“Our Eight-Year-Old Missionary,” Ensign, Jan. 1993, 70–71
Our Eight-Year-Old Missionary
The wedding reception—and the people she’d met there—must have made quite an impression on eight-year-old Krista. As we traveled home from the evening’s events, she declared, “We should belong to that church. We should be like those people and be members of their church. That is the right church for us.”
A bit taken aback, my husband, Rod, responded, “Well, why don’t we discuss it over the weekend. Then Mom can make a phone call on Monday to see what we need to do.”
During the days that followed, Krista talked incessantly about joining that church. So on Monday, I made a phone call.
I knew that our friend, who had invited us and our daughters, Krista and Tracy, to his wedding reception, was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The woman he’d married was also a Latter-day Saint, as were most of the guests. So I began by looking up the Church in the phone book.
I dialed the number listed for the mission. A young man answered, and I asked him how my family and I could join his church. I laugh now as I recall how the phone went silent for a moment, then he haltingly requested that I repeat the question. I did, and then agreed to meet the missionaries.
After several discussions with the elders, we agreed to attend church. We woke up that Sunday morning to find Krista standing in the doorway of our kitchen with her arms folded and feet firmly planted against the frame, blocking our passage. She emphatically announced, “I want to be baptized today!”
We urged her to wait until we could all be baptized together. She reluctantly agreed, but then said: “I’ll give you just one more week.”
Three weeks after we started hearing the missionary discussions, our family was baptized. It’s been fourteen years, and we still look back on our baptism day as one of the best days of our lives.
We later learned that on the day of our Latter-day Saint friends’ wedding, the missionaries had held a mission-wide fast to find one golden family. We are grateful that a little child felt the Spirit that day and led us to the gospel.