Proof that God has a sense of humor

My husband called our future bishop yesterday to see if we can get some help moving in when we arrive on August 22nd. Only the bishop’s wife was home, so he explained to her that we would be moving into the ward and were hoping for some help unloading our truck. He managed to avoid mentioning my status as a filthy Gentile.
Today the Elder’s Quorum President called while Paul was at work to get some details pertaining to our move, such as our future address in Vernon Hills, so I talked with him. Again, I managed to avoid mentioning my non-member status. Afterward he sent out a group e-mail to some of the ward leaders and CCed it to me. It is as follows (personal information removed):
———————————————
From: K.
To: M., T., R.
CC: Bishop H., BJM, K.
Subject: New Family – move help needed
M./T.,
Since I will be out of town, can you make this announcement on Sunday?
Paul & Bridget Meyers (3yr old girl) will be driving in late Friday night, moving from Washington state. The apt. office opens at 10am, so they could use 2-3 folks to come help them move in. They will have one friend from the South side of Chicago coming up to help on the move. They donot have a cell phone and will not be able to reached after the middle of next week, until then, they can be reached at this number: XXX-XXX-XXXX.
Help requested for Sat, 8/22 at 11am:
2-3 people
[Our street address]
Vernon Hills, IL
Bridget’s e-mail address is listed above in the distribution list.
K.
———————————————
Now check out the bishop’s reply:
———————————————
From: Bishop H.
To: M., T., R., K.
CC: BJM, K.
Subject: Re: New Family – move help needed
Brother & Sister Meyers – welcome to the ward.
M./T. – looks like they live right behind the missionaries – let’s invite them to come in addition to the other 2-3 we can find.
Thanks.
Bishop
———————————————
We live right behind the missionaries and the missionaries will be helping us move in, eh? Bear in mind that, as far as I know, they do not know I’m not LDS.
God really does have a sense of humor.

Comments

Proof that God has a sense of humor — 38 Comments

  1. Fun fun fun! I am so excited to hear your report once you get settled enough to blog. Good luck on the move!
  3. HA! I love it. Let’s see how long it takes them to figure out you’re a dirty non-Mormon.
  4. The missionaries always have helped us move. On one of our moves, we had 8 elders helping us. They sang “Put Your Shoulder To The Wheel” while they carried our furniture up to the 4th floor walkup. :)
  6. I’m putting neat little labels on the top of my moving boxes which list the box’s destination room and contents. For example “Living Room — Books.”
    I plan to do a box which says “Master Bedroom — Sex Toys.”
    So I’m betting the joke’s on them…
  8. Nope. Haven’t you read Stephen King’s Cell? I don’t want to become a zombie!
    I used to have one and I almost never used it. I was paying a $60 bill every month for a phone service I was barely using and it was annoying. I am thinking about picking up a prepaid cell phone for the trip or borrowing one of my brother’s cell phones and mailing it back to him. I’m already borrowing his portable DVD player so I can just ship them both back.
  10. BTW, I probably should have clarified that I have no fear of the ward finding out I’m not LDS. 5 years at BYU and 6 in Provo were more than enough to make me feel quite comfortable breaking that news to Mormons who were expecting otherwise. The reason I’m not telling people myself is because I feel like explaining our interfaith family situation to the ward should be my husband’s responsibility, same as informing potential pastors of our family’s part-Mormon status should be my responsibility. And if he’s not ready to let them in on it yet, I’ll do everything I can to go along with him.
    I think he dislikes telling people because the reaction is always surprise followed by, “Well, why isn’t she a member?” He’s gotten as tired of that question as I have.
  13. HAHAHA!
    I have a story that involves moving, my father-in-law, and misplaced sex toys. It’s pretty horrible/hilarious.
  14. If you’re looking for a prepaid cell phone, I’d suggest Net10. It’s run by the same company as Tracfone but at half the price. The phones are very cheap (in more ways than one), but the coverage is very good (although you’ll have gaps of coverage in Montana and South Dakota regardless of which company you use). My oldest son has been using Net10 for the past year, ends paying $15/month and is very satisfied with what he gets for the price.
  16. Hey, wait. Jack, why isn’t YOUR church also sending any moving-in helpers ?!?!?
    Hint: also put some embarassing, or other religion labels on boxes of books.
  18. Chelsea ~ I wouldn’t mind hearing this story, or is it the sort of thing to share at fMh?
    Eric ~ Thanks for the tip on Net10. They look like a good option for a prepaid cell phone.
    CD-Host ~ We raise her in both churches in hopes that she’ll decide for herself on one or the other. She alternates churches every week. It’s not really what either of us wants, but since we can’t agree on raising her in only one or the other, it’s really the only option.
    Bookslinger ~ I haven’t decided what church to attend in Chicago yet. There’s two things I really want in a church for this move: a woman pastor and a congregation which welcomes my part-Mormon family. I also want a church that’s within a 30-minute drive from our apartment. There’s plenty of other things which are important, but those are the first two factors I’m looking at.
    I’ve spoken to three pastors on the phone so far. Two have made me feel pretty good about how they would welcome my Mormon husband. The other was a fairly high-strung anti-Mormon who wouldn’t even let me get a sentence out on my relationship to Mormonism without interrupting me to point out that Mormons think Jesus is the brother of Satan or some other standard counter-cult line. Needless to say, I don’t think that pastor’s church will work for us.
    On August 23rd, I’ll be visiting DeerGrove Covenant Church in Palatine, which is part of theEvangelical Covenant Church denomination. I just spoke to this pastor on the phone today and I like her a lot.
    On August 30th, I’ll be visiting Willow Creek Northshore in Northfield, part of the fourth-largest mega-church in the nation. It was co-founded in the 70s by egalitarian scholar Gilbert Bilezikian and they let women do everything. I spoke to one of their pastors on the phone on Monday and she was great. My only reservation about them is that I’ve never attended a mega-church before.
    I plan to check out a few more churches, but I’m not going to announce them until I’ve spoken with the pastors to confirm that they’re willing to have a healthy attitude toward my interfaith family and we’ve set up a visiting date.
    Anyways, if I had a denomination I call my own or I knew for sure what church I’m going to attend, I’m sure they’d be helping us with the move.
  19. We raise her in both churches in hopes that she’ll decide for herself on one or the other. She alternates churches every week. It’s not really what either of us wants, but since we can’t agree on raising her in only one or the other, it’s really the only option.
    If you do mind me being nosy she doesn’t see this as a “pick Mommy or Daddy” type situation where she can’t be either? If you do mind me being nosy just delete this question I understand completely.
  20. CD-Host ~ I don’t mind your questions at all. I’ve discussed the topic in more detail here,here, and here. The latest one was a guest-post at Times & Seasons, one of the big Mormon blogs, which got quite a bit of discussion.
    I have given some thought to allowing her to be baptized LDS and raising her as an “evangelical Mormon.” The story of the two women and the baby they were fighting over and Solomon has weighed on my heart in that respect, that maybe it would be better to give her up to being raised in the LDS community rather than letting both faith communities fight over her. That maybe that would be the loving thing to do, just as the baby’s real mother would rather see the false mother raise it than see it cut in half. I do believe it’s possible to be saved as a Mormon.
    Still, the thought of giving her over to believe in and live under false teachings just breaks my heart. So I don’t know what I’ll do. We’ll see how things work out for now and where the Spirit takes us.
  21. I’d say the jokes on them – those missionaries will have no idea what they’re getting themselves into when they start trying to proselytize you….it’s making me laugh just thinking about it.
    Of course, it will be more of the same for you and I know you’re tired of it, so maybe it’s not that funny after all…
  22. Well I guess since you are being so open about it…. (and again feel free to delete)
    It seems to me choosing between evangelical and Mormon is going to be picking Mommy or Daddy. I don’t see how she can be either given you are both passionate about your respective faiths. What about a family compromise like Adventist?
  23. OK, here’s the story, I have no problem humiliating myself here. :D So my husband’s dad and brother were very kindly helping us move when we had been married for about 2 years. We hadn’t yet packed the contents of our dresser and decided to just take the drawers out, move the dresser onto the truck, and then put the drawers back in with their contents. I didn’t think through what was inside that “special” top right drawer (I blame it on pregnant brain, I was about 2 months along at the time) but my father-in-law found out when he pulled it out and got a nice look at our “intimate” accessories, including a purple vibrator, some brightly colored handcuffs, and a big economy size bottle of Astroglide. I have never seen a redder face. We all just pretended nothing had happened.
  24. Hmm. Doctrinal issues aside, I am wary of a mega church where you attend a satellite campus. I don’t do well with church on TV. Plus, the other one has electronic paging thingies for their nursery! I think my ward should have those.
  25. From a certain point of view, the LDS Church is a “mega church where you attend a satellite campus” if you count the General Conference and some of the Stake training…
    From another point of view it’s the furthest thing from that, though. Worth a bit of thought…
  26. Chelsea: I was helping one family move in, and their teen daughter had found I had come across a box of her tampons (why in the world were they packed in with empty frames for paintings?). And I thought she turned as red as you can get, without me making any “cute” remarks! Sex toys would be even worse!
    Jack: I wish you well in finding a church that will fit you beliefs & situation.
    Unpacking is a pain, to say nothing of broken items after moving, no matter if Pros do it.
    Yes, I saw some humor to that email. Look out, Missionaries!
  27. CD-Host ~ Don’t worry, you’d have to go pretty far to make me want to delete your comments. Over a year of running this blog and the only comments that have been deleted have been obvious trolling and spam.
    I’m curious how much you’ve studied Mormonism though to suggest Seventh Day Adventism as a compromise. The problem is, there really is no compromise for them. They believe only their church has the true priesthood and only their baptisms are valid, so it’s either be Mormon or be not Mormon. Suggesting that Seventh Day Adventist might work as a compromise is a bit like suggesting to a Conservative Jew and a Mainline Protestant who are in a marriage that Reformed Judaism would be a good compromise. The Jew might go for it, but the Christian won’t be satisfied because Reformed Judaism still doesn’t teach Jesus Christ.
    The closest thing to a compromise church would be the Community of Christ/Re-organized LDS Church, since they still believe in priesthood, apostles, prophets, Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, etc., yet functionally they’re pretty much a mainline Protestant church. But he’d never go for it.
    The best we can do is stress to our daughter that choosing a religion isn’t going to mean picking between Mommy and Daddy. I’ll be telling her that if she chooses to become Mormon, I will support her 100% in her LDS activities, and Paul says he already loves one evangelical woman so why not two.
    Chelsea ~ Awesome story! Thanks for sharing.
    Mike H. ~ Man, I can sympathize with that teenage girl. Until I had a baby, I was horribly shy when menstrual topics came up and I worked overtime to make sure no one ever saw my stash of feminine hygiene products.
    Now I totally don’t care. I’d blog about it if I weren’t sure it’d scare all my male readers away…
    Also, I love Genesis 31:35. It shows that even 4,000 years ago, the fastest way to get a man to leave you the hell alone was to mention your period.
  28. Jack: I have a male friend who’s also embarrassed about any menstrual topics. So, he has 5 daughters! I wonder how he deals with it? I’m more matter of fact.
    “Stash”, eh? Now you did it, a related story: At one work place, a guy needed to add water to his car’s radiator. Another coworker was going to help by using a watering can of the Janitorial crew, but he had to remove someone’s “stash”, as he put it, first. It was one of those unused vending machine tampons! The 2 men there were totally disgusted, I just shook my head, & said “how did that get in there?” The woman from Travel who was with us just laughed, and later made a funny about “maybe we can put that in the radiator leak to stop it!”
    Off to other subjects: Maybe your daughter will become Baha’i. Just kidding there. My daughter converted to Islam for her Marriage.
  29. ’m curious how much you’ve studied Mormonism though to suggest Seventh Day Adventism as a compromise.
    Not much they are all sort of cousins from the “burned-over district” My thinking was the
    Latter Day Adventist movement is likely kind of close. There are some very common ideas between them. Joseph Smith while not himself a Millerite was part of the restoration movement and any of the restoration churches are closer.
    The problem is, there really is no compromise for them. They believe only their church has the true priesthood and only their baptisms are valid, so it’s either be Mormon or be not Mormon. Suggesting that Seventh Day Adventist might work as a compromise is a bit like suggesting to a Conservative Jew and a Mainline Protestant who are in a marriage that Reformed Judaism would be a good compromise. The Jew might go for it, but the Christian won’t be satisfied because Reformed Judaism still doesn’t teach Jesus Christ.
    Well Reformed Judaism isn’t a 50/50 compromise it is like 20/80. But something like Messianic Jewish is a compromise both sides are a bit far away…. for the Christian this is a Judaizing sect denying salvation by faith and for the Jew this is accepting Yeshua…
    Or another reasonable Jewish/Christian compromise (IMHO) is Unitarian.
    And that’s exactly my point a compromise is something both sides are giving quite a bit. You would be buying into the whole 19th century restorationist philosophy, giving up the creeds… and he’s giving up the centrality of Joseph Smith’s revelation. Just throwing it out there.
    The closest thing to a compromise church would be the Community of Christ/Re-organized LDS Church, since they still believe in priesthood, apostles, prophets, Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, etc., yet functionally they’re pretty much a mainline Protestant church. But he’d never go for it.
    RLDS I think that is a very fair compromise (at least for him), I didn’t know about nor think you would consider any LDS as being fair but I love it (not that what I think matters here). I think this gives her a church she can believe in which isn’t tied into family politics if you are game.
    The best we can do is stress to our daughter that choosing a religion isn’t going to mean picking between Mommy and Daddy. I’ll be telling her that if she chooses to become Mormon, I will support her 100% in her LDS activities, and Paul says he already loves one evangelical woman so why not two.
    I feel awkward doing this since we just met but you are very open. Since you seem to accept the Jewish / Christian analogy:
    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/05/study-finds-jews-in-us-drifting-away-from-faith/print/
  30. Jack,
    Best wishes on the move. Hope it all goes smoothly.
    FYI, there is no easier prey for embarrassment than the missionaries. I say let em have it. While they might blush they are also good sports.
  31. Jack, I always considered Gen. 31:35 to just be the earliest recording of a woman using her time of the month as an excuse. (And was she really on her period? I doubt it.)
  32. CD-Host ~ I’m gonna try to get back to you tomorrow. There’s an article on the subject I want to show you, but the web site it’s hosted at is down right now.
    BTW, I’d like to add your blog to my side-bar, but you can see I have them organized by religion and I’m not completely certain what your blog is. Evangelical? Catholic? Or should I put it down as interfaith? (I’ll be adding some new categories as well.)
    Alex ~ Well, the men had no way of knowing, but the women she was traveling with probably knew…
  34. Okay, check out this article by Karen Lewis in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. It’s a PDF-type file and you’ll have to skip it to page 115 where it starts. Karen Lewis is a Mormon who married a non-member, a Presbyterian of some sort, and at the start of their marriage he did not know very much about Mormonism and had promised they could raise the children LDS. On page 117 she says:
    He was very enthusiastic about the Church, very supportive of my attendance and participation, and said that he would be happy to raise our children in the LDS faith. What more could I ask for?
    Later, on page 119, when explaining why her marriage broke up, she says:
    [Her husband] occasionally heard talks in sacrament meeting by family members who were praying for their father to join the Church so that they could be sealed in the temple. My husband did not enjoy feeling like a second-class citizen and did not want his children to see their father as inferior. His proposed solution was to raise our children as neither LDS nor Presbyterian, but something “neutral,” like Episcopalian. That did not go over very well with me. For someone indoctrinated in LDS belief, raising children in the Episcopalian faith did not seem like neutral ground. I found it interesting that although I could accept my husband’s having a different religion, I was very unhappy about raising children in a different religion. The LDS belief system gave my life such deep and precious meaning while I was growing up that I did not want that stolen from my children.
    Anyways, it’s all kind of moot because my husband would never go for a “compromise” church, not even the CoC/RLDS church. From his viewpoint, if he were going to raise her as Adventist or RLDS, he might as well just let me raise her as evangelical. The only compromise he’ll allow is to let her be raised as both so she can decide for herself what she wants to be at a later date.
    We really do try to stress that she is a child of both religious traditions though, not that she’s “neither.” When she was a baby she had both a dedication in my Assemblies of God church and a blessing & naming ritual in her father’s church. So… my hope is that she either becomes a very evangelical Mormon or an evangelical Christian who has a lot of respect and love for Mormonism, like I do.
    Mike H. ~ I missed your #28 earlier. You know, when my mother died, one of the first things my father did was bring out boxes upon boxes of tampons from the bathroom and say, “Here. Do you want these? If not I’m throwing them away.” You would think that a man who’d been married for 30ish years and had two grown daughters would be pretty comfortable with tampons talk, but he still handled them like they were going to bite him or something.
    I accepted his donation and took them back to my apartment, but it turned out to be a bit of a pain because my sister and I were so used to pinching Mom’s tampons when we visited his house; now we had to remember to bring enough of them if we needed them and were going to visit. Finally we accosted him one day and said, “Dad, if you want us to keep visiting (and I reminded him that I am the gateway to seeing his granddaughter), you need to put a box of tampons back in the bathroom.”
    He looked kind of bewildered and then he said, “Damn it! Can’t you two learn to carry purses like normal women?”
    “Nope,” said Jenny.
    “Tomboys,” said I.
    I’ve never seen a man look so downtrodden. He thought the death of his wife had set him free from having to pay homage to the tampon aisle at the grocery store, and look what we did to him. Ah well.
  35. Yes, I have been known to buy things in that aisle in the store. I would do it in a pinch for someone else, if they could stand the possible embarrassment on their part. I help with such things at the Bishop’s Storehouse when filling orders for people.
    I first heard about menstrual synchronization in Biology when I was 33.
    I helped with moves as a Missionary, but not to my, or others, embarrassment at any time. The incident in #26 was later when I was 31. On my mission, I did overhear a member telling some other Missionaries carrying a dresser to “lean to the right or you going to drop your drawers!”, good for a laugh.
    On the other hand, an Elder’s Quorum I was in dropped a ‘fridge down some stairs when they were helping to moving. It never did work quite right afterward.
    The incident in Genesis 31 reminds me a little of an Apocryphal account of the earlier life of Abraham. It seemed that Terah, Abram’s father, was an Idol worshiper in that writing. Abram got so disgusted about it, he smashed the Idols with a club while Terah was absent, and then dropped the club amongst the wreckage. Terah came home, and got angry, and asked Abram what happened. Abram replied the Idols started to fight each other!!
    While this incident can’t be proved to be real, it is interesting in light of Genesis 31.
    CD-Host: Unitarian may be interesting in light of their view of the Trinity. And, I’ve known some Reformed Jews, who decided not to attend the near by Reformed Synagogue because the Rabbi there was a little too Reformed for them! They didn’t go into details.
  36. Oh, one REAL embarrassing moment (for some others) on my mission:
    My Companion & I were visited by the 2 Traveling Assistants (to the Mission President), who would work a few days with all the Male missionaries there. When they came to our area, they were both really sick, to the point they wondered if they had pneumonia. My companion at that time knew there was a Doctor in a nearby area, who was a member of the Church. It was Sunday, and my companion called this Dr. at home, & set up an appointment for the 2 Assistants to come in early to his office the next day, before his normal patient schedule.
    So, the Dr. looked them, said it was bronchitis, and scripted Tetracycline. On their way out, the 2 Assistant went by the Nurse who worked there. She was looking at them kind of funny, and at that point of the 2 looked down at the paperwork, and saw:
    “Dr. Hardy, MD, Gynecology & Obstetrics”
    They got real embarrassed when they found that out afterward.
  37. Those were interesting essays. The comments about the temple wedding again are even stronger in Orthodox Judaism. It is an interesting collection of essays because you don’t see nearly the level of converting I generally see among interfaith couples. I’m used to these sorts of essays where there was more change, for example where one person in the couple converts and then changes their mind. Or where only one person is religious and the other is indifferent.
    As an aside have you picked an age where she can decide? 10, 15, 18…?
  38. Jack,
    5 years at BYU and 6 in Provo were more than enough to make me feel quite comfortable breaking that news to Mormons who were expecting otherwise.
    You shouldn’t have this problem outside of Utah.
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