I am going to try to respond to all the emails
I got but I have a buttload to tell you all about what happened this past week.
First of all I am going to say that baptisms are so stressful!!! First of all I
don’t know how well I explained Laura´s story so I will give a brief overview.
Our relief society president and her husband
(ward mission leader) have a very inactive family. They used to be inactives
themselves until they went to the temple. Their son was the spouse of Laura and
he has been inactive for years. They weren’t married which is what missionaries
have been trying to change for the past 10 months or so. They got married
Friday so that she could be baptized on Saturday. My companion and I had
entrevistas with our Mission President so we couldn’t go to the wedding which
was sad, but it didn’t sound like they did that much anyway. Sad. Because she
has a relation to the church they have gone to activities and the ward knows
and loves her. The ward decided to throw her a party after the baptism which is
why we decided to have it later in the day (7:30...they don’t have dinner until
9 or 10 here!)
Now I am going to go into the stresses of a
baptism. First of all, from a misunderstanding on the part of the bishop, he
told us that in order to go to the dinner after they were saying you needed to
have an invitation, meaning that all of our investigators were going to feel
rejected by our ward. I was pretty upset about that and we talked to some other
people to figure out what was going on. All was well after we figured out the
bishop was completely wrong. We then asked the mission leader to find someone
to clean the font and fill it. Yeah, that didn’t happen like we thought it
would and we didn’t find that out until a half hour before the baptism was
supposed to stop. It was "cleaned" but not filled all the way and
only freezing cold water could come out fast enough to fill it the rest of the
way. We also had a scare about who was actually going to baptize her because
the person who was supposed to couldn’t. His wife is an "active"
member, but she doesn’t want him to do missionary work or to do a calling or
use his priesthood. We aren’t sure what her problem is, especially since they
just got married in January and it seems like she hates him. Anyway, not my
point. We found someone to baptize her at 7:30, but he didn’t have any clothes
so we had to call the Elders to bring theirs. They ran from their apartment,
but the person that was going to baptize her still wasn’t there. She had shown
up 15 minutes after her baptism was supposed to start and so we still needed to
take pictures and wait for the guy who was going to baptize her. It was all
ridiculous and we didn’t finish until 9:00, but it was wonderful to see how
happy she was. She even cried (and if you know anything about Argentinians that
is kind of a big deal to cry in public). She is also not a very emotionally
driven person so it was very special to see. (by that I mean that I don’t
usually see her mad, or sad, or overly happy). She had no idea about the dinner
so it was a wonderful surprise and they took pictures for us because after the
baptism we had to book-it back to our apartment to make it by curfew.
The next day (Sunday) she was confirmed and it
was great! I am so thankful that I could have been part of it all!!!! I love
you all.
Hermana Allen
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