Something to ponder.

If I have no other experience than the one I had tonight, my mission will have been a success.  It taught me so much about myself and others.  What we can assume and what we can't.  Last Sunday a little family walked into the branch out of the blue.  No one I talked with knew them but we introduced ourselves, made an appointment and went to see them on Monday.  The father had been called away to a shearing job but mum and the kids were there and we made ourselves acquainted and set up an appointment for tonight.   Mum and kids came to church this morning and though she has little gospel knowledge and was overwhelmed by all that she heard this morning, she was very receptive.  I could tell she was feeling things that were important to her.

We met the elders at her home today and went in to teach the first lesson.  We exchanged small talk and kind of "slid" into a gospel discussion.  Somehow in the course of that discussion her life was revealed to almost total strangers who showed her some love.  She was raped repeatedly by four boys when she was a young girl and then they took an ax to her.  She crawled from the back yard to the front yard and "crawled into a green box to die".  She was found there and taken to a hospital but not before she "saw a light and felt at peace with the idea that she was going to die".  She did not understand it but when she told her father she wanted to go to church he just brushed her off.  She wanted to know what the light and peace was.  She still wants to know after all these years.  We showed her "Finding Faith in Christ".  There was total silence, even from the dog who had been quite rowdy.

We were trying to help her understand that a loving Heavenly Father cared about her but because her family lost everything including her father's life which he himself took due to drugs, it was pretty hard to explain.  She later married and had some children and then her husband was killed in an auto accident.  After that she found her "partner", the name they call a permanent relationship with no marriage here, John Heke.  He is the one who wanted to come to church. She has been a good girl and they want to change their lives.  I couldn't help but cry for her and the pain she is still in from those horrible experiences.

We walk down the street each day and see "people" but we don't know their stories.  Maybe if we did, we would be more inclined to be more kind.  That incidentally was what she said her "talent" was when asked in church today.  She is kind.  Should we be less?  Something we could ponder.