I was baptized!

June 11^th, 2011 dun dun dun…

Most of y’all got baptized when you were 8, me? 22, the following week I turned 23. Yeah, I wish I had grown up in the church, but I am grateful for all of the experiences I had before, even though they included some poor decision-making. I can look back and know exactly how it feels to not have the gospel in my life, and I will never go there again.

Leading up to that day was funny. I say funny because I particularly remember a day when I was still working at Applebees and somebody I worked with asked me to tell them a little bit about the church. I was in the middle of expressing some of the key things I had learned when I hear this voice whisper, “the church is true!” To my surprise, this random guys head pops around the corner and tells me he overheard me. Creepy, but he was right, right? Haha come to find out, he converted to the church 20 years before and was baptized on the same day I was going to be. The Lord works in mysterious ways, I can tell you that.

That day was great, my family and some friends were there, along with members of the ward. I felt the support of people. Nothing crazy happened, the heavens didn’t open up right before me, but I felt happy about the choice and covenants that I had just made. I knew it was right.

Later that day I went to petsmart and dropped my iphone on the concrete floor and then it shattered. I didn’t care though, cause the day was that (almost)perfect haha.

 Jake and I before, I kept joking that it looked like I was about

to hop out of an airplane.

Patty, Me and Sam

MY FAMILY! <3

I attended church in a family ward. I wasn’t really fond of the singles wards around my area. I sat with friends’ families (the Sprunt and Fresh families we're SO great to me), which was wonderful, but I would look around and wish that I could share this with my own family. It was getting harder and harder to attend church every Sunday by myself. I can understand how people are able to fall away from the church without that support.

I had slowly begun to recognize that I needed that. During that summer I had started dating Sam. Sam was from home, but was moving to Utah for school. We tried the whole long distance thing, so obviously I made a couple trips up here to visit.  I was suddenly surrounded by people my age with morals and goals. I ate it all up, plus Utah is beautiful.

During one of those trips, I think the thought occurred to me that… I could live here.