This week was great. We have an investigator who finally accepted the challenge to be baptized. She has had a testimony since we first started meeting with her a couple weeks ago. She was having visits from missionaries beforehand for over a year, her twin having already been converted. Since the beginning, after we encouraged her toward baptism, I had a pretty good feeling that if we tried to press her again she'd shrink even further. At the same time, I figured if she still kept all of her commitments, kept feeling the Spirit so strongly, she would inevitably tell us one of these days, "Elders...I think I'm ready now." And so it was. This was quite miraculous. While we haven't been able to reach the full extent of our zone goals as far as baptisms go this month, we were still able to have a very successful month, and she told us just about the last day possible in which we could still set a date for October. I'm grateful for that.
I've been thinking this week on the message of the New Testament. We have just a bit of information on who our Savior was and what He did in His life. Really, what we have is a detailed account of Him healing blind people, cripples, the diseased, and the deaf. Of course, this is a very heartwarming story, but still I wondered, why is that the central emphasis of the story of Christ? Why is that Christianity's story? I realized it's because the whole point of the Gospel is that we can be healed. We're hammered with this doctrine that Christ can heal anything to make us remember that through His Atonement, He can fix us up too, be it physical, mental, or spiritual. Our belief system is one of becoming whole and shaking off the dust of a harsh life into purity and immortality. The Gospels are all one big metaphor for the Atonement. That helped me appreciate how central it is to my life -- the power that Christ has to take the hits and let us overcome our trials. I know that He has a plan for each of us, to make us whole.
Until next week, my friends!