This story has a long build up, but I want you to have the whole story.
Toward the end of my mission I was stationed in Oulu, Finland. My companion, a native Finn named Kimo Reimann, had only two months left on his mission. He had set the goal of having two baptisms on his mission (twice the mission average). With only two months left, he was doing everything he could to meet this goal. I never had a companion who worked as hard. Among other things he went through the area book looking for people that he might contact. We visited everyone who had previously taking lessons from the missionaries but had been dropped for one reason or another. Finally, we knocked on the door of Tuula Säynävirtä.
The area book contained her history. She had been on and off again interested in baptism. Then she and her husband separated. He moved to Helsinki where he hooked up with the Church and started dating a Church member. The divorce was not final, and when Tuula learned of this she became very angry with the missionaries and told them she never wanted to see them again. I had not read this, and if I had, it is likely that I would have tried to talk my companion out of making contact. But we did.
Veli (Elder) Reimann knocked on the door. When it opened, Tuula stood and stared at us for what seemed to me to have been two minutes--an eternity. Finally, she said, "Oh, well. Come in." Two weeks prior she had been at the brink as a single mother raising two rambunctious daughters. On her knees she had plead with the Lord and promised that she would do whatever he asked if he would only help her. When we knocked on her door she knew it was the answer to her prayer, but it still took her a couple of minutes to convince herself to keep her end of the bargain.
She was baptized the day before Veli Reimann got on the plane to fly home to Helsinki.
A day of two after the baptism one of Tuula's friends/co-workers asked, "Have you done something to your hair? You look different." Tuula responded, "I've joined the Mormons." The friend came to church and my companion and I started to teach her. Her name was Helena Paakunainen.
Helena was a golden investigator. She was ready for baptism in a matter of a few weeks. Her husband was not making progress. We postponed baptizing Helena for about three months hoping that the husband would come along. But in December I felt that we shouldn't wait any longer. That baptism was a fulfillment of one of the promises in my patriarchal blessing that I would see the light of the gospel shining in the faces of those whom I would baptism. This baptism was one of my most positive moments.
But the story doesn't end there. I wrote to her a few times after my mission, but Helena and I have not been good letter writers. I lost contact. Not long after I joined Facebook I got a message from a woman named Marketta Saroma asking if I was the Glynn Bennion who had been in Finland in 1978. I didn't recognize the name. But I pulled out my mission journal and read that we had baptized Tuula's daughter, Marketta, at the same time that we baptized Helena. I had forgotten this, and Marketta has subsequently changed her name from Säynävirtä to Saroma. Marketta helped me to find the people who knew Helena and could help me reconnect.
When I did reconnect, Helena informed me that her youngest son (from a later marriage), Hannu Lampinen, was serving as a missionary in the Provo, Utah mission and was stationed in Vernal. The following summer, Mother and I took a vacation to Utah and stopped through Vernal to meet Elder Lampinen.
This meeting was one of the most positive of my life. But the story doesn't end there. We took Elder Lampinen and his companion to lunch at a Chinese restaurant. Over lunch I asked him why he had chosen to serve a mission. He said, "It's true, isn't it?" Of course it's true. My heart was near to bursting that I was seeing the fruit bearing offspring of the seed I had planted years before as a missionary.
Helena informed me that she was planning to visit Utah at the end of Hannu's mission. It had been a dream of hers ever since her conversion to go to Utah and see the historical pioneer sights. So Mom and I planned another vacation to Utah the following summer. We arranged for Helena and Hannu to spend a night with Adam and Brit. That Sunday happened to be Fast Sunday, and we attended a ward in Provo where Hannu had served. I bore my testimony and told of the young mother whom we had baptized almost 40 years prior. I witnessed of the truthfulness of the passage in Doctrine and Covenants section 18, "If ye should labor all your days and bring save it be one soul unto me, how great shall be your joy with him in the kingdom of my father." Meeting Helena and Hannu and knowing of their faithfulness in the gospel after all these years filled me with great joy.
Helena stood and with the help of her son bore her witness of the truthfulness of the gospel. And expressed that she was the young mother who had joined the church so many years before.
Some days later we had a picnic up at Aspen Grove with Adam and Brit. These stories together are one of the most positive of my life. To plant the seed of the gospel and then to later find that the seed had grown to a tree and bourn more fruit. This is very close to tasting the fruit that Nephi speaks of in his father's dream.
Helena has dropped off of the map for me again. Since her visit to Utah I know that she has remarried, happily this time, I hope. But I have lost contact. I am in regular contact with Marketta. She is no longer connected with the Church. When she was young and messed up and she needed kindness and help, the representatives of the Church turned her away perhaps because she was not living as she should. Nevertheless, Marketta may never return to the Church--which is heart breaking, but a reality of missionary experience. I keep contact, not because I believe Marketta will come back to the Church, but because all those whom I have baptized are precious to me. Marketta has told me that during her darkest times, the memory of a missionary who taught her the gospel helped her to hold on and work though the dark times.
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