Hugs for Izzy

I was 14 years old when my mother met the missionaries in the street as she was walking to her mother’s house. She felt sorry for them because she knew that people were often rude to them and shut doors in their face. She said they were welcome to come and talk to us and gave them our address. We were already committed Christians and attended the local Church of England church (I sang in the choir and served at the altar). My mother had already realized that something was missing from her spirituality though and we had attended other churches as she looked for it.

The missionaries came to our house. From the very start of the discussions, I felt that everything just made so much sense, I felt that I already knew and believed the things we were being taught. Each night as my mother came up to say goodnight to me she would sit on my bed and we would talk about the things we had learned and said over and over again “it just makes so much sense!”. The missionaries invited our family to attend church, but I had responsibilities in our previous church which I was unwilling to abandon. My family all went without me for the first couple of weeks.

At last, I was not on the rota to do anything special at my old church so I went with my family for the first time to the LDS church. I had prayed so hard that if this was the right church that I would know and feel it when I went. As soon as I entered the building I felt a warm sense of peace and I knew that I was “home”. They had a baptism that day after the normal three hour block and we stayed on for that. I remember in the weeks that followed that I walked around school in a daze unable to believe the wonderful things I’d found. I wanted to climb on the tower of the old school building and yell it to everyone.

The missionaries insisted on teaching us all together as a family although my father was a little reluctant. He read and prayed and came to church with us, but although we waited and waited for him, eventually me, my mother and two of my siblings (the third was too young at the time) were baptised without him. I was 15 by then.

I will turn 30 soon and in November I will have spent half my life in the church. My mother and my sisters and brother all stopped coming to church a few years after our baptism. I still hope and pray they will return, I ache to be sealed to them in the temple. I am now married for time and all eternity to another wonderful convert (and his conversion story is fabulous!) and we have two boys born in the covenant.