JOY!

The most amazing thing happened to me last night. It had been a great Sunday. One sister in church bore her testimony about the missionaries that found her because they felt inspired to tract one more block after a whole afternoon of fruitless tracting. She talked about how those missionaries don't know that that one baptism became a family sealed in the temple and today her son was ordained a deacon. It was so touching, and I thought about my mission, now 18 years ago, and I wondered if any of the people I had taught were still active. After church I was talking to my sister, and told her the story of Sis. Barajas, and Cyndi told me about Sis. Tamietti from our home ward who spoke at church today about reuniting recently while on a trip to Utah with the missionaries who taught her twenty years ago. Again, I thought of Paraguay and wondered if I had been effective. You will not believe this, but later that night I received a phone call from an unknown number. A man asked if I had served in the Asunción, Paraguay mission in 1990. I said that I had, and he passed the phone to someone else who began speaking to me in Spanish. It was Vilma, a girl I had taught while in San Lorenzo. When I was transferred to Concepción she was scheduled to be baptized the following week. She told me about how she had been baptized and remained always faithful to the church, had served a mission to Argentina, had helped to translate the Book of Mormon into Guaraní. She came to the US for a visit, went to a dance, met a guy, and now she is married in the temple and lives in California. All these years she has remembered me. She said that she had looked for me many times on the internet, but all she had was my maiden name which is very common. Finally she found Pres. Russell's information on the internet and called him. I send him a Christmas card every year. He was able to tell her my married last name and my address, and with that she was able to find me on the internet. She thanked me for sharing the gospel with her, and I just sobbed I was so overcome with emotion. I went back and read my journal. I wrote about setting her baptism date, and then later I wrote about her showing up at church on a day when no one else had come. I wrote, "we were so discouraged, and then in walked Vilma, the golden investigator that we thought we had lost--JOY!" I remember teaching Vilma and thinking, wow, an investigator with real questions and concerns. I have thought about her all day today. You never know whose life you have influenced. I can't tell her enough what it means to me that she made such an effort just to say thank you, and let me know what she has done with her life. Like I wrote almost 18 years ago, JOY!

~C