Most people know I'm a convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Almost everyone, at one time or another, has asked me how I got involved with it after finding out that piece of information and a lot of people keep asking for my conversion story (missionaries and RMs more often than not but that's besides the point). Being asked the same questions over and over is getting annoying, so hopefully now this gets cleared up and everyone can stop bugging me about this.December of 2007: I got my first set of missionaries at the door. I was willing to take the tour of the building and eventually take the lessons, granted their schedules lined up with my work schedule at Dollar Tree. Unfortunately, no matter how many times we tried to set up a day to meet at the church, work got in the way. About two weeks into my working at Dollar Tree, the same set of missionaries that had come to my door came through my line and they were surprised it was me that was checking them out. I didn't really think too much of the fact that I kept seeing them.
January of 2008: I started school at Pierce. I managed to reconnect with people I went to high school with and because of one of them, I became friends with Bekah and started hanging out with Ashley. At the time, I didn't know they would eventually introduce me to the person who would actually get me to go to an LDS church on a Sunday.
May of 2008: Two weeks or so before my 19th birthday, Bekah and Ashley brought around their friend Andrew. I didn't think much of him at the time – he was just someone else to play cards with since that's all everyone in the group of people I hung out with at the time did. They brought him around one or two more times after that day but I still didn't pay that much attention to him.
October of 2008: Andrew was also attending Pierce now at this point. He hung out with me for a while after our last classes got out and before I went to work or before his first class in the morning since we were both on campus at about 7AM. We didn't really say much to each other then but slowly started talking more and more and mostly on MySpace.
January of 2009: Around this time, Andrew and I started spending a lot of time together when we could and if we weren't together, we were talking through text. Winter quarter of 2009 was when he and I started getting super close because of all the talking we were doing. At some point during the quarter, I found out he was Mormon. He didn't really say much about the church at the time, though.
April of 2009: The night before Easter Sunday, I was talking to Andrew when he asked me if I wanted to go to church with him the next day. My automatic response was to ask if he really wanted me to be there, to which he answered yes. I said I'd try to get there. I spent the next three to four hours trying to figure something out to wear while Andrew kept telling me to not stress out about it. What I couldn't get through his head was that, growing up for me, when you went to church you looked nice and you didn't wear a pair of jeans and a T-shirt into the chapel.
I kept going back every Sunday. At the beginning, it was just another way to hang out with Andrew. But as the Sundays kept passing and the more I was learning about the church and the gospel, the more things started making sense in my head. That spring, I was going through a bit of a rough patch with someone and with what we were going over in Sunday school, it fit exactly with what was going on at the time.
May of 2009: The Lake City Ward missionaries finally started talking to me at the end of the month. They hadn't approached me before the entire time I had been going up until that point. I took an immediate liking to Elder Cracroft (Elder Strange seemed pretty cool, too). They asked me a couple of questions and they soon found out that I wasn't a member of the church. Somewhere around that time, I decided I wanted to take the lessons.
June of 2009: When I finally got to start taking the lessons with the missionaries, it was somehow decided that I would be meeting Elder Cracroft and Elder Strange at the Castro household. Having the discussions at my house wouldn't have been a good idea since my family isn't too fond of the LDS church . I caught on with the information fairly fast and it felt familiar. I didn't have too many issues remembering the information they told me about and after one lesson, they even gave me a reading assignment (thank you, Cracroft). After the final lesson with them, I told them I was sure I was ready to be baptized.
On June 21st, I was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by Elder Cracroft. I was so excited to finally be an official member of the church. The water in the font was so cold that it was almost like a tolerable version of the Puget Sound walking into it since they had just filled it prior to it starting. Elder Cracroft was the lucky one of us walking into the font that day, in a way – he didn't have to go completely under the water. I froze walking out of that font and it took what felt like forever getting warm again. And I'm pretty sure all the shaking I was doing wasn't just from the cold water.
June 28th, I was officially confirmed a member of the LDS church by Elder Strange. There weren't too many other priesthood holders at the time that I was comfortable with, so having Elder Strange do it made sense. Even if I had had a choice of having a different priesthood holder do it at the time, I think I still would have chosen Elder Strange to do it. There was just something about having one of my missionaries doing it that I couldn't pass up.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
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