Ukulele Strings--Becky

Ukulele Strings

A few months ago Madison prepared a song on the ukulele to perform in the high school cabaret. Tracking down music, practicing, getting some coaching from a friend in the branch--her preparation was extensive and thorough and we all looked forward to the performance night. The week of the cabaret we realized it was at 5:00 instead of 7:00, and that getting everyone home from the different schools and Jeff home from work  in time to then get back to the school for the performance was going to be tricky. We also had company coming in town that night, so I was worried about their transportation via taxi and having a nice dinner prepared for the moment we walked back in the door with tired and hungry kids. As soon as Madison got home from school she practiced her song one last time, and something seemed strange--the ukulele was not staying in tune. We were in a hurry, though, so we just moved on to getting snacks, shoes, etc. taken care of. As I finally shooed the last of the kids out the door to get in the van, Emma came running back in. One string on Madison's ukulele had broken just as they were getting in the car! Fortunately Emma's ukulele was ready to go, so we just grabbed hers. I realized as I rushed to the van that if the string had broken even ten minutes later we would not have been able to get turned around in traffic to get the other ukulele and still get to the performance on time. Although it seems like a small thing, I knew it was a miracle and that the Lord was watching out not only for Madison but also for me and my efforts to take care of this family.

The Larsen Family Easter Miracle--Grandma Larsen

The Larsen Family Easter Miracle

No, I'm not talking about the Atonement but about a much smaller miracle that happened in the Larsen household a lot of years ago.  At the time we were doing a lot of missionary work with the Mexican laborers who came into the country illegally to get work so that they could send their wages home to their families and provide a better living for them than they could if they would have stayed in Mexico.  Since we were a farm family at the time, we had several Latino men who worked for us doing all kinds of jobs including moving sprinkler pipe and picking lava rock up from the fields so that the crops could be planted without the machinery getting messed up by the lava rock.  It was spring time and so we had recently hired several Latino men and they were likable fellows.  They really enjoyed our children since most of them left their own children back in Mexico and were homesick for them.

Well, the kids and I thought it would be a sweet thing to buy some Easter goodies for these workers but when we went to the store to get some of the baskets and candy we could see that it was going to take nearly all of our grocery money to buy the treats and we didn't know how we would have money then for our family if we spent it on the Easter goodies for these men.  We discussed it and decided that we wanted them to have a good experience for Easter since they were far from home and that we would put our own needs aside and buy some goodies for them.  We did this and prepared our gifts.  

A couple of days before Easter I received a phone call from a furniture store in Blackfoot.  They were trying to find carpet remnants of a particular kind of carpet and in their records they had information that we had purchased several months before this particular carpet for our family room and they wondered if there had been any remnants left.  I assured them that there were.  We had been given the remnants after the carpet layers were through with our project and we had rolled them up and put them downstairs in the storage room and they were still there, in pristine condition.  The store manager sent someone out to pick up the remnants and when he arrived he carried the carpet out to his pickup and then figured how many yards we had given him and he wrote us out a check for that amount.  It was far more than we had spent on the Easter goodies for our Latino friends and provided us with plenty of goodies and a delicious Easter meal on the amount received!  We knew that it was a small Easter miracle!