Mission Miracles

 July was truly a month of miracles for us.  I already mentioned the miracle of all my children being nearby at the time of my mother's funeral; here are a few more:

- Neil and I took the opportunity to attend the Manhattan Temple when we were in the city for missionary transfers.  We have become so proficient at the subway that we actually arrived an hour before our appointed time, which is no small miracle, so we stopped in to say hello to another senior missionary couple who are serving in the Family History Center in the same building.  Elder and Sister Ashton were so excited to see us and, after visiting for a while, asked if we had any family history tasks they could help us with.  I mentioned that my family has been looking for the death date of my mother's grandmother for years, so they took the information and tried a few things but had no success.  We left for our temple session and didn't think any more about it until I got a text from them later that evening - Elder Ashton had found her death certificate!  When I asked him how he found it, he just said, "It was nothing short of a miracle!"  That was just three days before my mother passed away.

- We held our first ward Family History Workshop and 16 people came!  That didn't seem like a lot to me, but our bishopric counselor thought it was miraculous and the bishopric has asked us to continue doing it monthly.  I was just happy that every person was able to find relatives for whom they could do temple work.  Score!

- I had to make baked beans for 75 people and transport them to New York City for our Zone Conference - getting them there without spilling them all over my car was just the first miracle of the day.  Being able to time our flight to Utah so we could go straight to the airport from Zone Conference was the second miracle.  Getting our car parked and us shuttled to the airport in time for our flight might have been the biggest miracle - that was the scariest off-airport parking I have ever seen!  And possibly the best miracle was when our car was still there and in good condition when we got back!

- We had the wonderful blessing of a week-long visit from our daughter Heidi a week after we got back from Utah.  We enjoyed visiting local sites like the beach and the aquarium as well as spending two days in Manhattan.  One of the highlights in the city was visiting the September 11 Memorial and Museum, where it was evident that tragedy was balanced by divine miracles.  Heidi beautifully described the memorial with these words:

Falling.

Always falling.

Roaring-

Roaring water, roaring voices.

Silenced voices

Known by name.

We go on

Resilient

But not the same.

Another highlight was more magical than miraculous - we saw Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway!  It was very fantastically magical, but I hadn't done my homework and I was surprised that it was a play and not a musical.  To have been able to navigate around Manhattan for two days without getting seriously lost (or injured or worse!) seemed miraculous enough to me!

- I saved the best miracle for the last.  One of the places we visited with Heidi was the American Museum of Natural History (think Night at the Museum).  Knowing that we had limited time here, Heidi decided to do some exploring on her own instead of staying with us old folks who couldn’t make up our minds which way to go.  As Neil and I were exploring the Hall of Planet Earth, we were interrupted by a gentleman and his wife (all wearing masks) who said, “Hello, Elder! I’m Elder Renlund,” – and he pulled down his mask to prove that he was!!  He was so kind and open as he and his wife visited with us for a few minutes – as if we were someone important!  It turns out that July is his “month off” and they were in Baltimore, where he used to be a bishop, to throw out the first pitch at the LDS night at the Orioles game and had come into New York to see some Broadway shows.  After going our separate ways, Neil had the impression that we needed to go back and ask if we could get a picture with him, to which he said, “Of course!”  And now we have a picture to prove our miracle for the day – and to add to the greeting of love he asked us to extend to all the missionaries in our mission.  In a city of millions of people, in a venue filled with hundreds of people - all wearing masks, in a random room on just a random day - what a miracle!  But that's the blessing of serving a mission - it's a time for miracles!