Ben's Homecoming Talk:
Good
morning Brothers and Sisters! How good it is to be with you in the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints! I am
grateful for this opportunity to speak.
I pray that the Holy Ghost will carry the truth of my words unto your
hearts that we may be edified together.
I returned last Saturday from a
two-year mission in Minas Gerais Brazil.
In the week or so that I have been home, I have reflected on my whole
mission and which of the many things that I have learned I should share with
you today. As I wrote and re-wrote my
remarks, my gratitude for the daily blessings that I received was amplified. I
am so grateful to my Heavenly Father for the protection and love that He gave
me every single day of my mission. There
was not one day that passed that did not contain a personal reminder that God
lives and loves us all and that He is doing a great work here upon the
earth. Everyday of my mission, I saw His
hand at work. In the Doctrine and
Covenants, the Lord says, “Draw near unto me, and I will draw near unto you.” I
want to describe to you in this discourse three experiences that I had as a
missionary that show that as we selflessly serve others and preach the gospel
of Christ, we will draw unto God and see His face.
I was feeling really depressed the
Sunday that we found Selma and Giselle.
We had planned to have a baptism that Sunday, but instead, we had no
investigators at church. I was
heartbroken. And yet, my trainer simply
said to me “Elder Jacob, never, never, never, never, never, never, never,
never, never, never give up.” And so, we
went out seeking the elect and that is when we knocked on Selma’s door. She graciously let us in and we taught her the
1st lesson. We explained how
God is our loving Father in Heaven, how He always called prophets to guide his
children and how Christ paved the way for our salvation. We explained that His Church was again on the
earth in the perfect form that He intended and that she could know if this is
true through the Book of Mormon and personal prayer to God. She accepted our invitation for baptism. We left feeling happy and grateful for her
faith.
We visited her everyday, teaching
her more principles and explaining more and more about the gospel of
Christ. Every time we taught her and her
daughter Giselle, we felt that they were happier and more filled with the
Spirit. One time we passed by and Selma
told us that her sons were very angry at her for her decision to be
baptized. At this point, I started
sweating and getting worried because that usually meant that they wanted to
stop hearing our messages. But then
Selma told us that she had read in the Book of Mormon how these things would
happen and that she knew that it was true so she would continue her preparation
for baptism. She was baptized with
Giselle two weeks after our initial lesson.
As I left the waters of baptism and saw her smiling face, I felt a
greater love than I had before felt. I
felt in that moment that God loved Selma.
I was a vessel for that divine love that He wanted to share with His
daughter. I felt like Ammon who said,
“Yea, we have reason to praise Him forever, for He is the Most High God and has
loosed our brethren from the chains of hell!”
That is what awaits us as we accept
the call and become missionaries! We learn how much God loves His
children. We can feel that divine love
as we become instruments to bring salvation to the children of God. I testify that as we selflessly serve others
and preach the gospel, we will see the face of God more clearly and understand
more deeply His love for every single child on this earth.
Almost a year into my mission, I was
made Senior companion. I was serving in a city called Tres Coracoes, a city of
about 70,000 inhabitants. Our area was
the whole city and a few smaller neighbor cities. We worked hard – walking every where we went
and talking with as many people as we could.
My planners from Tres Coracoes are filled with hundreds of names of
people that we contacted as we preached the gospel. And yet, initially, our labors bore little
fruit. As I labored in this city, I
thought to myself often “How is it not possible that in this city of 70,000
there is not at least one person or one family who is willing to accept the
restored gospel of Christ?” And yet, day
after day we faced disappointment at almost every doorstep. I recall in particular one Sunday when, once
again, all of our investigators had fallen through. A whole week of hard work – and apparently
nothing to show for it! The temptation to despair came upon me. To explain what happened next, I will quote
from the email that I sent to my family that week. I wrote,
“We sang Now Let Us Rejoice
yesterday in Sacrament meeting (of course it was in Portuguese so I should say
we sang Alegres Cantemos) and while singing, I was getting really choked up.
There hadn´t been a lot of visible success this week and I was feeling down about
how I was doing when we started to sing and I remembered how W.W. Phelps, when
he wrote this hymn, wrote it just after a terrible mob had destroyed his
printing press and tried to steal a lot of important papers.” Even in that time
of despair, Phelps and the early saints found joy in the gospel.
As I
sang that wonderful hymn, I felt a tangible sensation of love from my Heavenly
Father. In that hard time, when my heart
was weary, the Lord blessed me with perspective and encouragement to keep
going. I continued my email, “I know the
Lord lives and this is His Church. I know it with all my soul. Many people may
talk about the blessings that come from serving a mission but I know that the
great blessing is to serve a mission - even when it is hard. I am very grateful
to be here serving.”
Being
a missionary is hard. It was never meant
to be easy nor do I believe that it ever will be easy. Yet as we heed the call to become
missionaries and face the challenges and disappointments in the mission field,
we will receive a measure of God’s grace even greater than our
difficulties. I testify that our
difficulties are the foundation for some of our greatest blessings. I know that our most important lessons are
learned as we faithfully endure the challenges that come upon us, always
looking to our Savior and Redeemer Jesus Christ. Even for Him, who did no sin, the way was
rough. Isaiah teaches, “…We did esteem
him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.”
Although Christ was afflicted for doing God’s will, we know that He
endured and because He endured, salvation was won for all of us. So as we selflessly serve others and preach
the gospel, we too will have moments of affliction and sorrow. But we will receive grace and divine help,
just like I did as I sang Now Let us Rejoice in Tres Coracoes.
My
final experience occurred at the end of my mission, when I was transferred to
my last area, right in the center of Belo Horizonte. On my second or third night in the area, my
companion took me to visit an investigator named Joao. When we got to his apartment, I was greeted
by a very large, bearded 30 something man in a dirty T-shirt. He introduced himself as Joao and we began
our visit. Joao had been through some
big problems and had lost a lot of the faith that he had once had. He had no desire to keep the
commandments. He told us outright that
he did not want to follow the gospel path.
Although he was reading the Book of Mormon, he had no faith in God. We struggled for fifteen minutes just trying
to get him to say a prayer. As we left
that night, I thought to myself – how will Joao progress in the gospel? It seems as if he has no desire to
change. But even though it looked like
Joao was hopeless, I felt a spirit of confidence inside of me. I remember feeling as if the Spirit whispered
to me that it all would work out.
What
happened afterwards has become one of the greatest miracles that I witnessed
while on my mission. We did not give up
on Joao and neither did the Lord. We
continued to pass by on Joao to see how he was doing. And everytime we visited, he was just about
the same. For three months he continued
to break the commandments, continued without prayer and showed little faith in
God. It wasn’t until my very last month
in the field that one day, Joao changed.
It was in early April. He came to
us and told us almost unexpectedly that he had decided to start doing what is
right and that he wanted to be baptized.
Out of the blue, he told us that he repented of what he had done wrong
and he wanted, in his own words, “to seek holiness.” We listened to him bear his testimony to us
about the veracity of the Church and the goodness of God. I remember looking into that round face, a
face that had been void of hope and happiness for so many months, and seeing
his smile and his pride at making the decision to follow Christ and be
baptized. Two weeks later, he was
baptized and confirmed and has already received the priesthood. A man that to the outside world appeared
without value or hope was transformed by the powerful grace of God.
This
is what awaits us as we enter the mission field. These kinds of miracles happen everyday. As
President Monson has said, “Ours is the privilege to be not spectators, but
participants on the stage of priesthood service!” We too can have the privilege to bring light
and salvation to those in need. How
marvelous is our calling!
A missionary message is not complete
without an invitation to act. To
conclude, I would like to share three simple invitations.
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1)
I invite us to consider and ponder the fact that we all have been called to be
missionaries.
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2)
I invite us to study Preach My Gospel regularly.
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3)
I invite us to invite more of our friends or relatives or even strangers to
come to Church and learn with us.
I
promise you that as we complete these invitations, we truly will draw unto God
and feel of His love for us.
God’s
work and God’s glory is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of
man. As missionaries, our work and our
glory is the same. I know that as we
selflessly serve others and preach the gospel, we will draw near unto God and
truly see His face. Before my mission, I
loved the sweet principle taught in the musical Les Miserables – “to love another
person is to see the face of God.” But
now, I know that as we truly love others enough to invite them to come unto
Christ, we will see the face of God and become one with Him.
