For Posterity-My Mother's Conversion Story

This is from my mom. It was recently published is something (can't remember what) so I think I am alright to add this now. I have actually had this story in my records for a while trying to figure out how to add this to my blog (which as I have said before...is basically my journal) with out embarrassing my mom but since it has been published, I think I am good. This story is very dear to my heart and I am so glad she has written it down for me.

When I was a small child we were members of the United Church of Canada. My mother had actually been Lutheran but changed when they got married to so that their family religion would be the same. Quite a few years after my mom & dad were married my mother’s family joined the church. Apparently my grandma was pretty anxious for her daughter and family to hear the gospel. My father was in the Canadian Navy so we always lived on the coast thousands of miles away but we would travel to their home every summer to visit. During one such visit my Grandma would hustle everyone through dinner and the missionaries would “show up to visit”. After her doing this for a couple nights in a row my parents got really annoyed with her. They had driven across the country to visit their family not the missionaries so the pop in visits were stopped. What no one realized was that my mother was actually very interested in their message but she too was annoyed at her mother for doing this and never!
said anything.

Years later we were living in Victoria, British Columbia. My mother started praying to hear more about the gospel. My best friend at the time was Kathy Lyle who as it turned out was LDS. So my mom asked her to refer us to the missionaries. Kathy and I were just 11 years old. She did turn in a referral but it wasn’t the usual person who handled them. The card did end up in the hands of the correct missionaries finally. They looked at the referral card and it was older and it didn’t look particularly promising so they put it into their scriptures and then forgot all about it. Meanwhile my mother was praying that if this religion was true the missionaries would come.

One day the missionaries decided to fast for people to teach because they were just getting nowhere. One of them picked up their scriptures and our referral card fell out.

Meanwhile my mother told my father what she did and all heck broke out in our home. When the missionaries come to our door my parents were in the middle of it all. My mom asked them to come back later so they thought it was another dead end. Luckily they decided to give it another try and come back and this time my father was gone and they were welcomed in. The rest as they say is history.

My father has never since joined the church and it has been 35 years this March. I still have hope that he will. My mother sacrificed a lot for us to join the church. There was no peace in our home for a long time. She took me and my 3 sisters to church faithfully. This was way before the block and there were times we lived many miles away. While we lived in Nova Scotia the nearest branch was 85 miles one way and we were there faithfully whether we like it or not. We left at 7 am and would get home about 9pm. She even got us to mutual every Tuesday whether there was a planned activity or not. The block was a huge blessing for us. Sometimes we lived where the church was strong and many times not. My mother kept us strong. All of my sisters and I have been married in the Temple although 2 have since divorced. My youngest sister was not active for a time, those teenage and young adult years were rough, but now we all are active and raising our families in the church. I am prett!
y sure we owe that all to my mom. My testimony has never wavered and I am so grateful to my mom and to the missionaries who were brave enough to come back to our home. They were Elder (Kent)Fowler from Ogden, UT and Elder (Malcolm)Isherwood from Tasmania, Australia. I only know their first names from their cards they gave me that I kept all these years in a scrapbook.

As “coincidence” would have it my son is now serving in the Brisbane Australia mission. I joined the Missionary Moms and have been visiting with sisters in and around Australia for about 4 months now. I just finally figured out that one of “my elders” might still be there and decided to ask around. It took all of one night to find someone who knows him. So now after 35 years I hope to hear from him soon and let him know what my family has been up to all these years. It’s a small world, especially in this wonderful church. I am so blessed and have been all my life.
Debbie Cooper, Overton, NV