Miracles do happen

The last picture before "the little disaster"

I have to record for our posterity an amazing event that happened to our family today. Yesterday was an especially long day for us because Garrett was gone at school from 6:20am until 7:45pm last night. I was expecting Garrett home at 7:00p, so I got a call from him on my cell phone at 6:58 telling me he had to stay longer than he had expected. Meanwhile the kids were in the bath, so I made the call really short so I could run back into the bathroom to check on them. So as I hung up and felt more stressed that he was going to be even later plus the missionaries were coming to our house at 8:30 and the house was a disaster, I walked back into the bathroom and to my horror saw little Carter in the bathtub holding my new (4 months old) digital camera under the water and he was turning it on. I screamed and grabbed it out of his hands and frantically tried to dry it off, but the lens was half way zoomed out and wouldn't close. So at that point I about started crying since we are poor students and cannot afford to buy a new camera right now, and taking pictures of my family and blogging is very important to me and the whole day just came crashing down on me. I desperately said a prayer and asked that Heavenly Father would save our camera and then I removed the battery and memory card and propped the camera up so it could dry out.

When Garrett got home I told him and we both just felt really impressed that we needed to say a family prayer and use it as an opportunity to teach Rylynn about receiving answers to prayers. So Rylynn and Garrett and I said a prayer and then Garrett took the camera apart and began blow drying the inside of the camera. Then we had to put Rylynn to bed but we said another prayer for the camera in her night time prayers. Then the missionaries came for our visit and we asked them to include our camera in the prayer before they left. So needless to say there were many prayers offered on behalf of our little camera yesterday!! So we kept checking on the camera throughout the night and blowing the lens and the LCD screen dry with the blow dryer to get rid of the fog. We went to bed and were hopeful that in the morning our camera would start working miraculously again.

So in the morning Garrett turned it on without putting the memory card in or putting the screws back in and it didn't work. He was a little discouraged, but I suggested we put all the screws back into place and and the memory card in and give it another try. So we did and it still didn't work. By then we were pretty sad, but we still had faith. Garrett then had the idea of charging the battery to see if that was the problem. So after charging the battery for a couple hours I popped it in and pressed the button for the 100th time and it miraculously chirped to life!! The pictures of the day before were all there and everything seemed to work as normal. It was a complete miracle so I ran in and showed Rylynn that it worked and she got so excited and jumped up and said, "Thank you Heavenly Father!" It was so sweet. So I told her that we needed to say a prayer and thank Him for this miracle in our lives, so we said a prayer and afterwards she said, "I am so happy!"

It was such an amazing teaching experience to show Rylynn that Heavenly Father really does hear and answer our prayers, even about unimportant things. If they are important to us, they are important to Him. I am grateful that our camera works, but I am even more grateful for the reminder in my life of how dependent I am upon the Lord for everything that I have and also for the chance to teach that to my children. So we feel very blessed today to be able to post these wonderful pictures! I will never take my little camera or blogging for granted again!