The Miracle of Conversion

Chrise and I are currently working with three very good investigators. Two of them we have been teaching for some time. They all have challenges. Two have addictions to alcohol or tobacco to overcome and one has a lot of opposition within her family. You also need to understand that we, Chrise and I, don’t claim to be the most powerful teachers to ever grace the mission field.

I’m going to talk first about a woman whom we’ve been teaching more a less since her daughter was baptized in December. As we taught her daughter the new member discussions, her mother would come and sit with us. She seemed to really like what we were teaching, but then we would not see her for a few weeks. Finally, we decided to make the visit explicitly to teach her. When we taught the Plan of Salvation, we sensed a wonderful change occurring. I felt inspired at the end of that discussion to show her the three-minute video which includes President Uchtdorf’s talk on who we really are and used the story of the Ugly Duckling. We could see this had really touched her and that she was accepting completely what we taught. She is a very intelligent and relatively wealthy woman and thinks and understands very deeply. Our biggest problem was getting her to come to Church. This was a problem because her oldest daughter, a strong Catholic, did everything in her power to dissuade her, but she believed and wanted to act upon those beliefs, so today for the first time she came to Church. We have a firm date to baptize her.

A few weeks ago a man his wife came to church. The members of our ward pointed us to him, saying that he was not a member. We met to have a discussion with him a few days later. At first, I thought that he was not going to be very interested, but I was wrong. There was a light in his eyes from the start and he readily accepted everything we were saying and embracing it. On our next discussion he talked about what we had talked about the time before and how he had meditated on it. We also discovered that he recently quit drinking and that he had had a problem for many years. That worried us and we have been praying that he will have the strength to continue. We have been teaching him for nearly a month and he has not fallen. Our hope is that in three weeks he will be ready to be baptized.

The third man we have been teaching since we arrived in this ward in October. He has a really bad smoking problem. We have talked to him many times and tried to fortify his faith. We even stopped teaching for a few weeks. Then suddenly there was a change very evident in his demeanor. He said that he was ready to move one. We have high hopes that he too will be baptized now.

What I have noted in each of these experiences is that the change has come because of our message and the Spirit that we carry. We are not selling them the Gospel of Jesus Christ and it is not us. We are only messengers and instruments in the hands of a loving Father in Heaven. We open our mouths and He does the rest.