Hugs for Martha Bott

I was on vacation visiting my parents in Corpus Christi, Texas, 1977.  It was a hot, humid afternoon, so I decided to take a nap on my parents bed.  I reached behind me to grab a book from the bookcase headboard and I pulled out a pamphlet titled “Joseph Smith Testimony”.  I read it and said to myself, “This is the truth”.

I asked my Dad where he got it, and he said a couple of young boys gave it to him and he gave them some vegetables from his garden and a watermelon. When I got back to California, I literally dropped my suitcases in the hall and called a friend that I knew was a “Mormon”.  I said, “Kim, I want to join your church.  What do I have to do?”

Dead silence on the other end, and he said, “Well, you’ll have to take some lessons from the missionaries and then you can be baptized”.

I said, “Ok, but they will have to eat dinner with us first.”  Kim said he thought they would do that.

I have been fortunate to travel all around the world, always finding the nearest church, sometimes helping to get one going, packing the Book of Mormon in the language of the country we were going to live instead of clothes, and raising children along the way.

My youngest son was baptized in the Yellow Sea off the coast of S. Korea.  Later, my second son helped build a small baptismal font from cinder blocks on the roof of the building we met in.  My oldest son served a mission in Argentina.

I have just been called to be a Service Missionary for familysearch.org., got my name tag in the mail this morning.

Later, both my parents joined the church.  The point is, the 2 missionaries that left that pamphlet never knew the result of their tracking that day.  I am talking the ripple effect.  If you served a mission in the summer of 1977 in Corpus Christi, Texas, please let me say, “Thank you”.  By the way, I still have that pamphlet.