#50
9:06 PMAugust 18, 2013
Dear all,
First, I want to relay an experience that has been going down for about two weeks.So we had this investigator. Her name was Izumi-san. When we met her, she was very anxious to learn about the church. She went to a Catholic Kindergarten, so she had studied the Bible before and was familiar with Jesus. When we started teaching her, she was SO receptive. She readily accepted that Joseph Smith saw God, and she was excited to read the Book of Mormon. (When she gets excited, she moves her head in circles like a bobble head and goes ''ehhhhhhhhhh???'')
The next two meetings with her just kept getting worse. The first of those was still, like, okay. But she was really struggling to understand the scriptures. She was scared of God. She thought that God sounded mean. She said that the God in the New Testament could not possibly be the same as the God in the Book of Mormon because the BOM God was too cruel. The following visit was just worse. I wanted to shoot myself forty times over the lesson went so poorly. She was there to fight. She was there to tell us that the Book of Mormon was not the word of God. It was not possibly written by a prophet. She said it could only have been written by cruel, evil men.
I used a great analogy of how God speaks to us sternly just as our parents might speak to us sternly sometimes. They love us so they give us correction. God has the right as our father to command us to do things and he tells us straight up how it is. She didn't really even listen. I don't know if she really listened to us at all.
She told us she would never join the church because of this book.
Well, though all I really wanted to do was just slap her silly and then leave forever, I was able to talk to her a little bit. We finally asked her to just come to church ONCE. If you don't like it, that's fine. It's your choice not to come back. But if you do then you can keep learning. But there's no way she'd given us a fair shot yet.
She didn't come to church.
We knew that this next lesson was our make it or break it lesson. I've never studied harder for someone that I did for Izumi-san. We took the entire morning and afternoon to prepare this lesson. And man, we prepared a good one. We had great scriptures connecting the New Testament and the Book of Mormon... we had great questions... we had great testimonies... we're super pretty (JK, that's a lie)... we had it all going for us.
But through this experience, I can guarantee you that us three AmeriCanadian gurlz have a whole lot stronger testimony of the Book of Mormon. I have no idea why Izumi-san chose to meet with us again. She wasn't going to change her mind. She was done. But she did. And that's because WE needed that experience. Olsen Shimai bore the strongest testimony I've ever heard her say ever - maybe even ANYONE say ever. We all grew in very specific and individual ways.
Love,
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