Every now and then we get just a glimpse at how much of an impact our work will make in the future. This week I caught a glimpse.
Trial Of My Faith
Every week we work extremely hard as missionaries trying to help people grow their testimonies and personal relationships with Christ but the real “test” is on sunday. Sunday is the day of action where we depend on people to act in their faith and go to church, going to church is the biggest indication that someone will progress.
On this particular day we were expecting to have more people than I’ve ever had at church, but as usual, the morning of, things started falling apart. Mysterious appointments apeared out of nowhere, others weren’t waking up, and others just didn’t want to go. So here we are with no one wanting to go to church and basically a bunch of people lying in our face. We start walking dejectedly to the church, I can’t lie I was extremely mad and about at my limit…
You Tryna Fight?!
Right when I’m at the peak of disappointment, anguish and anger, we knocked on a door of a girl we had been teaching and out sprints a guy shouting and making very aggressive hand motions at us. I put my hands up and got ready to defend myself as this guy swarmed us throwing his arms in our face and shouting incoherent things. He then stopped right in front of my face about ready to start swinging, raising his arms still shouting, I braced waiting for the first touch to return my personal defense and then out of nowhere he seemed to recalculate and slowed down his flailing arms and calmed down. Shook our hands and we left.
After such a rough morning and then this guy I expected it to end even worse. Walking away and old woman sitting alone on her porch looked at us smiled and as if she was sending a message from God she says “Takes a lot of patience to deal with that how you did” and in that moment it was I realized the morning was a test from God, to see if we were ready for what happened next.
The idea quickly came to us that we should try one family who didn’t wake up one more time. So again we knock and shout to try and wake them up and just as we started walking away we heard a “who is it” I’ve never felt so happy as they told us they were getting ready quickly, the next thing I knew everyone starting waking up and confirming they were going and some even brought friends.
Long story short, and I’ll continue more in the next part we had more people at church than I’ve ever had on my mission so far and we had the best baptism so far as well. The baptism of Poliane.
Poliane
Every Missionaries dream is to find the people prepared by God. Poliane is one of those people.
Her story starts out one year ago when she recieved a book of Mormon from her then boyfriend. (The book of Mormon is a testament of Jesus Christ) and as she read she grew in her desire to learn more. This desire grew until the point where she accepted on a random night from her now fiancé a member of the church to take a look at the church building. It just so happened that as they were outside looking around another set of Elders were walking by and noticed them and asked if they could give a better tour, and have more missionaries explain more. They agreed seeing that she lived in our area sent the number of Poliane and set up our first lesson. Immediately we knew she was different than most, she had such astute questions and her ability to comprehend exceeded most. As we left invite after invite to read more and learn more, she soaked it all up like a sponge. We left an challenge for her to pray, about the truthfulness of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. She recounted that as she prayed sincerely asking God, a light flooded the room and formed and arrow on the wall pointing exactly at where she was praying, and she was filled with the feelings that Galatians mentions as the fruits of the spirit (5:22).
This sunday was her baptism, I’ve never had such an awesome experience on the mission helping people. Everything just fell into place. The spirit was so strong as she was baptized and her friends and family watched her make her commitment to Jesus.
What do I take from this experience. The power of the Savior to overcome all bad days and make the sun shine again.
Love ya’ll
-ELDER Gist