I can only imagine what those elders thought. "A steak dinner?! Hey, I'm on a budget." But I can also imagine the spiritual prompting they received, "Do it!" So they did, that very same day, and as a result Al's life would change in ways she could never have imagined. That doesn't mean, however, that teaching Al Fox would be easy. On the one hand, Al just loved the way she felt around the elders, on the other hand, "Every day I saw them, I did everything I could to do anything except talk about the Church, and I thought I was doing fairly well."
Then one day the missionaries showed her the video "The Restoration" which depicted Joseph Smith's First Vision. Al's reaction was to think that there was no way that happened, so she issued another challenge to the elders, "I want to go there," she said. What she didn't know was that Palmyra was only about a half hour away from Rochester. In the Sacred Grove, Al Fox learned that Heavenly Father is real and that He does answer prayers, as she herself knelt and prayed for the first time -- She felt so awkward that she repeated after the elders. "But that's how it began," she would say later, "because I started to care, because of that prayer."
But Al Fox was still a "rascal" as an investigator. While she began to open up, and started reading the scriptures and praying, she was still hoping to prove that the LDS Church was wrong. Yet even as she fought it, the change in her heart grew. Then one day she decided to be baptized, "But it came out of nowhere," she said.
The missionaries got a call at 4 a.m. from Al who shouted at them "I want to get baptized!" before just as suddenly hanging up the phone -- her declaration had shocked her. Fortunately, the elders called her back. Despite her shock and her fears, Al decided to follow through. "I knew when I said it, I felt it, and that was what I needed to do."
One month after challenging the elders to bring her a steak dinner, Al Fox was baptized. "I was just filled with this excitement and this happiness that I couldn't even put it into words," she would later say, "and I wanted to yell to all of New York that happiness is real, that it exists, and that they can have it. I was so excited that I told everyone. I made a promise that how I felt that day when I got confirmed and I got baptized, I didn't want it to ever go away, because I recognize that it only came from the gospel, and I am going to do everything I can to keep that with me."
Like many converts to the church, Al found that members of her family, and many of her friends disapproved. Some friends rejected her, but at the same time, as a newly confirmed Latter-day Saint, Al found that her new life was no longer compatible with the lifestyles of other friends. One of her sisters, however, would join the church not long after Al, and would go on to be married in the temple (Al is still single, but she does have a boyfriend). At the same time, because of her many tattoos, Al had a hard time fitting in with the LDS community.
Excited about the Restored Gospel, Al considered serving a mission, but when she prayed about it she received an unexpected answer: move to Utah. It was hard, she tried to fight it, but she moved to Utah. On her first day in the state she was at a restaurant, already feeling self-conscious, holding a copy of a biography of one of the presidents of the church, when a man tapped her on the shoulder and said, "You know, it's pretty ironic you look the way you do, holding that book." Al would later say "My heart broke. I just wanted so badly wanted to turn to him and say, 'Do you know what I just went through, and what I gave up, and how hard this is?'"
But Al recognized that she had a choice; she could blast the guy, or she could choose happiness. Instead of going off, Al turned to the man, shook his hand and smiled. "Hey, I'm Al Fox, and I just got baptized and this is like my first day here." Naturally, the man felt a little bit silly, and to try to make up for it, he bought her lunch. About a year later Al would run into this man again; as it turns out, the man was a stake president, and he had been telling the story of this encounter in stake conferences, which was quite the coincidence because Al had been telling the story at firesides.
Al Fox has found several ways to share her happiness. She started a blog, making and posting videos online and, of course, sharing her story at firesides -- something she would never have expected as she sluffed her college public speaking class. Some missionaries have started using her videos and her blog to help their investigators -- in fact, this is how she met her boyfriend, who as a missionary found her on Facebook as he used it as a missionary tool; they met in person after he got home (I mention this because she keeps getting asked out by guys who meet her and hear her story).
"The happiness that I have felt is real," said Fox in a recent interview. "It's real, and I recognize that everyone doesn't have and feel this. And I want everyone to know that they can. Happiness is the gospel - it comes from there and it's real, and I'm grateful for that."
Sources:
Marsden, M. (2013). "Convert endures trial, shares happiness through social media (+video)." Deseret Morning News, February 7, 2013
Worthen, K. (2013). "Finding Joy in the Gospel: Converts Share Their Stories." LDS Living, March/April 2013.
Interview with Al Fox on The Cultural Hall accessed at http://www.youtube.com/user/22AlFox on April 23, 2013.
Al Fox's Blog: {In the Head of Al Fox} at blogspot. http://alfoxshead.blogspot.com/
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