Claudia

This week our friend Claudia got baptized.  She is really awesome, and her conversion story is pretty short, but very miraculous.

Claudia has always been religious, her mother (who was absolutely amazing, from what Claudia tells us about her) having raised her as such.  About two months before we met her, Claudia began to pray that the Lord would be with her always, and she continued to pray for that.  For a while did not really receive answers, but she kept praying.

Claudia works every day, Monday through Friday, from 8:00 in the morning until about 6:00 in the evening, when she gets on a bus and goes to classes (she is studying to get a degree in differential learning) and does not arrive home until almost 11:00 at night.  In other words, she is hardly ever home.  One day she got off of work and was waiting for the bus to go to class when she got a phone call saying that classes were cancelled that day, so she ended up at home when she normally would not have been.  That was the day we came tracting up her street.  She let us in immediately, recognizing that we were the answer she had been praying for.

She started coming to church right away, but we weren`t really sure how we were ever going to be able to give her all the teachings she needed if we could only see her once a week.  So the Lord reached out His hand and worked another miracle.  Claudia has had chronic back and hip pain for a while now, and recently she was given licensia (I do not know how to describe that in English) for her pain and has not been required to go in to work for the past two weeks!  So when she went on licensia, we started visiting her almost every day and at the end of the second week, she got baptized.

Claudia is totally awesome.  She has so much faith and accepted all the teachings and the commandments without even flinching.  When we taught her about tithing, she said that she already had a testimony of it because her mother had always paid a tithe to her church as she was growing up and that her family had always been blessed by that sacrifice.  She is married and has four kids, two adult daughters, one teenage son, and one son who is about eight.  We have not had the opportunity to teach her family much, but I know her example and her faithfulness to her covenants will bless them all and someday their time will come too.

We have been so greatly blessed this past month to have these three baptisms.  I know it is not because of anything I or my companion can do, but simply that the Lord provided a means for these prepared people to be able to learn about and accept the restored Gospel.  What a wonderful gift!

Anyway, that is Claudia´s story!  She totally rocks and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to get to know her.