Saturday morning. Aiza (our baptizee) texts at 7:30 and says that she can no longer be baptized.. she has gone home to the bukid. I KNOW this is not true so we rush over to her aunts house and find her sobbing her head off. She won't tell us anything or why she is crying or why she won't be baptized. We tried to ask if she was just scared, or nervous, couldn't get a word out of her. We stayed trying to figure it out for like 20 minutes, her crying into her hands the whole time, before we finally had to just go because we can hardly drag her bawling to the font. My feet were sooooo heavy walking out the door. We got home and quietly started studies, I read the words of like every comforting hymn in the hymnbook, and we start personal study and both just sit there silently crying. I KNEW that she was supposed to be baptized!! The spirit was telling me!! I had no idea how but I had not given up hope. We decided to go by her house again on our way to the church to see if anything had changed. Thats when she texts and says that now she has really gone to the bukid. So we just go out to work. First appointment we go to is a LA family with one active RM son, the second we get there the son goes "Your baptism isn't going through, huh?" and we were like "How did you know?" and he says "I went and told her not to be baptized. She is going home to the bukid and its too far to go to church so I told her to wait and find some other missionaries some other time." My mind is shouting YOU SAID WHAT and me and Sister Cinco look at each other and just leave and go right to her aunts house, she really has just left and we missed her by like 2 minutes, but there is a cousin there that is replacing her who knows how to get to her house so we get the cousin and head off into the bukid on a trike to find Aiza, BAPTISM OR BUST. On the way it starts raining like noah is on the earth again and a jeep drives by and splashes a wave of water onto my side of the trike and it completely soaked me and got in my mouth and the driver slows down to stop and i'm like DRIVE ON so we keep going and 40 minutes later we are walking out into a muddy rice field to her house. We see her, she was SO super surprised that we were there and her parents were like "Oh my gosh! What is a white person doing here!!" and we found out that she still wanted to be baptized but thought she couldn't and was too shy and scared to tell us, so she gets her stuff together, we sing hymns to her parents, trump back through the rice field, BAPTISM BACK ON. We get to the church 40 minutes later, 2 hours late for the baptism but thank goodness to filippino time no one cares and the elders who also had a baptism had waited. THEN as we're taking pictures President Lopez shows up with Sister Lopez to see our baptism. We take more pictures with them and then the baptism starts. It was a glorious baptism. Aiza was smiling sooooo big, sooooo happy to be baptized, almost as happy as me and sister cinco. We took her home to her aunts house after for her to stay the night and be confirmed at church in the morning. I gave her one of the skirts that mom sent in my last package because she doesn't have one and I didn't want her wearing jeans to her confirmation (Thanks mom!!!). Oh, we were also fasting this whole time. We got home that night SOOOOOO drained but SOOOO happy. After her confirmation we took her back to the bukid again. She most likely won't be able to come to church for a while, its farrrrr too expensive for them to make that trip weekly. But I know that even though she may not be able to be fully active right now it was such an important baptism. I love every baptism, but there was something special about this one, Heavenly Father really wanted her baptized and I felt so much the reality of opening the door of the celestial kingdom to one of his children.
I LOVE THIS WORK. I wish I could keep writing for forever but I'm all out of time!! Also sorry that this email is late, we are in Bacolod today for MLC and had to take the ceres bus into the city this morning. 6 hours with a vomiting girl next to us and the puke bag kept bouncing against sister cincos leg. Training tonight and tomorrow, soooooo excited. I ALSO SAW SISTER JUDD AND HAD LUNCH AT BOBS WITH HER BECAUSE HEAVENLY FATHER LOVES US SO MUCH. I love you all to death and I hope your week is amazing, I JUST LOVE YOU AND THIS WORK SO MUCH.
ALL my love, Sister Manwaring
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