Elders Learn the Lord is "in the Details of [their] Lives"

Elder Neal A. Maxwell taught that while the Lord always preserves our agency, He is also involved "in the details of our lives" (“Becoming a Disciple,” Ensign, June 1996, 19). Elders Call and Poppleton discovered this to be true. . .

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24 June 2009

Dear Family,

Again, thank you for the letters this week. It is always good to hear from home about what is going on.

Last Wednesday we lost our phone! Elder Poppleton thinks it is less botherrsome to ask a random person we see in Wal-Mart to give us a ride home rather than calling someone ahead of time and planning to have someone pick us up. I think it is more bothersome to ask someone we don't know, who could live anywhere and who might already have plans. So we compromised and call for a ride from the library to Wal-Mart and then Elder Poppleton asks a random person for a ride home. But that is probably more than you wanted to know. Suffice it to say that we've compromised.

So, after we were done shopping, Elder Poppleton asked for a ride home. The man hesitated, but agreed. His name was Ken and he had stopped to buy some donuts. He was on his way to the Palisades for a Boy Scout camp. He was from a town near Malad (which is outside our mission).

We got home and a little over an hour later we realized the phone wasn't in my pocket anymore! We looked all over the place. We had gone bowling with an older couple, so we called them. It wasn't in their car. We called the bowling alley. They didn't have it. We called Wal-Mart; they didn't have it.

Elder Poppleton asked if I remembered the man's name. "All I remember is that his name was Ken," I said. "I don't know what his last name is." Elder Poppleton remembered seeing that the name on the tent started with an "El." So we looked in the phone book and we found a man who lives in Firth. But that isn't anywhere close to Malad.

Well, to make it short, I found a Ken El--- living in ---, Idaho. We tried calling several times, and eventually we got ahold of him on Friday.

His wife said he was rounding up the cows. So she took the phone out to him (in the meantime, all the cows were mooing). He said they had been in and out of the car a lot, and they hadn't seen it, but he would look. Lo and behold, there it was!

He was coming up to Blackfoot and would be driving right past us, so Saturday morning he heard a semi pulling up and Ken, a typical cowboy, gave us our phone!

That saved a lot of stress and $100. That was definitely an answer to our many prayers.

Love,

Elder Call