Eclipses and Missionary Homecomings

Greeley, Colorado

Given our mobile lifestyle, one would think that we were in a perfect position to have scheduled a trip to the zone of totality last week and witnessed the eclipse in all its glory, but instead we were back in Colorado Springs watching a not quite total eclipse with friends in their front yard from behind eclipse glasses hastily and gratefully purchased in a shopping center parking lot just days before the event and through cereal box viewers taped together the night before and on the shadows formed between our interlaced fingers.

We missed totality because the day following the eclipse we welcomed home missionary number four. And when I say 'home' I mean that he flew into the same airport that he flew out of two years ago. But, while we drove by the house he spent 8 years of his life in, he saw its glorious blue color for the first and possibly last time ever that day and then spent his first night home sleeping on a spare bed in the basement of our dear friends' house. I am so thankful to have good friends who took us in, helped us celebrate our missionary homecoming and especially let us eat their food and sleep in their beds (and on their floors and couches).

Having my children serve missions has really been a great experience for our family. We miss them terribly of course while they are gone, but we also love to get our weekly emails, love our Skype calls on Christmas and Mother's Day and love to learn about the places and the people where they each have served. Most of all, missionaries are just dear to my heart because I know that my life as I know it is because of other missionaries. My parents were taught and baptized by missionaries when I was an infant. I will never know who those missionaries were, and my understanding is that my parents went through many of them before committing to baptism, but I am so grateful to and for those missionaries and their families. Kris was taught and baptized by missionaries only a couple years before we were married, in this case I do know one of 'his' missionaries, thanks to a ward member who went out of his way to help us reconnect about twenty-five years later. And I am also eternally grateful to and for Elder White for serving a mission. Having my children out there serving and impacting lives the way I believe mine to have been is really a precious thing.

So missionary number four has returned, numbers five and six are still serving, and number seven is finishing mission papers and expecting to go early next year. I love the tradition of missionary service that my children have begun, and I hope that the rest of them continue to follow the tradition of their older siblings and choose to serve missions also.