HE BAPTIZED ME! I haven’t seen him in… maybe 5 years???6? We couldn’t remember. But like, he didn’t *just teach & baptized me—b/c he was an ASL elder that rarely got transferred, he was one of the very, very few who stuck around & was there for this deep, deep, reconstruction of my entire existence & this painful & consistent sacrifice & loss.
The most intimate thing we could ask someone to do is get baptized. B/c when we ask that, we’re asking them to change almost everything— not just what they do, but even the way they think. It’s overcoming, relearning, and rewiring the only way of living you know of, leaving behind years of habits, traditions, & sometimes family & friends.
It can be severely overwhelming to gain a testimony– change is extremely scary when you have such a long history & contrast of life filled w/ decisions, plans, paths & dreams completely out of sorts w/ the Lord’s will. Thinking of everything you need to be doing better or stop doing altogether is exhausting in itself.
You have racing thoughts of fear of what this could mean for your life now & how unexpected & unknown & scary whatever the next steps are. All while still learning how all this stuff works. And he👆🏼 was the very, very few who was there for a lot of it.
Knowing that God is real & the gospel is true is another way of saying your life will never be the same. BUT— it. WILL. be. better. And yeah, we change. But when following God, it’s more of a blossoming into our real selves—who we were meant to be all along. & the incredible thing about it all, is starting a life of doing things you never thought you could do! Better paths w/ better blessings.
xoxAL
“anciently, sacrifice meant literally ‘to make something or someone holy.’ …Sacrifice is less about giving up—and more about giving TO the Lord”— Elder Budge