Another One's Home

Just as I was collecting the week's worth of mail from while we were gone over Thanksgiving and what had accrued during the rest of the week -- two armloads of catalogs and junk -- a car drove by and shouted my name. I could barely see in the dark, but as he pulled over, I realized it was Aldo! One of Marty's best friends since the first day of Kindergarten! He got home Tuesday from the Redlands, California Mission. It was so good to see him! We visited for a bit and he helped me carry the mail in. He shared with me a time after he'd decided to serve a mission and talked to Marty about serving, but Marty acknowledged he wasn't so sure. Aldo encouraged him to really consider his blessings and choose to serve.

Aldo's family are converts. Many years ago, Tania came to my house to pick up Aldo. I had left the new primary sharing time guide on the porch and she was flipping through it when I opened the door. "What's this?" she asked. I told her, but was a little perplexed. "Have you not seen this before? Are you not LDS?" She wasn't.

The missionaries came to ward council a few months later and gave us a 24-day challenge. 1) prayerfully consider 8 names to write on a list and 2) pray for those people daily and 3) read the scriptures daily. At the end of 24 days, we would be inspired to know who to share the gospel with. I added the Chipanas to my list. Over the course of those 24 days I had very special experiences with many of the people on that list. Even though I didn't sit down with them with the missionaries or give any of them a Book of Mormon, I knew I had been inspired to put them on my list and discovered many of them had needed prayers during that time. (My testimony that prayer blesses lives but I'm not sure how it works, is for a different post.) I was also inspired with ways to reach out to the Chipanas and friendship them even more than our normal friendship. This also included acting on promptings to act NOW on aspects of our friendship. We had them over for a BBQ with my dad and another member of our ward. We were about to leave on a trip and logically I could have put it off until later. But I felt it was important to do it right then. We did and it was lovely. I'll never know why it was important right that second, but from the urgency of the prompting, I knew it was.

A year or two later, I found out they were getting baptized. I didn't have anything to do with their conversion process. Or did I? I like knowing that I chose to do the 24-day challenge and I listened to inspiration of who to include, who to pray for and how to foster a friendship.  It didn't matter to me one way or the other if they were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They were a special family to me regardless. I loved their son. They loved my son. We loved each other. And we have remained great friends. But they were so happy to be baptized and to be sealed in the temple with their family.

The beauty of the blessings we have on each other in life is not missed on me that many years later, their son was an important influence on my son to serve a mission.

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Dan and I went to the Andrea Bocelli concert tonight. Beautiful!

We weren't supposed to take photos during the concert, so I didn't. But I wish had one that better represented the beauty!