I used to drive this one man to a stake center where they played indoor soccer on Thursday nights. One night I hung around to watch for a minute. There was a guy who came and was just watching. He was hanging out alone in the corner all by himself. I walked up to him and asked why he was just watching. He said, because I don’t belong to this church.
I said, well, we can fix that! Why don’t you go ahead and play? I promised him that we wouldn’t tell anyone. He thought about it for a minute and then went in and played. After they finished playing, I sat with him and talked for a while.
He was pretty open to conversation but seemed to be afraid of something. I asked him if I could give him a ride to his house. It was January after all! After great hesitation and much angst he agreed.
I gave him that ride to his house where he lived in the basement. After I arrived I quickly found the source of his hesitation. His wife had a very strong and borderline abrasive attitude towards me and towards the church. She acted like he had betrayed her and that I was the problem. It was clear that he had been disobedient.
She had heard some bad things about our church and was adamant that they not have anything to do with the church or the people in it. She said she would not allow anyone in her house to badmouth the Catholic church. She looked at me and said, I suppose right now that means especially you. The spirit whispered to me to keep talking.
I said, fortunately, for you, I don’t badmouth any church and in our church we’re not supposed to badmouth other religions. We believe in letting people worship how, where or what they may.i even pulled up the article of faith to prove it.
Following promptings from the spirit I asked if she believed in the Bible. She said yes. I asked her which was more important to her, the Catholic church or the Bible. She hesitated for a long time and said that to her they were one and the same but in the end the Bible was the word of God. After quite a bit of internal deliberation she finally settled on this statement, the Bible, is the more important of the two. I told her that I agreed and that no one in our church was going to take her away from or teardown her belief in the Bible. I said that we would talk about ways to add to the truth she already knew.
She asked, don’t you guys have another Bible? What about that? I said that we believe in the same Bible she believes in and that we could teach her from her own Bible. I told her she was confusing the Bible with the Book of Mormon . She asked, what is the Book of Mormon? I love that question.
I testified about the love of God and the reality of revelation to all of his children as his way to bless them. I asked if it was important for a parent to show love to all of his children even if they are not all together. This touched her and she got a tear in her eye. She whispered yes. I taught her that God had prophets in America to do just that. He wanted to make sure that all of his children had his truth even if they were not in Israel.
I asked her what she felt right then in her heart. She said that she was bursting on the inside. I told her that what she was feeling was the spirit. I said that it was sent by God to testify of truth. I said, it means that the things I am saying are true. I let her know that this is how God guides us in his paths and that we can make right choices if we follow his spirit.
This was important to her for a reason I didn’t know. She and her husband had children back in Guatemala. They were staying with her mother while they came to the United States to earn money to provide for the family. They missed their children and had not been around them for way too long. It was the perfect thing for the spirit to prompt me to say.
I said that God uses prophets to reveal his teachings to his people no matter where in the world and this included her ancestors here in America many years ago. I said that they wrote those revelations down because the teachings from God were important to them. I said that the translation of these writings is what we call the Book of Mormon. I said that the Book of Mormon is direct teachings to her from her ancestors.
From that time forward she was open to hearing what I had to say. I felt prompted to remember what in our mission what we called the Didier discussion. It was taught to us in our mission by Elder Charles Didier of the Seventy. It’s a religious timeline that starts in the Garden of Eden and goes all the way down to today. It discusses prophets, apostasies, the church of Christ, the great apostasy and the restoration of the Gospel through Joseph Smith. It is an easy freeform, non-threatening way to teach someone who has no real exposure to the church. As I went over the material they both agreed with every point I made.
I used the Bible relying heavily on Ephesians to demonstrate the structure of the Church of Jesus Christ. The part that touched her was where it says that apostles and prophets will always be the structure of the church of Christ until we all come to a unity of the faith. That blew the wife away because she knew that there was absolutely no unity of the faith in the world today. She knew that Based on this there had to be apostles and prophets in the true church.
Reading this with her I said, if you’re trying to find the church of Jesus Christ, you need to find a church with the same structure. She said yes. Then i talked to them about the restoration of the modern-day church. I taught them more about the Book of Mormon and how important a knowledge of that book is to our salvation. This was a huge topic. The wife was fascinated by the thought of Jesus coming to America. All this time her husband was sitting over in the corner, smiling yet not saying a word. She clearly was the hurdle that had to be overcome.
Finally, I talked to her about the baptism of Jesus Christ and asked her if she had been baptized in that way. She said that she had not. I invited her to take the lessons with the missionaries, follow Jesus Christ and accept his baptism. She did not reject the idea out of hand. I read Moroni’s promise and testified to her. She sat quiet for some time and then carefully said that if she could pray and get an answer that the church was true, she would accept that baptism.
When she said this her husband glowed. It turns out that he had known about the church for years. He had family that were members of the church. He had wanted to become a member of the church but she would always stop the conversation before it ever got started. This is why he hung around soccer at the church. He knew that they played soccer at the church and was hoping for a miracle. He wanted someone do just what we did that night.
From that day forward everything progressed very quickly and three weeks later they were baptized. The biggest sticking point came on the day when the missionaries talked about the Word of Wisdom. After much discussion and prayer we walked out of there with three bags of coffee and a coffee maker.
On the day they were baptized she said that she was so happy to be home! She was thrilled when her husband was ordained a Priest in the Aaronic priesthood. He was happy to finally be following his heart and serving the Lord in his church. His position in Thursday night soccer was assured.
Shortly after their baptism they went back to Guatemala to take care of their family.
Her mother who had been taking care of their three children was sick. She could no longer provide the care they needed. I called the ward in Guatemala to let the bishop know they were coming. They welcomed them with much love in that ward. There they are active member of the church.
