Saturday, October 3, 2009

1-800-Dial-a-Baptism: Blog of the Month

Elder Lee Jepsen serving in the Minnesota Minneapolis Mission's mother has one of the most interesting missionary blogs as she shares video clips and very interesting accounts of his mission which started in Denmark Copenhagen and now finishes up in this mission which also includes part of Canada.

Being a more mature member of the church he has some interesting insights and thoughts about his mission which he shares weekly with his family.  An exceptionally interesting post is 1-800-Dial-a-Baptism in which he reports:

This week I once again had the blessing of seeing my testimony grow. The Lord truly loves the people in this area the way that He prepares both them and us. We do our missionary work every week, but it was as if I this week in particular saw a clear relation in how the Lord blesses us when he finds our effort acceptable and the time is right. It could seem that perhaps we are doing something right. Now I just have to remember what that was and we can do it every week. But wait, if that doesn't happen I guess it wasn't us at all, but instead the Lord's hand at work. We just work here. ;-)

A woman phoned us up one day and said she wanted to be baptized... just like that... out of the blue. She had met with the elders four years ago and it had come to a halt for some reason.

Then she recently had a dream where she was reading in the Book of Mormon, and definitely read the word "Apocalypse" very clearly. Still in her dream, she reacted by saying out loud "I should have gotten baptized while I had the chance." This was at first particularly unsettling to her because she was reading "Apocalypse" as a synonym to "Armageddon," much more like an all encompassing version of our more recent and already horrifying September 11th.

I then proceeded to explain to her that the word itself actually simply meant "revealed," "uncovered," or even "morning of Divine light" and actually applies to all books of scripture, as the "Revelation of John" is also known as the "Apocalypse" and the word just got a bad rep because of the contents of that particular book. However, the word applied to her in the way that this was an uncovering of truth for her, a revelation to her from God mapping out a course of action for her to follow.

With that settled she was all for baptism. Well that is... she was all for baptism already when she called us, we just work here. Obviously there's a lot more to the story, but to shorten a long story we have planned for her baptism a month from now, on her birthday.
 Check out this blog if you want to see the maturity and insights of this fine man.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for linking to a refreshing and interesting approach to doing a mission blog. A lot of food for thought can be found here.