12/12/12

Dec 12, 2012

Banner day.

My mother has a love affair with numbers. She set her alarm for 4:44 or 5:55. Our phone number ended in 3333 and then after that, 2222. We counted everything and screamed over any cool combination of numbers we encountered.

I have the same love affair.

So today is a pretty cool day. But I didn’t do anything to celebrate. I don’t know why. It wasn’t a conscious choice. It just felt like another day and I spent it with my children, reading, mathing, cleaning, and sewing. Not a bad way to spend any day, but there was certainly nothing exciting about it. I didn’t even notice when 12:12 p.m. rolled around.

I do, however, remember a December 12 from nineteen years ago when we had been married for just eight short weeks. On that December 12, on the night before final exams started, our first little house burned down. We were living without a working furnace in a singlewide trailer and I finally got so tired of being SO cold that I asked Richard to start a fire in the decrepit wood stove.

We left to go practice being Mary and Joseph in a church performance and came home to a house all aflame.

Oh, the tears. The absolute gut-wrenching sobs that poured out of my soul that night…and for many nights to follow. We lost everything we owned except for Richard’s scriptures, gun, and missionary memory box.

It seemed an army of kindness was thrown our way. So many people reached out their hearts and hands and helped us. We found another little house to rent and each night when we came home from school we would find boxes on our doorstep full of things we needed. We had only moved to the town in October and very few people knew us, but everyone knew of our plight and blessed us with their love.

Our family members tried to replace many of our wedding gifts and my great-grandfather sent me a quilt he made along with $500. My father sent us $1000 in JCPenny gift cards so we could get some clothing. My church in Wyoming sent us a beautiful handstitched quilt. Our aunts and uncles sent kitchen goods, blankets, and more love than we thought possible.

I will never forget that December 12. It changed me. Forever altered my being and cemented in me a great desire to make a difference in the world by blessing others as I had been blessed.

And for that I am grateful.