Monumental stupidity to faith promoting story
Posted: Mon Jun 24, 2019 6:47 am
My TBM parents decided to take a three week cross country drive to see the sites, visit old friends, and be good Mormons.
My parents are mid-late 60s, but my dad had "health problems" that are so severe that he can't do much more than watch TV for 10-12 hours a day. Taking the riding mower out is such an undertaking for him that he lets us hear about it for at least two days. He can't even walk to the microwave to heat up his Nutrisystem packet. However, when something comes up that he is interested in, he is miraculously cured and will just jump up and do it. Basically, while he may have legit medical issues, he has found a way to guilt everyone around him to do everything for him so he can be uber lazy. The majority of his heal issues are from the fact he does nothing except sleep, eat, and watch TV.
So while they were out in Wyoming, the decided to try to find the graves of some of my dad's ancestors who died along the Oregon Trail back in the 1850's. These graves were really out in the middle of nowhere, in US forest service country. Several hours drive from any city, up the in mountains, a few miles from even a paved road. So they follow some maps to find it. This leads them up into the mountains, where even though its June, are still snow covered. They are driving a new, but trouble prone Honda CRV.* My dad won't drive so my mom is. She isn't very good in snow to start with** and has no experience with driving off road. The car it not equipped for winter driving since it is summer back home. They have very few provisions, no backup communications, etc.
They find the grave site and actually manage to find two additional children that were not known before.
On the way out, they get lost between snow covered roads and issues with their paper maps. There is no cell service at all, let along data. So they can't use the GPS on the phone since it can't download the local map package. During this, they manage to slide the car off the road and into a ditch, getting stuck. They spend the night in the car. In the morning, my dad is too scared to go out, so he had my mom go for help. She hikes 4 hours until she can find a local rancher who can contact help. A couple local ranchers work with the Forest Service Ranger and they pull my parent's car out of the ditch and get them back to paved, weather treated roads, and "escort" them to more developed roads. Needless to say, the locals were not impressed. During this hike, my mom damages her phone when it gets dropped in a steam and she injures her foot, requiring her to visit a local urgent care when they finally get pulled out and into town somewhere.
Even with my mom's foot bandaged up, they make sure they stop at the next temple they can, Boise, to do the work for the two children they found.
So to the normal person, this would be a monument to stupidity. A couple of old easterners, playing around the the mountains of Wyoming without basic precautions. This could have turned into something a lot worse.
But to my dad, it's a wonderful faith promoting story about how they struggled though adversity to find two missing names and to get their temple work. When he tells the story, it varies between just some minor interlude with some slight inconveniences to them taking on the devil himself to do the work of the lord.
It makes me think about a lot of the faith promoting stories you hear. Many of them, once you take a step back and look at the situation, it is either someone makes a mistake, or they do something stupid and manage to get out of it. Like the story about the apostle who took a wrong turn and decided that the lord was trying to make a point about something or other. No, they made a wrong turn. Something basic gets turned into something that it is not, or it's an attempt to spin a story to save face.
What really happened? What do they not want to say over the pulpit?
* They had already had this thing into the dealer twice for engine problems. On the way home, it had repeated fuel injector problems that several dealers could not fix because they were traveling. When they got home and took it to a dealer, they ended up having to replace the whole engine because the failed fuel injector had damaged the cylinder. This car has less than 20,000 miles on it.
** She usually puts a car into a ditch at least once a winter.
My parents are mid-late 60s, but my dad had "health problems" that are so severe that he can't do much more than watch TV for 10-12 hours a day. Taking the riding mower out is such an undertaking for him that he lets us hear about it for at least two days. He can't even walk to the microwave to heat up his Nutrisystem packet. However, when something comes up that he is interested in, he is miraculously cured and will just jump up and do it. Basically, while he may have legit medical issues, he has found a way to guilt everyone around him to do everything for him so he can be uber lazy. The majority of his heal issues are from the fact he does nothing except sleep, eat, and watch TV.
So while they were out in Wyoming, the decided to try to find the graves of some of my dad's ancestors who died along the Oregon Trail back in the 1850's. These graves were really out in the middle of nowhere, in US forest service country. Several hours drive from any city, up the in mountains, a few miles from even a paved road. So they follow some maps to find it. This leads them up into the mountains, where even though its June, are still snow covered. They are driving a new, but trouble prone Honda CRV.* My dad won't drive so my mom is. She isn't very good in snow to start with** and has no experience with driving off road. The car it not equipped for winter driving since it is summer back home. They have very few provisions, no backup communications, etc.
They find the grave site and actually manage to find two additional children that were not known before.
On the way out, they get lost between snow covered roads and issues with their paper maps. There is no cell service at all, let along data. So they can't use the GPS on the phone since it can't download the local map package. During this, they manage to slide the car off the road and into a ditch, getting stuck. They spend the night in the car. In the morning, my dad is too scared to go out, so he had my mom go for help. She hikes 4 hours until she can find a local rancher who can contact help. A couple local ranchers work with the Forest Service Ranger and they pull my parent's car out of the ditch and get them back to paved, weather treated roads, and "escort" them to more developed roads. Needless to say, the locals were not impressed. During this hike, my mom damages her phone when it gets dropped in a steam and she injures her foot, requiring her to visit a local urgent care when they finally get pulled out and into town somewhere.
Even with my mom's foot bandaged up, they make sure they stop at the next temple they can, Boise, to do the work for the two children they found.
So to the normal person, this would be a monument to stupidity. A couple of old easterners, playing around the the mountains of Wyoming without basic precautions. This could have turned into something a lot worse.
But to my dad, it's a wonderful faith promoting story about how they struggled though adversity to find two missing names and to get their temple work. When he tells the story, it varies between just some minor interlude with some slight inconveniences to them taking on the devil himself to do the work of the lord.
It makes me think about a lot of the faith promoting stories you hear. Many of them, once you take a step back and look at the situation, it is either someone makes a mistake, or they do something stupid and manage to get out of it. Like the story about the apostle who took a wrong turn and decided that the lord was trying to make a point about something or other. No, they made a wrong turn. Something basic gets turned into something that it is not, or it's an attempt to spin a story to save face.
What really happened? What do they not want to say over the pulpit?
* They had already had this thing into the dealer twice for engine problems. On the way home, it had repeated fuel injector problems that several dealers could not fix because they were traveling. When they got home and took it to a dealer, they ended up having to replace the whole engine because the failed fuel injector had damaged the cylinder. This car has less than 20,000 miles on it.
** She usually puts a car into a ditch at least once a winter.
