Member Voices
Touched by the Spirit
Anthony Quasie had a life-changing experience while just a boy growing up in Cape Coast Ghana. His mother told him that when he was 5 years old, he witnessed a man, who was hired to help at his home, cut the neck of a chicken just enough for the chicken to run around in pain before dying. He remembers his mother saying that “I folded my arms and cried all day”, and when it came time to eat the chicken, it made him very sick. He grew up not liking it when people mistreated animals.
This tenderness of heart allowed Brother Quasie to be touched by the Spirit when he first heard about the Church. In 1986, when he was 16 years old, the Church was new in the Cape Coast area. One night, a friend invited him to see a movie in the town open market. It was a movie about Joseph Smith’s First Vision and the Book of Mormon. After watching the movie, he felt that it was true and wanted to learn more but wasn’t sure how to get more information. Then he met Elder and Sister Nelson from the United States. They taught him the gospel by having Anthony proselyte with them and after a week, they asked him if would like to be baptized. “I decided to be baptized without consulting my parents, who were Catholic. I took that decision independently”, he said.
In those days, baptisms in Cape Coast were done in the ocean. On 30 April 1986, Brother Quasie was baptized on the same beach that the first Ghanaian members had been baptized a few years earlier.
The day after his baptism, he wanted “to have an experience like Joseph Smith in the grove of trees, so I walked into a very deep thick forest”.
Initially he was scared, but he summoned the courage to kneel and pray. But he didn’t see anything. “I wasn’t sad, but I really wanted to know how to explain everything to my parents”, he said.
When he came home that evening, something happened that he would never forget.
“I was sleeping with four of my siblings and around 2 a.m. I had a dream. In that dream, the Savior visited with me, and he opened His arms to me. In the dream, I stood up and tried to embrace the Savior, but then I woke up and I was standing and trying to hug someone who wasn’t there.” He was so touched by this experience that he decided to share it with his parents.
When he joined the Church, he knew that it was true, and he wanted to bring his family to the Church. Now, after these many years, almost all of his family members have joined. Anthony’s conversion not only blessed his own family, but also the people he worked with in Kenya as a missionary, and the countless others he has served throughout his life.
A story of conversion as told to Elder and Sister Wursten.