I’ve got big news. This will be my last full week to serve in my mission so I thought it would be appropriate to share my testimony that this mission I’ve been serving has been by far the most significant event of my life. I’ve never before had so many perspective changing occurrences. If we compared those first 19 years and these last 2 years of my life I feel like I have had more significant and defining moments in these last 2 years than in all of the other 19 years combined.
This week we had been looking for some people that some other missionaries had been teaching, that had moved into our area. The other missionaries had given us the reference to where the people had moved to but not the exact direction, so we went looking in vain, and unfortunately we didn’t find their house.
Then about 3 nights ago we were on our way home after a long day and a guy in a van pulled up next to us and tells us that he had been looking everywhere for us, and that his wife was deathly ill. He told us to get in so that we could go and give her a blessing. Normally it’s a bad idea to get in some random guys van but this time we saw the sincerity and fear he had in his eyes. So we got in and he took us to his house.
It was a little plywood 2 room house with banana trees in front, with a small light bulb hanging in front, illuminating the dirt porch, flickering with mosquitoes and moths that were dancing all about it. When we went inside and we found a moaning, sweating figure hunched in her hammock with a blue moist towel on her forehead. The man said that she had been sick for 2 months but only just that day had she fainted and the fever had progressed to the point where she couldn’t even sit up or speak. They had gone to the hospital but they couldn’t find a cause for the sickness. So the man had gotten real worried and figured if anyone could save his wife it was God. That was when he had decided to look for the missionaries. After searching for about 2 hours he found us walking to our house.
So for the blessing he asked his wife to sit up, but she couldn’t even manage to move her shoulder and she just kind of moaned. For the blessing my companion anointed her head with oil and from there I put my hands upon her head and gave her a blessing. I don’t remember all of the words but roughly I said that "...according to and through the faith and diligence that you and your family have in preparing for making higher covenants with God, He will strengthen your debilitated knees and raise you in this same night..."
After finishing the blessing we asked the man his name and found that they were the very people we had been looking for. We left them a chapter to read in the Book of Mormon and we made an appointment for the next day to see how things were going.
The next day when we arrived and the same lady that we had given the blessing to answered the door 100% healthy, almost as if she hadn’t been sick at all. We all sat down and we asked them how things went. They said that right after we had left they started reading the scriptures and praying. While the husband Enrique and the sister-in-law Daivis were reading, the wife Marley stood up with no evidence of having been sick at all.
Then that same night we taught them the doctrine of Christ and all 3 of them now have baptismal dates for the Sunday after I get home.
In the mission, stories like this aren’t out of the norm. But I realize that getting home things like this will never happen again with such a constant occurrence and so I’m so very grateful for my time here, to not just be sitting on the bleachers but to be actually participating in miracles. I know these things are true because in these 2 years of putting it to the test I haven’t seen any evidences of it not being true. Every time the gospel is put to the test it always delivers.
I love you all and I’ll see you in 10 days,
Elder Smith
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