? He's 16, and his mom didn't want to give permission for his baptism. Long story short, we got it, and after his interview on Thursday he was positively beaming! He is so amazing. We had gone to visit him the day before, and were talking about the Holy Ghost and what a blessing it would be in his life. When we finished he said,
 "Hermanas, I was at school today and I saw some of my friends that I've stopped hanging out with because they do things that I know God wouldn't like. They were trying to get me to drink coffee and hermanas I was so stressed and I didn't know what to do! So I thought I should say a prayer. So I said a prayer and I just felt this feeling that I was choosing the right and I just felt filled with the Holy Ghost like God was saying "Good job." I'm so excited to have that always!"

So we stopped by his house to go to the church. It was starting to rain so we ran straight in the house. We noticed he was in basketball shorts.
 "Hey man, what are you doing? Go change!"
 He looked at us, "Hermanas, I'm not going to get baptized."

.....What?!?!?!?!

He explained that his dad didn't approve of him being baptized (his dad, who he hasn't seen for 8 years because he lives in the states and has another wife and family over there and his only relationship that he has with him is that he sends him money once a month.) And thus started the most stressful 20 minutes of my life. I have always been firm in that I always want my investigators to make their own decisions, so not wanting to pressure him into being baptized, we just explained our point of views. 

In the simplest form, we explained that he just had to choose which was more important, his dad, and the money that he sent or God. Kristian was just stressed. His mom signed the permission, but they all go to the Evangelical church. He was just worried about everything. But he just wasn't worrying about the important things- like the fact that he knows that this church is true and wants so badly to follow Christ's example. He had made that choice, but in the last minute Satan was fighting.

Finally he looked at us, and said,
 "Let's go Hermanas. I'm getting baptized!" 
He looked stressed, and nervous, but as soon as he came out of the water there was a huge smile on his face. And even more when he received the Holy Ghost. He turned around to me with a huge smile and gave me 2 thumbs up. 

That night we went to a deviontional. Kristian was sitting in between 2 investigators when one asked (miracle number 273: she was walking past the church and just walked in. A member found her and told her to come to the baptism. So that's how we met Perla :) ) what he had to do to be baptized. He was so animated as he explained, "Well, the hermanas come to your house and they teach you everything and they tell you to pray but you have to pray with faith and then you can know if it's true and when I prayed....." and Hermana Carias and I just smiled and when we came home we laid on our beds and said, "man, we are SO blessed!"

That's it for this week! Love you lots! :)