Tender Mercies

Guess what! Our missionary is home and no longer a missionary! I have to share his home coming, because he was blessed all the way home. In turn we were too.

Originally he was scheduled to have a 5 hour layover in Denver. We had tried to have that changed, but in so doing we would have had to drive 5 hours to pick him up instead of 5 minutes. I know. When he arrived in Denver another traveler saw him and asked him where he was headed. He told the gentleman and mentioned his layover. The gentleman suggested that he see if he could catch the earlier flight. When Flights aren't full they will allow it at times. So just for fun our young man headed over and asked. They opened the door and let him on.

When he arrived to our small po-dunk of an airport he asked for directions to a public phone. They didn't have one and apparently nobody had one on them for him to borrow. As he was asking around another mother who had just dropped off her son noticed his name tag and asked if by chance he was related to my hubby.

Mean while at the house we were trying to clean things up some and get ready for his return. Things were a little hectic at the moment, we had had some friends stop by, and suddenly I was getting one phone call after another. When things looked like they were slowing down the door bell rang. It kept ringing. My husband was in the living room and I couldn't figure out why he wasn't getting it, so I ran in to find my husband helping our youngest with something. I went to the door and saw a glimpse of black, looked out to see the car and didn't recognize it, but the driver was one of my husbands colleagues, she was grinning from ear to ear. I looked back to see who was at the door and it was OUR MISSIONARY!!!! home 4 1/2 hours early!!!!(and I got to be the lucky one to see him first!)

The plan had been to go with him the following day to get him released. We were able to make arrangements to do it that very night, instead of driving 2 hours to do it, we were able to go 45 min. After his release we went to dinner and then headed home. when we were about 18 miles form home I thought I saw a plane land half an hour before scheduled. When we got in town we decided to stop by the air port and see if his luggage had arrived. It had not only arrived but had been unloaded and was ready for him.

So the tender mercies were that he arrived home early, was released, had dinner, received his luggage, and was home to shower all before his plane had been scheduled to land. We were able to put in a lot of love'n in that four and a half hours we couldn't have done otherwise. Just saying, it was sweet to have him come home!