Missionary Blessings and Tender Mercies

This is a picture of Lucia taken the morning after Evelyn's death. 

The doctors were being very proactive with her care, learning what they could from Evelyn's death.

Here's a picture of Lucia on the ECMO machine. 

She is very swollen because they have to push fluids for it to work.

On Monday, 29 October, we were having our devotional when the assistants told us that it was snowing! 

It kept snowing. Later I took this picture out of Elder Shurtz's office window. 

You can see the giant snowflakes.

We met with Pres. Aura on Monday, and he gave us some good counsel and read us some scriptures 

and promised us that the Lord was blessing our family in ways that we couldn't even 

begin to understand or comprehend because or our faithful service. 

He also told us that we would be a blessing to Stephanie and her family by going to be with them 

for a short time and then returning to continue to serve our mission. 

Steve gave me a Priesthood blessing and then Pres. Aura gave Steve a blessing. 

What a great source of peace and comfort!

 After Lunch, we noticed that the walkways were totally snow covered.

Things were getting slippery out there. 

Since daylight savings ended on Sunday, it was now quite dark when it was time to go home. 

I walked sister Airto to the bus because I was afraid that she would slip. 

I took this picture as I was walking back to meet Elder Shurtz.

Sister Airto had brought these interesting green cookies to share with us. 

I don't remember what they are called, but she told us that these are for Halloween to keep the ghosts away.

 Monday evening was an English FHE. We were glad that we went.
It was good to get to know a few of the members a bit better, and it was good to be with them.

 It was especially fun to watch the kids (most of whom are the grandkids of the Lehtinens.)

We bought our plane tickets Monday night. 

We fly to Virginia on Nov. 2, and leave Nov. 9, arriving back in Finland on Nov. 10.

There is a large blossom on the Christmas Catus that is at the office.

On Tuesday, I looked at more ticket options because we had 24 hours to cancel the tickets that we had purchased. 

Every time I looked at some flights, the number of passengers would change back to one and I kept having to reset that. 

The other things seemed to be staying the same, and at some point, I must have stopped looking on all of the variables.

I found some flights that looked a little bit better both on the way out and on the way back. 

The ones coming back sent Charlottesville to Chicago and then straight to Helsinki. 

That looked especially good. It was also a little bit less expensive. 

I had Elder Shurtz come and look at it with me to make sure I wasn't missing something. 

We both carefully looked through everything and decided to go ahead and purchase them, 

and would then cancel the other tickets before out 24 hours was up. 

We got all of the information in and pushed the purchase button and an error message popped up. 

It said that they were unable to make our special request and that we needed to call and talk to the airline, 

but not to worry the tickets were reserved or purchased or something 

(I can't remember the exact wording.) I hadn't made any special requests, so we weren't sure what that meant. 

Elder Shurtz called the airline. As he was doing that, he noticed that the tickets were for the wrong dates! 

Maybe that (the dates we wanted) was the special request that they were unable to make? 

Anyway, he was able to talk to someone and they said they didn't know what the error message was, 

but that the tickets weren't actually purchased yet, so they were able to cancel those tickets. 

We felt like that was a tender mercy! If that error message hadn't popped up, 

we would have thought that we had better tickets and would have cancelled our original tickets 

and would have been left with tickets for the wrong dates that were non-cancelable. 

The Lord was watching out for us!

We were able to go to hurry and leave the office after the ticket fiasco to go to the temple. 

We are so grateful to have the temple so close to us and that we are able to go there most weeks!

We started moving things back to our usual apartment during the week. 

We were hoping that they might actually finish working on our apartment early. 

We were disappointed to see that they were still working on it. 

The bathroom ceiling was still torn apart on Wednesday.

 As was the kitchen.

We were anxious to get moved back in since we were now planning to leave very early 

on Friday morning to fly to Virginia to be with Stephanie and Clay and their family.

This is Elder Shurtz perfoming "surgery" on the mayonnaise squeeze container (he is in our temporary apartment).

He does this with many of the different types of containers to get the last bit of their contents. 

He cuts them in half and then uses a rubber scrapper to get the last little bit.

Stephanie sent us a video that used a doll to explain all the things that Lucia was hooked up to.

As we have struggled with emotion and especially concern for how Stephanie was dealing with the loss of little Evelyn, 

we have had several tender mercies shown to us. One was on Thursday morning. 

Thursday morning, I saw a message from Stephanie asking for prayers for Lucia 

as she was going to be taken off of the ECMO machine sometime on Thursday.  

I was trying not to worry about her, but trying to have faith that Heavenly Father knew what was best for her.  

We went out for our usually morning walk. As we walked through the forest we could see a sunrise, 

and as we came out of the forest, it was even more beautiful.

The thought came to my mind, "Faith is knowing the sun will rise, lighting each now day.
Faith is knowing the Lord will hear my prayers each time I pray."

It is hard to be so far away, but all I could do was to place little Lucia and her family in the Lord's hands.
We know He has the power to heal her, and we would like for that to happen,
and we hope that is what He has in store for her.
However, we also know that He knows more than us and we will be submissive to His will.

The other thought that came to my mind was "Joy cometh in the morning" (from a scripture in Psalms).
I also had read the following from a BYU devotional many years ago.
Joy comes in waiting patiently on the Lord and trusting in His own patterns for fulfilling promises. We don't know how the answers will come to our prayers, but the Lord does, and His comfort is "joy in the morning".

As much as we wanted to be there with Stephanie and Clay all we could do was leave them in the Lord's hands
and pray for them, trusting that they would be blessed for our service.
We know that the Lord is mindful of them and of little Lucia and that He knows what is best for them.

The Nielsens (temple missionaries) called to see if they could bring a little something over for us.
They came over after our dinner. They hugged us and expressed their love
and told us that they had a little gift for us as a remembrance of Evelyn,
and so we could remember two sweet little girls together.
So sweet!    

We had to finish moving from the temporary apartment to our regular apartment on Thursday evening. 
We weren't sure where we would actually spend the night. 
We were excited when we went to our apartment to see that the bathroom and the kitchen had been put back together. 
Since it looked like we would be able to shower in our regular apartment, 
we thought that it made the most sense to spend the night there and be completely moved out of the temporary apartment. 
We had to make several trips back and forth to accomplish this. 

At some point in all of this we found out that they would be taking Lucia off of the ECMO machine. 
The risks of being on it were now beginning to outweigh the benefits. 
This was both exciting and worrisome for us. 
We were on pins and needles all evening while we were packing and moving. 

Here we are getting the last loads from the temporary apartment.

We finally said goodbye to our temporary apartment!

It was nice to spend the night (even though it was a short one) back in our regular apartment. 

It was still a challenge since the closet, hall and office were all still covered in plastic. 

We were extremely grateful to finally get word from Stephanie that the surgeon 

had just come in and said that all went well with the removal of the ECMO machine. 

Here is a picture of Lucia after being removed from the ECMO machine 

and when her swelling has started to go down a little.

We had to get up at 4:00a.m to get ready to go to the airport. 

The Evans came and picked us up at 5:00 to take us to the airport. 

We got checked in, and got through security and to our first leg of the journey. 

Our flight was scheduled to leave at 7:30. 

I was concerned about getting to our connection in Paris because we didn't have a lot of extra time for such a big airport. 

We got to Paris pretty much on time and we found the shuttle, it went the opposite way of where we needed to go, 

but we weren't too concerned since we had gotten in on time. 

The monitors said that the flight from Paris to Chicago was on time.

We got off the shuttle and had to walk to the end of the airport to get to our gate! 

When we got to our gate, the monitors still said on time and we expected that they would be boarding, 

but the screen at the gate said delayed. They said about a half an hour.  

We are so tired already and we haven't even been on the long segment our our journey!

The half hour kept growing and growing. After a while they brought out food for everyone who was on that flight. We had sandwiches/wraps, chips, apples, and a drink. They said that they were not able to make any rebookings for missed connections there. That they would be made automatically as soon as we took off. We left about two hours late.

We were originally scheduled to fly from Chicago to Charlottesville and would arrive at 8:00pm. There were no other flights from Chicago to Charlottesville that night, so they rebooked us on a flight from Chicago to Charlotte and then from Charlotte to Charlottesville. We got in about midnight. The Elder's quorum president in Stephanie and Clay's ward picked us up at the airport and took us to their house.

On Saturday, I got to meet little Lucia in person for the first time!

 She looked much bigger than she should because she still has so much extra fluid in her tissues, so she looks rather swollen. What a sweet little girl!

Stephanie and I laughed at her little socks with nonslip tread on the bottom. Just in case she decides she wants to try to escape, she won't slip on her way out. 😏

 A sweet picture of Stephanie and Clay talking to Lucia.

On Friday when we left Finland, the sunrise was at 7:46 and sunset at 16:22 for 8:35 hours of daylight.

In Virginia, the sunrise that day was at 7:40 and sunset at 18:13 for 10:32 hours of daylight.

In Provo, the sunrise was at 7:57 and sunset at 18:22 for 10:25 hours of daylight.