Sorry for the lull in blogging. I have been moving! Oh the joys of it all! Not!!!! This post contains some photos of our old place that we have lived in and loved the past almost 4 years. I call it the “Cottage on the Corner” as it was on a huge corner lot. The yard was bigger than the house! I so loved decorating this home. It was the first home I’ve had that I loved to decorate. I just loved the cheery yellow walls and the bright, white kitchen. (We were forced to move because our landlords sold the home. We want to wait to buy again for when we have a 20% down payment, according to Dave Ramsey’s guideline. I wonder if he will change his tune with the astronomical cost of real estate these days.)

A week ago today was our semiannual stake conference. As a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I get to attend this meeting on two Sundays, about six months apart, each year. I get to gather with the other members of my “stake” (a unit of congregation) which is roughly equal to about 3000 people, I believe. We hear testimony of Jesus Christ and words of encouragement from our stake leaders and fellow members of the stake to continue living Christ’s gospel. Normally, every week, I attend church with a few hundred people from my local congregation, or “ward.” A stake is equal to about 6-8 wards. It’s always interesting to see other people who live in our area in addition to those in our ward. Every stake conference has a theme. This past week’s theme was prayer.

During the stake conference, I heard many stories about answered prayers that I absolutely loved hearing. One of my friends in the ward got to speak. I was sad to hear her story about how as a child, she, her mother, and siblings suffered abuse from her father. She prayed many times for this abuse to stop and it never did until they all moved out. This just hurts my heart. Sometimes, because of other people’s agency to choose, we don’t get the answers to prayers that we want. Another person, a man about my age, shared the story of his prayers not being answered the way he wanted as well. As a young man, when he was 13, his dad announced that he was moving out because he was divorcing the young man’s mother. This broke the young man’s heart and shattered his world. He thought his family was going to be “together forever.” He fasted and prayed multiple times that his parents would get remarried. This never happened. His parents split up, with his younger sister living with his mom and him living with his dad, and the older siblings doing their young adult things, not living with either parent. The young man grew up and said that thirty years later, his prayer was answered in the form of seeing his mom accidentally embrace his dad at the young man’s younger sister’s wedding. His mother thought her ex-husband was the groom’s dad. They hadn’t seen each other in over 10 years. This led to them sitting on the beach talking and laughing the next day, which in a small way, was healing for the man. He also shared that although his parents never remarried, He felt God answering his prayers for help in the form of ward members who ministered to him. He said that every week someone would say “Hi” to him at church and ask how he was doing. He said that his ministering brothers shoveled his sidewalk and driveway every morning at 5 AM during a snowy winter so he could get to swim practice without having to shovel snow. He said that he loves attending church, being a part of a ward family, where he gets to help people feel God’s love by the way he ministers to others in his ward.

All this talk about prayer made me think of my prayers through the years. Of course, I’ve had times when my prayers haven’t been answered in my way. I remember Elder Holland’s quote somewhere (I’m sorry I can’t find it right now) about how a “no” from Heavenly Father is often just a “delayed yes.” I also thought of prayers that have been answered in my desired way. I agree with what was said during the conference, that prayers aren’t always answered in the way we want. God does hear every prayer, however, and He answers them according to His will and timetable.

I’ve been thinking of my prayers involved with our moving during the month of May, which was hard, as all moves are. If a move actually only involved “moving” it wouldn’t be so bad. It’s all the other stuff involved. So may decisions to make every day! I am weary with decision fatigue. So much sorting, dejunking, organizing, packing, and then moving, with cleaning mixed into all of that. That’s on top of the day-to-day ordinary business of living! Then the whole process repeats in reverse order, like some grand universal chiasmus that parallels the gospel of Jesus Christ. Only with new decisions of where to put everything in a whole differently configured home. I’m so grateful for every Sabbath Day I’ve had to give me a rest after every 6 days from the hard work of moving. I’ve decided that if you ever want to torture anyone, just force them in less than a month’s time to move all of their stuff into a new home and leave the previous home spotlessly clean. Fortunately, we had more than month’s time to do it all.

Then there was my accident, which happened on what was supposed to be the last day of “moving.” More on that later. Suffice it to say, I’m so grateful for homeopathy and prayers. I got a black eye, cut lip, and could hardly walk for a day. Plus a sprained thumb which made it hard to squeeze or hold anything in my dominant hand fatter than a tube of lip balm. All on top of moving! I have, however, been healing nicely, and have almost regained all my strength, with almost all the wounds completely healed and almost all the pain completely gone. I have had enough healing and strength in my right hand to unpack and organize which has been a huge blessing. At first, I couldn’t even walk without pain. I needed lots of rest. I’m so grateful I can walk without pain now.

In the move, which involved packing a TON of books, board games, educational supplies and memorabilia,(let’s just say when you are a homeschooling mom with 7 children and over 30 years of marriage, you have a lot of books!, plus binders, flash cards, learning kits, educational toys, journals, art and craft supplies, etc. etc.), I found this book shown above at the top of this post. Providentially enough, this is a book that I received as a hand-me-down when one of my relatives moved over 20 years ago. I remember reading it back then. It totally helped me during that time when I was living in my in-laws’ basement with 5 children and desperately wanting to move out into a home of our own. Seeing this book resurface during the current move reminded me that yes, prayers do have the power to bring about miracles, always in the name of Jesus Christ, the source of all goodness and all miracles. I have seen this happen in my own life for sure. (Partly because of reading that book and with the resultant prayers, we did end up buying a home of our own and moved out.)

Here are some of my answered prayers/miracles lately, mostly involving our latest move:

1. We, my husband and I, found a house we wanted to move into which was still in our neighborhood but lacked a garage. We wanted to stay in the neighborhood so our son could stay with his friends in our ward. This is the first time that one of our children has had so many close friends in our ward. I value this and didn’t want to disrupt it. I figure three more years until he goes off to college in a house without a garage is a small price to pay for him to stay with close friends. You can’t buy such a great group of young men. So in moving to a home without a garage, we had to buy a shed to store all of our garage stuff. After determining that we wanted to buy a used shed (following the Duggars’ thrifting principle of “buy used and save the difference”), we basically had one week to find a shed, look at the shed to decide its worthiness, take down the shed, transport the shed, and build the shed back up. Then we could move the garage stuff. Then we could move other stuff. Moving from one small home into a different small home is like playing that puzzle game on a grid where there is only spot empty to shift things. Anyway, we prayed we would find a shed. I was able to find a Lifetime 8′ x 20′ shed, 4 years old, less than half the price of a new shed! With the help of my parents, sons, dad and brothers-in-law and nephew’s help, we got that shed down, transported 90 minutes by car, and up in a week!

2. On the appointed night of building the shed, it started raining. I gathered those involved for prayer and prayed that the rain would stop. It did. The men got most of the shed up that night, and then we finished it within the next two days.

3. On one of the last days I had to sort and pack, I felt so overwhelmed. As one of my homeschooling friends has said, when you move, “you hate everything you own!” So true. The amount of stuff I still had to sort though, dejunk and pack still felt endless. That morning, I pled with Heavenly Father to help me. I explained that I really needed help. I felt so overwhelmed! Later that day He sent three friends over who greatly helped me by cleaning and getting the stuff out with a lot of going to Deseret Industries. I felt so blessed! I could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. The next day, two friends came, then the next day, even more people, this time from my ward, came to help.

4. For months I have been praying that I would find my retainers which I got after getting my braces off over 30 years ago, during my first year of college. Ever since we moved 4 years ago from AZ, they have been missing. I really wanted to start wearing them again at night to prevent any more drifting of my teeth! Where, oh where could they be? I had unpacked every single box of bathroom/medicine cabinet stuff I could think of. They had never turned up. I began to wonder if for some odd reason I had somehow packed them with unrelated things like the huge painting of George Washington in Valley Forge that we had never unpacked. Well last week, on the first day I had after my friends arrived to help me, I was finally attacking the “room of doom.” This was the storage room, the Black Hole of the house, where we had stockpiled boxes of long-term storage, as well as suitcases, bags, seasonal decorations, gift bags, wrapping paper, long term food storage, and random odds and ends. Lo and behold, I opened a big ugly black work bag of my husband’s that he has used on and off for his lawyer job. I had no idea what could be inside. What did I find? A ziploc bag full of an old toothbrush, Boiron homeopathy medicine tubes, and…drumroll please….my retainers!!!! I felt as if the heavens parted and angels were singing above my head!!! I also found our furniture sliders that would have come so in handy the previous week when we had moved a ton of heavy furniture into the new home with a hardwood floor, and a measuring tape, which we had also been looking for! So that long-time prayer I had been praying for months to find my retainers was answered! Apparently, dear husband had packed this bag up at the bitter end on the day we finished packing in AZ over three years ago and just stuffed a bunch of random stuff in the master bedroom/bathroom into this ugly bag. Then he completely forgot to tell me he had packed my retainers. And I, not knowing that this bag in the Room of Doom held them, never thought to unpack anything in this room that held mostly stuff of long-term storage.

5. On the final day of the move, which happened after the original “final day,” (mercifully, we got an extension of one day due to my injury), I prayed that people would come help us. Because of my accident, I was completely out of commission. I needed to stay in bed at the new home and rest. It was now up to my husband and two children at home at the time to get the final push done. I also texted people and asked for help. At least 8 people, including my married daughter and her husband, showed up and got us out and cleaned for the final inspection with the landlady. She said it was the cleanest she has ever seen the home. Whew! I am so grateful!

I conclude with the LDS Bible Dictionary definition of prayer, from the LDS Edition of the Bible, copied and pasted from over here:

“As soon as we learn the true relationship in which we stand toward God (namely, God is our Father, and we are His children), then at once prayer becomes natural and instinctive on our part (Matt. 7:7–11). Many of the so-called difficulties about prayer arise from forgetting this relationship. Prayer is the act by which the will of the Father and the will of the child are brought into correspondence with each other. The object of prayer is not to change the will of God but to secure for ourselves and for others blessings that God is already willing to grant but that are made conditional on our asking for them. Blessings require some work or effort on our part before we can obtain them. Prayer is a form of work and is an appointed means for obtaining the highest of all blessings.”