Sometimes

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen to you.

~ Sheenagh Pugh ~


One of my favorite poems ever comes to mind as I reflect back on our short, but oh so lovely, trip to Rexburg, Idaho this past weekend.

Keep in mind that I often lament the fact that I have bad luck. For example, my van is seriously a deer magnet. Among those of us who drive it (Gerald, Luke, Shulamith, Isaiah, Eli, and I), only Eli has not hit a deer at least once, and I'm pretty sure his turn is coming right up. Bad luck. In addition, things at our house seem to break randomly, just sort of fall apart, for no apparent reason, long before they should. Presently, not one, but BOTH of our garage door openers are broken. So in the dead of Montana winter, we have to get out of our cars and manually open both garage doors. Bad luck.

However, as the poem so eloquently points out, "Sometimes things don't go, after all, from bad to worse...sometimes a man aim high and all goes well." Sometimes even I escape the tendency toward bad luck.

And so it was, this past weekend.

We traveled to Rexburg to meet Shulamith and Matt in order to take Shulamith through the temple for her endowment. Why Rexburg? Because it's sort of a half way point between Billings and Salt Lake City. It was the easiest way to get Shulamith, Matt, Gerald, and me all in the same temple at the same time prior to the wedding. Still, there were risks involved. Weather, primarily. The weekend before brought a snowstorm which made long-distance travel nearly impossible. All I could think of was "What if this happens again next weekend?" Gerald kept tabs on the forecast all week, reassuring me that it was going to be okay. I didn't believe him. But it was. In fact, it was just about perfect.

We left at 5:00 a.m. Saturday, with no snow falling and none in the forecast. It was a smooth ride all the way, and we arrived in Rexburg a full hour ahead of Shulamith and Matt. We wandered the campus of BYU-Idaho until we met up with them just before noon. The temple experience was glorious. I won't elaborate. You'll have to trust me.

After a quick Mexican meal with the four of us along with Matt's parents and brother, the married couple to-be headed back to Utah, and Gerald and I went the opposite direction. By the time we reached Bozeman, we were too tired to go any farther. I was speaking in church the following morning at 11:00, so we were glad to have made it as far as Bozeman, just two hours from Billings. We rented a motel and crashed almost immediately but awoke at 6:00 a.m. to falling snow. Gerald checked the radar which indicated snow in Billings too and sporadically along I-90 as well. That was enough to convince us not to dawdle; we jumped in the car and headed for home. It was slow and snowy in places, but we arrived back in Billings by 9:30, in plenty of time to shower and be at church by 11:00.

Travel mercies. A window of opportunity between snowstorms to get to the temple and back for this very important occasion. I am thankful. Sometimes, when it's important enough, even a person with typically bad luck is richly blessed.

"The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen to you."