Sunday, December 7, 2008

The Lord Will Put Us in the Right Place at the Right Time (Denver)

I’ll begin my story with a quote from my missionary journal for 31 May 1978:

A few days ago we were going to see a referral or something, and Haynes [my companion] said “The Spirit says to go see Grubbs.” Well, I couldn’t figure out why the Spirit would want us to do a dumb thing like that, but we went anyway.

As I had guessed they would, the Grubbs (an elderly couple that really weren’t interested) “flaked out” [a journal quote] on us. But while we were there a member drove by and said to go to his house for cake and ice cream, as it was his daughter’s birthday. This member family was as poor as dirt, but were salt of the earth types - and they happened to live just sort of kitty-corner from the Grubbs.

So we went to the family’s house, and the mother told us we needed to rush over to the VA hospital to give a man another blessing. This man had cancer, and we had given him a blessing previously, but they had isolated the cancer and were taking him into surgery again, so he wanted another blessing. So off we rushed to the VA hospital (without having eaten any cake and ice cream!) to visit with this man and give him the requested blessing, which we were glad to do.

After all of that, we were in the elevator and a man on the elevator with us said to my companion, “What’s that on your shirt?” We had been babysitting a pet bird for a part-member family we were teaching; Perky had pooped on my companion’s shoulder; neither of us had noticed it until now. So we started talking to this man (whose name was John), and he told us he had visited Temple Square. We asked him if he would like to learn more, and he replied, “Sure,” so we started to teach him. He attended Church and came to the investigators’ class, and during the course of the lesson, which I was teaching, he asked at what point one gets baptized - so I gave him a baptismal challenge right there in class. He replied, “Where’s the water?” - and was baptized the following Saturday, which happened to be the day after the priesthood revelation was announced.

Written by Bro. B. (Schaumburg Illinois Stake)

1 comment:

Bookslinger said...

You might be interested in my blog about giving out foreign language copies of the Book of Mormon, paired with an English copy, to immigrants.

Pairing a foreign language Book of Mormon with an English edition makes it into bilingual material, which seems to be very popular among the people I encounter.

My blog is called "Flooding the Earth with the Book of Mormon."

Most of my encounters have been in Indianapolis, but I have been in Cincinnati too.