When Your Best Friend Gets Baptized...

AAAaaaaah!  She's baptized!  I can't believe it.  It's so unreal.  And all this time I just want to tell you guys about it!  Yesterday I even said to Sister King, can I just call my mom and tell her that it happened!  The whole thing is so... unbelievably AWESOME.  Everything I ever dreamed it would be.  I'm just about to burst inside because I'm SO HAPPY! Anna is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  And her TESTIMONY is on FIRE.  That girl is AMAZING.  I'm so proud of her, and I'm SO aware of the fact, more than ever, that we don't even do anything as missionaries.  God does it all!  We just set baptismal dates and set up meetings and try our best to bring the Spirit, but the SPIRIT and GOD do the converting, NOT us.  I couldn't have made up all the miracles that happened to get Anna baptized.  There's just no way.  The baptism was so AWESOME, I could have sprouted wings Saturday night, and then after church on Sunday it felt like someone had pulled out the plug and a lot of stress sort of just left my body.  -- yeah anyways, we've gotten to meet with Anna a lot more lately and I've really gotten to know her these past two weeks.  We saw her EVERY DAY last week and she tells the funniest stories and we laugh a lot and she's just awesome, she's for sure a best friend forever kinda girl! :)  I love Anna!  

 

 

 

 

I feel like the baptism pretty much drowns out everything else that happened this last week... or the last month... or year maybe... yeah... it was pretty EPIC.  It's so true, that idea that if you work towards something and you have to sacrifice a lot to get it...and it takes forever... that once you finally have it, it's like SO much more PRICELESS and AWESOME.  That's how I feel about Anna's baptism.  This is just... awesome.

 

O.k. so favorite parts of this whole deal...

 

We were waiting for Anna to show up and I was super nervous... I felt like just pacing around the chapel.  I knelt instead and prayed really quick... then we practiced the piano and singing because we were going to sing for her baptism, which we did, wasn't too bad!  We sang 'I like to look for rainbows' in Polish.  Rockin' - so then Brat Dziubla shows up and I said out loud 'everything's going to be okay' and he goes 'yeah it is.' - he's so SOLID, he's like an extra grandpa/uncle/dad thing going on here in Kraków, Brat Dziubla is seriously the MAN.  I love that guy.  He made me just feel a lot calmer.  Then Anna shows up and you can tell that she's freaking out too.  Haha, I joked with Sister King (who is also a stresser) that we just got the three most stressing people together and tried to plan a baptism, what a hoot!  And all the time Michał, her fiance, was there and trying to calm her down, he's such a sweet guy. So then finally the talks were over and we were on to the actual baptism.  We had three investegators attend the baptism (SCORE!) and... okay well one is actually a girl we just met in the park, we're not actually meeting with her, but I think it's WAY cool that she showed up!  And so we go downstairs with all the girls and Brat Dziubla - but with out Anna... and I wanted Anna with us the whole time so was a bit worried... expecially because I didn't even know where the basin was - the pool I mean - so anyways, we get lead by Brat Dziubla and turns out that Anna's group didn't know where to go to get to the pool either and wandered around a bit and Elder Skolimowski made some joke about a 'Plan' on the wall that was actually an Evacuation Plan... oh boy... well maybe it lightened the mood for Anna... haha!  Then we get to the pool and have to take off our shoes and socks, except we're wearing tights and I didn't want to take off my tights infront of everyone so I just left them on.  They got super wet.  But I didn't care.  Then Anna gets dressed, in WHITE!  YEAH!  And gets in the pool which is really deep, and Tim Tudor-hart, a convert from England married to Agata, a polish woman, who are both AWESOME and MIRACLES for Anna, got dressed in white too... and they went into the pool and tried going to the other end of the pool to see if it was not so deep - turns out it was just the same on that side :) So they're like swimming around in their white outfits, it was quite comical, actually... Then Tim says his perfectly memorized prayer in POLISH to baptize Anna and down she goes and WHALLA!  She's baptized!  Woot! We go back up and she gives her TESTIMONY,

 

O.k. let me just preface this a little bit, so Anna doesn't like public speaking, she's fine at it, but for some reason it freaks her out.  She was a witness at her sister's wedding last year and had to read the scriptures from a little pulpit and she said she was shaking so bad and grabbing the pulpit so hard that she practically took it with her back to her seat :) haha...

 

O.k. now fast-forward back to the end of her baptism where she was to bear her testimony - she goes right up there and stands there for a good eight minutes bearing the most beautiful strong testimony I've ever heard!  And she thanked the members by name and even said something about Elder Walter and she just was BEAMING.  She said she knew the Book of Mormon was true and that God had TOLD her that.  She explained how she'd just come to realize that we have a living prophet, even though that'd been a problem before.  She talked about how God had just been so much in her life recently and answering her questions that she KNEW he loved her and specifically wanted HER in THIS church.  She even spoke to Michał from the pulpit and told him that he was 'next' :) haha!  And she read one of her favorite verses from the Bible about how Christ talks to the apostles while he's on the cross and asks them to take care of his mother, that they are his family and that they are all brothers and sisters.  She told about how she knew she was now really a 'SISTER' in this branch and of Christ and even though she'd felt it before, never in this way and never so fully.  I can't tell you how big the smile was on my face.  I couldn't stop smiling, it was probably the biggest smile I've ever smiled in my whole life.

 

Then Sunday as the Elders and men in our branch gathered around Anna and placed their hands on her head.  That was so SO cool.  I can't even tell you how cool.  And I was hoping that Brat Dziubla knew what to do when confirming someone, he nailed it.  And you could definitely feel the spirit and God speaking through that man.  I know that the Spirit is REAL, and I know that BAPTISM is real and it is SUPPOSED to happen.  I KNOW this church is true, now more than EVER!  I even know that I knew Anna before this life.  We had to have been friends before.  I am so grateful for the opportunity to get to know her and just be a small part of seeing this all happen.  It's a miracle.  Our lives are miracles.  Missions are miracles.

 

There's more I could say... but I need to do some other stuff, so... I'll write more next week!  :)

Pray for us to find new investegators this week!  And new baptismal dates!   ONWARD!  It's not over!

I love this!

Love,

Siostra Amber Allen