Grateful--Truly Blessed and Duly Grateful

As I woke up this morning it occurred to me that I needed to add a couple of things to this blog--they're things I always want to remember.

When we moved to Salt Lake City--Kaitlyn and I arrived one year ago today--I needed to quickly make a home.  Eden and Ezra were coming at Christmas to stay for the year and Kait was due back in the hospital in a week's time which meant I was not going to be at the house much.  In addition to all of this we were keeping our house on Saipan, so whatever we needed to furnish would have to be bought.  My oldest daughter, who had agreed to live with us for the year so that there would be another adult in the house, was my "man on the ground" in SLC (we were still at UCLA medical center at the time).  She was able to find a house to rent starting in the middle of December which was 10 minutes from the hospital.  It also worked out for our landlady to rent the house fully furnished.  I mean fully!  Furniture, dishes, some linens, towels--fully furnished.  This was not a rental house; this was a house the owner lived in but because of a series of circumstances now had to rent out.  The fact that we were able to find a furnished house close to the hospital wasn't even the most amazing thing--the most amazing thing was that when we came to see the house after I arrived she had set up a nativity set in the dining room.  The nativity was exactly like the one my mother had used for years and had given me to use in my home many years ago.  I had lost my mother just before Kaitlyn was diagnosed and everything I had of her things were now at our home on Saipan.  When we walked into that room and saw that nativity, we cried.  And I knew we had found the right place.

Here's the other thing.  The ward (we call the local congregations "wards" in our church) nearest our house here in downtown Mormon-headquarters-of-the-world Salt Lake City didn't have any young people!  It had a lot of senior citizen housing within it's boundaries (areas of the LDS Church are divided into boundaries and that's the ward that you attend on Sundays), and then there were a few young married couples, mostly college students, and that was it.  No teenagers and I had two teenagers arriving in a couple of weeks.  So when they arrived we randomly chose a different ward a couple of miles away, closer to where they would be attending school.  Also attending this particular ward was the sister of one of our friends on Saipan ("I have a brother who lives on Saipan..."), and a man who had served his mission in the Micronesia Guam Mission back in the 90's.  But once again, meeting these people in our randomly chosen ward was not the most amazing thing.

The most amazing thing for me happened the day I was talking to one of the men in the ward after church.  His wife was a young doctor who was doing her rotation in the Hem-Onc unit during the time that Kaitlyn was there and we had talked several times.  On this day I was explaining to her husband that we had just returned from Kaitlyn's Make-a-Wish trip to Maine.  He casually mentioned that he thought his wife's trip to Italy was the first one they allowed out of the country after 9-11.  ???  I hesitated--she had been life-threateningly ill when she was younger?  So here in our little randomly chosen ward there was this young woman--now a doctor--who, at 17 years old (just like Kaitlyn) and a senior in high school (just like Kaitlyn), had been diagnosed with AML--acute myelogenous leukemia (just like Kaitlyn).  Wow.  And here she was.  Eleven years healthy.  After all the people during the last few months who had come up to me to relate their horror stories of loved ones with leukemia, here was this happy ending right in our little corner of the world!  I can't tell you how much I needed to hear it and again, I knew we were in the right place.

These are just a few examples from this past year of years of tender mercies that I have been given throughout my life.  These experiences remind me that God is always there with help and love and strength and peace.  When obstacles have been before me He has raised up people that have smoothed out the rough places and helped me through the hard times.  I know from holding my mother's hand as she slipped away just weeks before this journey began that those tender mercies are there regardless of the outcome.  God has always brought help and love and strength and peace--often in unexpected ways.

I am so grateful.