The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
 -Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Without any prior warning at all, Elder Christoffel Golden Jr. of the Seventy appeared on the stand at the Island of Misfit Toys today and ended up spending the entire block of meetings with us. It was a very unexpected but nevertheless a pleasant surprise. Accompanied by his wife, Diane, they instructed us over the course of a two-hour block that normally would have been taken up by Sunday School and then elders quorum/Relief Society meetings.

"Don't put this on your blog," Elder Golden instructed more than once. (He actually uttered those words three times, to my count.)

Well, no. I'm not sharing any of the three teachings he specifically instructed us not to share. But I will say that it was an uplifting, spiritual, unique experience that you just don't get every Sunday here in Utah. "Don't give up on yourselves," he taught us. "God will bless you according to your righteous desires." Also, "Once we are cleansed by the blood of Christ, our whole desire is to be merciful toward others."

In spite of what my friends in foreign countries believe—that we regularly get visited by General Authorities here in our meetings in Utah—it just doesn't happen very often at all.

From that spiritual high, I got in my car and drove most of the way up to my brother's house in Layton for bimonthly family dinner. Passing through the final stoplight on the way up there, my car began to poop out, made several loud and unsettling noises, and moved very slowly in exactly the same way it had twice before—something which, I had been told, had been fixed twice before by my auto mechanic.

If I can just make it to my brother's, I thought, I'll be okay.

Then, a few blocks after that, my car stalled and died. Right there on the freeway. A man behind me angrily blared on his horn for me to turn before he realized that I physically couldn't move. At the same time, three good Samaritans got out of their car, right there on the highway, and pushed me to safety. They then walked back across the highway, got into their car, drove over to where I was, and offered me a ride to my destination to make sure I got there okay.

Thank heavens for the kindness of strangers. They could have been the Three Nephites, for all I know. Even so, the spiritual high I had been at just an hour earlier became a depressing, frustrating spiritual low. I felt like pushing the old bucket of bolts over a cliff or taking off the parking brake and letting it roll the rest of the way down the hill.

I finally made it to family dinner, and one of my siblings chided me for being late. Then I told them all the story. They understood.

The Aluminum Falcon's days, I fear, are numbered. The first and only car I have ever owned may soon be headed to the junkyard. I literally don't know what I'm going to do with it tomorrow. As I type this, it sits there on the side of that road, 16 or so miles from where I live.

The best of times, and the worst of times, indeed. Sometimes, they can happen within the same day, or within a very short time of each other. Such is our mortal journey. It's all part of the deal, I had to remind myself tonight.

Who knows? Tomorrow may be just a little bit better.

God Is in the Details

Week #7 on the Island of Misfit Toys: The bishop gave his first talk involving "actual doctrine," to use his term for it. And it was unforgettable. It was, indeed, simply profound.

Like improv, you just had to be there.

I'm not one who normally takes notes during sacrament meeting, but this discourse was full of such insightful teachings that I ended up taking a few. His theme was a play on the old phrase "the devil is in the details," except he turned it around and told us that "God is in the details."

He talked about the fact that we all experience disappointment at times, and these moments are when we are inclined to just stay home, close the drapes, and not answer the door—either literally or metaphorically, or both. The key to overcoming these moments in our lives is serving others. He added his belief that God has already prepared other people to answer prayers that we haven't even prayed yet.

"No one was foreordained to fail or be wicked," he said. I didn't write down many things word-for-word, but that statement was one of them.

"Don't goof up your orbit," he added, stating that our personal orbits have caused us collectively to meet in this ward at this place and at this time, and that it is for a special purpose. He concluded with the idea that the star of Bethlehem didn't just appear in the sky on the night of Christ's birth but that Heavenly Father sent it on its path billions of years prior.

Granted, that last statement may be speculation or from the Book of the Bishop, but he got his point across well.

Island of Misfit Toys? Yep, sure feels that way. And there's no other place I'd rather be right now.

Lost and Found

I'm a believer in the old saying that "what goes around, comes around." What I take this to mean is that we tend to become the benficiaries of others' good deeds when we also do good deeds in life, and that the converse is true with regard to bad deeds. Call it karma, if you will. We reap what we sow, or maybe it is the Golden Rule.

Uhh . . . let me check. Yeah, that's it. I'm all out of mottoes and catch phrases for this particular point.

Sometimes, this aspect of life becomes clear to me in a very real, concrete way. Such was the case just the other night, when I walked to my car in the parking lot and spotted a $20 bill lying there on the ground.

It didn't take me long to look up from the $20 bill on the ground to realize that it probably belonged to the man sitting in the car next to me, talking on his cell phone and apparently oblivious to the fact that the 20-spot lay there on the asphalt.

I picked the bill up and tapped on the man's window, and since he was busy talking on the phone, I tried to gesture that it was probably his and may have fallen out of his pocket. He opened his window and thanked me more than once, saying that it had probably fallen out as he was getting his keys out to unlock his car door.

No sooner had I opened the door of my own car and I sat in the driver's seat when I impusively looked at my left wrist to check the time and realized that my watch wasn't there where it normally was. I had left it at the gym, which was my previous stop before going to the grocery store. (Side note: Do not go grocery shopping when you've just been to the gym.)

I drove the half-mile back to the gym and found that my watch was not in any of the places I had been while I was there. My only hope left was the lost-and-found box at the check-in desk, and, fortunately, a good Samaritan had picked up my watch and had left it there for me to retrieve.

My two experiences of finding a lost item, as well as having one of my own returned to me, occurred within a 15-minute timeframe of each other. I had helped someone else find a lost item, and someone had done the same for me. I was grateful at that moment when it hit me, in a very real sense, that, when all is boiled down, people are still good, honest, decent, outgoing, and kind at heart. Our society is not yet doomed.

It would have been very easy for me to have scooped up that $20 bill and to put it into my own pocket - think of all of the curly cheese fries I could have bought with it! - without the man who had lost it realizing that fact until later in the evening (kind of like me and my watch!), but I'm glad I didn't.

The watch, by the way, cost me more than $20, so if anything, I was the one who lucked out.