Arise from the dust, my sons, and be men: Sharon

Man this week has been crazy. As the title of my letter states, pretty much every part of it links back to our investigator Sharon. I mentioned her in my past letters and promised her story this week. Given that its super long and heavy at parts, I will tell the abridged version.

So first off, I must say that This girl has had a crazy amount of opposition to her baptism. Acording to Elder Mendenhall, this has been his baptism with the greatest amount of opposition he has seen yet. After it all was over, I went through and counted 20 different "coincidences" or problems that arose to oppose her entering into the path of exaltation.

We first met her through Sonia (haha as always. Love that woman). Sonia had been tutoring her for years and, one day after we had visited, started talking about the gospel with her. Well she ended up commiting her to baptism that day and setting a date for it. Can I just say that Sonia is incredible.

As we began to teach her, she was super receptive, understood everything, and even asked deep questions to help her understand everything. She was the picture perfect golden investigator.

Thats when Satan opened up his wrench shop (sharon is the reason I made up that analogy a couple weeks ago). I will just list a couple of challenges that came up.

!) her dad got sent to jail for the next 15 years for some bad things he had done to his children, leaving Sharon to testify against him in court

2) her grandparents turned against her and blamed her for puting their son/son in law in prison. They accused her of lying and stirred up a ton of contention.

3)When Elder Mendenhall first got to this area he began teaching a girl named Camilla. The day before her baptism, Camillas mom read some antimormon lies on the internet, decided to become an antimormon, and ended up calling the entire baptism off. Well, guess who is Sharons cousin and aunt. La tia (the aunt) began telling Laticia (sharons mom) and Sharon all these crazy untrue things about the church. Sharon started to avoid us, untill we were able to sit down, have a charla (lesson/chat) with her, and dispel all of her doubts.

4) her mom kept changing her mind about weather or not she should be baptised

Yah. There is a lot more that happened, but I dont want to go into all of it here. It is sufficient to say that 16 more similar things came up to stop things from happening. The week of our final attempt with her before either her baptism or us dropping her, she had decided she wanted to postpone her baptism again because of another huge thing that went down. She was super upset and we didnt know what to do to help her. Thursday night (2 days before the scheduled baptism) we had a super spiritual charla, found her final fear (that her mom wasnt going to support her), resolved it, and this past saturday, she entered the waters dressed in white.

I had the opportunity to confirm her the following day in sacrament meeting. That was a super special experience that I will never forget.

I also had with her and Laticia a charla in which I had never felt the spirt prompt me so strongly. I was able to promise them things I knew were true. That was cool

Thanks guys for everything, hope you have a great week,

Elder Eliason