Hugs for Jenn L.

I am coming up on the third anniversary of my baptism. My older daughter and I joined the church on my birthday in 2009. My younger daughter just finished the lessons and is being interviewed by our bishop tomorrow (she somehow decided she needed to be 15 like her sister).

I lost my job in October 2008. I spent roughly 6 months adrift, depressed, lonely, angry. Suddenly, one day I realized I needed something more than resumes and the Internet to take up my attention, and I got it into my head somehow that I should learn about some world religions. I had absolutely no plan at that time to actually join a church, I just wanted to try and understand why they felt the way they did, etc. THAT VERY DAY, the most adorable pair of 19-year old boys showed up on my doorstep.

Now, I already knew a little bit about the Church as a result of being a fan of Orson Scott Card’s fiction and from joining his web forums. I had friends who had served missions in various distant lands. So I knew who they were when they appeared, and I knew that at a minimum, I wanted to offer them dinner. But they came on a day when I was feeling sick and the apartment was a mes, so I arranged for then to return the next week.

I spent the next month reading as instructed, wanting to throw Laban and Lemuel off the starboard bow for their stupidity, wanting to throw Lehi after them for not disciplining his idiot sons, fending off slings and arrows from my siblings and parents who thought I was an idiot for feeding strange boys instead of spending evenings at my parents’ house watching Blackhawks playoff hockey games, and still clinging to my belief that I had no intention of actually joining a church and that this was a purely academic exercise to keep my mind occupied. HAH! God clearly had other plans for me.

On Fathers Day 2009, the missionaries asked to talk with me briefly after church in addition to our normal weekly discussions and dinners. During that meeting, I knew that I was being a fool for pushing God away as I had been, and that I needed to be baptized. My daughter was not yet ready. The following Saturday was too soon, the second Saturday was the Fourth of July, the third Saturday was my birthday and my town’s summer festival. So I was going to push things off until the fourth Saturday, which would have been July 18. But then I clearly felt the Spirit tell me that I needed to do this on my birthday. And almost as soon as I acknowledged that prompting, I realized that the symbolism of doing so was absolutely perfect.

Members of our ward got together to watch fireworks at a park in my town, and while we were waiting for it to get dark enough, my older daughter asked me to get the attention of the missionaries and the Bishop. She told them that she would also like to be baptized. I asked her, mostly joking, if she wanted to wait for her birthday, which is 3 weeks after mine and also a Saturday that year. She said no, she wanted to enter the waters with me.

I have no idea where we would be without those young men helping us to find our path. I do know that my elder daughter would not be at BYU-Idaho right now. I’m fairly sure she’d be home working full-time, because there’s no way I could have afforded to send her to school otherwise. I would probably still be out of work – it was through Church contacts that I was able to network and find my current employer. Which means that we would probably be homeless and maybe living with my parents.