I thought I would spend some time in this letter describing someone I´ve been getting to know here. Her name is Hermana Clark. She often reminds me of another girl I used to know (I think her name may have been Ellis?). Like that other girl I used to know, Hermana Clark is learning to speak Spanish, but she calls it Castellano and pronounces ys and lls like sh/j as in Jean val Jean. In contrast to the Ellis girl (I´m almost sure that´s what her name was), Hna. Clark behaves rather strangely-- she approaches complete strangers in the street and starts conversations with them-- frequently inviting them to church or offering them pamphlets. Hna. Clark appears to be about 10 lbs skinnier than the other girl, perhaps because she spends all day walking and eats only a snack for dinner (you wouldn´t be hungry for dinner either if people fed you mountains of pasta or slices and slices of pizza or a stack of milanesa for lunch almost every day). One of the striking things about her is her interesting skill set-- she knows how to order pizza and icecream (occassionally) over the phone in Castellano, how to cook on a gas stove, how to make very busy people stop walking and listen to her, how to conjugate vos (the Argentine informal you), and how to scare off mangy growling street dogs by pretending to reach down and grab a rock (why the dogs don´t realize there are no rocks to throw is beyone me). Sometimes I think my new friend Hermana Clark IS that Ellis girl, but she can´t be. Hermana Clark always wears a skirt, is generally covered in dust from the knees down (from walking on dirt streets all day), more often than not has blisters on her heels, has a very dramatic farmers tan, and has strange tan lines on her feet from her shoe straps. Even so, the similarity is striking. But every time I´m almost convinced they are the same girl, I notice the missionary name tag: Hermana Clark. Definitely not the same girl. At least not quite.
This week Hermana Scott and I have been enjoying teaching our golden investigators Celeste and Mario. I almost don´t know what to do, it´s so easy. Every thing we teach them they accept with no problems, as if it´s incredibly obvious that our message is the truth. On Wednesday Celeste asked us, without being prompted, how the whole family could be baptized! We said she and Mario had to get married first and she was like "oh, ok." She talked to Mario and he´s all for it. He said something like "it´s about time, we have four kids and have been together 17 years, so why not?" Yesterday Celeste and Mario came to church with one of their daughters, Jasmín. We gave Celeste and Mario a copy of the Book of Mormon so they could use it during church. By the time we visited that afternoon, Celeste had read all the introduction about Joseph Smith and 3/8 witness pages in the front. (Mario had work on something, so he wasn´t there) We asked her if she thought that it was possible that Joseph Smith was a prophet and that the Book of Mormon was true. She said something like, "oh, it has to be true". Apparently as she read the Joseph Smith pamphlet we gave her and the first pages of the BoM, she felt strongly that it was true. Then she said something like "The United States is so blessed to have the truth. No wonder the church sends missionaries all over the world to preach the gospel-- everyone needs to hear this!" I couldn´t believe it! Why can´t everyone be like Celeste and Mario?
A more difficult, but incredibly important, experience this week was when our investigators Otilia and Luz (a mother and her 11 year old daughter) told us they didn´t want to be baptized on Saturday. Otilia started saying she wasn´t ready on Monday, but we kept coming and preparing great lessons to teach them and trying to be excited for their baptism. After all, you don´t have to know everything about the gospel or be perfectly sure to be baptized, right? I guess we put on a lot of pressure. Thursday night we organized a family night with our ward mission leader for Otilia and Luz, but they didn´t show up. We went to look for them and felt prompted together to tell them we loved them. We did that and talked to them for about half an hour. Otilia told us that in all the dozens of times she has come to church, she´s never felt anything. We talked about that, about what the Spirit is like and how important baptism is. We kept saying over and over how much we cared about them. I thought it went really well, but they didn´t come to the family night and were still not talking about being baptized. Finally on Friday, the day before the baptism, we went to talk to Otilia about the baptism. She said she wasn´t going to get baptized. We tried everything we could think of to say: we tried to explain that baptism is an act of faith and I piped in and explained the difference between spiritual and scientific knowledge and how she didn´t have to know the church was true, just have faith that it was. Otilia got really frustrated, understandably-- she said she just didn´t feel ready. She´s studied the Bible and other churches a lot and wants to be sure of what she´s doing before she makes a covenant like baptism. She said she agrees with all the things we teach, but doesn´t know enough yet to be baptized. She was worried because her son in law and daughter Nancy are members, but they don´t go to church and her son in law drinks and sometimes beats Nancy. If the church is true, she wanted to know, why does her son in law do that? She told us if she got baptized it would only be because we told her too, and she didn´t want that. She said she might get baptized some day, but she needs to know for sure, and right now all she can concentrate on is taking care of Luz and worrying about Nancy. Wow. Suddenly things sort of came together for me. I knew (or thought I knew. Maybe I was wrong) that Otilia would be blessed if she got baptized the next day, but at the same time it was really clear that for her to get baptized she would be sacrificing her integrity and her very righteous desire to be absolutely sure before making a covenant with God. I.E. if she did the right thing by being baptized, she would be giving up that beautiful part of herself that made her unique and good, which would be very wrong. What a paradox! On top of that, we had been focusing on baptism but neglecting her other very important needs--like having her family taken care of. We stopped insisting right then. We told her we were still her friends and that we would keep coming by to teach her and help her. We promised to fast for Nancy and visit Nancy and her husband to try to make the problem better. We told her we loved her and that whenever SHE felt ready, she could still get baptized. We felt at peace about that.
Lesson learned: Trying to baptize someone at all costs does not work. Period. If you don´t treat them with charity and try to make sure their other important needs are met, then you have forgotten the point of baptism. And if they don´t feel ready (more than just nerves not feeling ready), baptism isn´t good for them yet. It´s a life long covenant, not a box to be checked off. I imagine that I´m going to be a very different missionary because of this experience.
One last bit of news: we had 11 investigators in sacrament meeting on Sunday-- a record for me in the mission!
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