Elder Austin Smith: Needs of Investigators Come First!

This Week in the Utah Salt Lake City East Mission

We have an investigator named Brandon who we were about to stop teaching. Out first three lessons with him were great but after we taught him about the Word of Wisdom, thing began to fall apart. He told us he had been smoking since he was 10 and he didn't think he could do it. We gave him a blessing and promised to get him the stop smoking program.

However, from that day, he missed our appointments, stopped reading the scriptures, praying, and coming to church. Nevertheless, we wouldn't give up. We prayed mightily and repented of our own rush to get him baptized and not take of his personal needs enough. After we repented, we randomly went to his house and he was there! We had a great talk with him about all of his fears and hesitations and we asked him just to sit down with us in one week and hear the addiction program. He agreed and we made the appointment for exactly one week from then. 

During that week, we realized we needed back up. We worked with a ward mission leader to find someone who had great difficulty in smoking but also had succeeded and relied upon God to do it.

The next week we show up with our member and Brandon was there with his girlfriend (who we never knew existed). Our member friend told his life story to the both of them and Brandon was instantly ready to quit. He realized that if this man who struggled twice as long as him to quit could do it with God's help then he could too. We set up a rigorous but reasonable weening schedule, a date to STOP, and a date for him to be baptized. We then asked his girlfriend to be baptized and she said yes. She had actually been meeting with missionaries in another area but had stopped.

We saw the power of God manifest as we cared about our investigators as people, illustrated faith through diligence, and relied upon the strength of members in our area and we now have two people on date who we otherwise would have dropped or never met