Save Me A Seat?

It is still amazing to me that everything happened the way it did.  There are some times you can see why and how Heavenly Father shaped events in your life to open up a great opportunity for you…and this isn’t one of those times.

I have a friend who served as a young performing missionary last year that started practically begging me to audition to serve in Nauvoo this summer because he knew how much I would enjoy it.  This was back in September.  I had just been to Nauvoo two years previous during a family trip just before I left for my two-year full-time mission in West Virginia.  I vividly remembered how I felt when the young performing missionaries sang "Invocation."  The tears in my eyes swell just thinking about the heartbreak I felt as we left Nauvoo on the Trail of Hope to head back home.  I longed to stay.

However, at that time, I had no job and no money, I had other commitments during the summer that I needed to keep, and I was looking into getting paid to be an EFY counselor.  To top it all off, because of previous experiences of mine, I’ve never had a whole lot of confidence in my voice.  To go to all that effort when I had so much going on and no means of paying for it, when I knew that there was no way I would be chosen out of the however many hundred that might apply from all over the country and elsewhere, to fill one of the ten spots for a performing stage elder, I rejected the offer.  Multiple times.

Fast Forward.  Auditions were long over, the future missionaries had been called, and I’d just forgotten about the whole thing.  I had also found a solid job.  And my commitments for the summer had fallen through.  And my computer crashed every time I tried to send my EFY counselor application.  All coincidences…  My friend approached me again in February and said that now they were looking for tech missionaries to serve in Nauvoo, and that I should come to the meeting.  All of a sudden, I had a very strong drive to go, even though the meeting was at an extremely inconvenient time for me.  At the meeting, I found out that they had only called nine out of ten of the stage elders, and just weren’t sure if they were even going to fill the last spot.  They just hadn’t felt like they had met that person yet.  They said they would hold very brief auditions for anyone there that was interested in performing on stage rather than doing the technical work.  My heart leaped inside my chest.  Had God saved a seat for me?

Long story short, one week later Elder Camp called me and asked if I would accept the calling to be the tenth performing stage elder in Nauvoo, Illinois this summer.  At the time, I was in the middle of a dark street covered in snow, walking at night alone.  I just fell to the wet ground in shock and gratitude.  I knelt in prayer out in the middle of nowhere and poured out my soul to Heavenly Father for how humbled I felt to have so graciously been given such an incredible opportunity. Within a matter of a week, the Lord had altered my course from planning beach parties to planning to serve as a Church Service Missionary.  My heart is so full!!

I know I am meant to be in Nauvoo this summer.  Heavenly Father set everything up to make that one pretty obvious.  I don’t know why I am meant to go, and I don’t know how this even happened, but I will always accept a call from the Lord to do His work.  I am ready to not only learn of miracles, and experience miracles, in Nauvoo…I am ready to be an instrument for miracles in Nauvoo.

Two months of waiting just might kill me.