Tender Mercies

It's funny what will jog your memory...

I started the night shift today which means that I have weekday daytime hours open for the first time in…well…longer than I can remember. I plan to fit in my sleeping, but also run errands that I have been neglecting for a long time since many such errands require you to be free during weekday daytime hours!

One such errand is getting my car to the mechanic and worked on (bad oil leak…no bueno!) So I took my car in after getting off work this morning. This left me needing to get home, so I loaded my bike in the back seat and rode it home after dropping the car off.

Enter unexpected memory. As I was riding my bike home I passed a run-down corner market (the kind that fill many of the corners in this city. Kind of like a gas station except it does not sell gas), I had a sudden, shockingly powerful flashback to my mission days. I was on a bike, feeling rather exhausted, in moderate weather, with my right pants leg tucked into my sock to save it from the bike's sprockets and a big/cheap/bulky bike helmet on my head. Admittedly I didn't have a fellow-biker alongside to serve as a flashback-companion, but regardless it took me back. I remembered one very specific day in Wodonga. It was similar weather. A day no different than many that sandwiched it on both sides. Not really sure why this day is the one that has stuck in my head all these years versus one of the others. There was nothing to set it apart other than my companion and myself were feeling very tired that day and stopped at a small "Milk Bar" (the Australian equivalent of a corner market) and got ourselves a cheap ice cream to cool off. That was it. Nothing big. Nothing spectacular. But for some reason, almost exactly 10 years after it happened, this memory came back this morning and brought with it many of the emotions I was having at that time and with it yet another realization of what that time in my life has meant to me.

It makes me think of what Elder Bednar taught a few years back:

"This afternoon I want to describe and discuss a spiritual impression I received a few moments before I stepped to this pulpit during the Sunday morning session of general conference last October. Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf had just finished speaking and had declared his powerful witness of the Savior. Then we all stood together to sing the intermediatehymn that previously had been announced by President Gordon B. Hinckley. The intermediate hymn that morning was “Redeemer of Israel” (Hymns, no. 6).

Now, the music for the various conference sessions had been determined many weeks before—and obviously long before my new call to serve. If, however, I had been invited to suggest an intermediate hymn for that particular session of the conference—a hymn that would have been both edifying and spiritually soothing for me and for the congregation before my first address in this Conference Center—I would have selected my favorite hymn, “Redeemer of Israel.” Tears filled my eyes as I stood with you to sing that stirring hymn of the Restoration.

Near the conclusion of the singing, to my mind came this verse from the Book of Mormon: “But behold, I, Nephi, will show unto you that the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of deliverance” (1 Ne. 1:20).

My mind was drawn immediately to Nephi’s phrase “the tender mercies of the Lord,” and I knew in that very moment I was experiencing just such a tender mercy. A loving Savior was sending me a most personal and timely message of comfort and reassurance through a hymn selected weeks previously. Some may count this experience as simply a nice coincidence, but I testify that the tender mercies of the Lord are real and that they do not occur randomly or merely by coincidence. Often, the Lord’s timing of His tender mercies helps us to both discern and acknowledge them."

It is only in retrospect that I can start to see how important and influential those mission years were. Some of it certainly had to do with me learning to be out, away from my family and "being my own man". Of course it did. But it is much, much more than just that. I have many shortcomings. Many that I recognize and probably many that I don't. Regardless, I feel a desire (a desire that, hopefully on occasion at least, translates into action) to live the gospel. That desire started with righteous parents teaching me correct principals, but it solidified and has persisted largely because of what I felt and experienced as a missionary.

And it was riding my bike past an old corner market that reminded me.

I needed that….