Our Thanksgiving Surprise, part one - A Stupor of Thought

Ack! December already? I will sincerely try to make up for my pitiful November offering on this blog. So sorry. I had good intentions.

I cannot let another day go by without writing about Thanksgiving. It was one of our best ever! Because I like to keep things short and sweet, I'll break up our adventures into a few posts.

Let me back up and start with an experience I had sometime near the end of October.

I woke up one morning with the thought that maybe I should plan a trip to see my parents. After I dropped the kids off at school that day, I started looking for plane tickets just to see if a trip was even feasible. I figured I might be able to get away sometime in January after the holidays.

I entered a random long weekend in January and google flights gave me some options like, If you can leave one day earlier and come home one day earlier, you can save this much and then If you can stay two days longer you can save this much. Why not? I clicked on each option and finally ended up with a set of dates around mid-January for a week in Las Vegas for the ridiculously low price of... $127 round trip! I know! Crazy!

My impulse was to hurry and book the flight, but then reality hit. Why was I doing this? Was it a good idea? I knew this price wouldn't be available very long, but my parents had no idea I was even thinking of coming. Would they be around? I had no idea what my kids would be doing that week or what Jeff would have going on.

So I said a quick prayer. I said something like, "Heavenly Father, I don't know if I should do this. Would you please let me know unmistakably either way if I should buy this ticket?" I closed my prayer just as the dryer buzzed so I went into the laundry room to fold the clothes.

I hadn't been in there for more than 1 minute when I stopped and thought to myself, "What was I just doing before I came in here?" I knew it was important and I knew I'd been at the computer, but I couldn't remember for the life of me what I was doing there. I was a little frustrated by my poor memory as I walked back to the computer to see if something on the screen would jog my memory. And then there it was. The plane ticket. And suddenly it was the most obvious answer to my prayer. In Doctrine and Covenants 9:9 it says, "But if it be not right...you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong...." I had been given a stupor of thought. It was the unmistakable answer I had asked for! I wasn't supposed to buy the ticket. So I closed the browser window and went back to folding the laundry.

A couple of weeks went by before I understood why I didn't need to visit my parents in January.
(To be continued...)