A Unique Experience

It's not everyday that you get to drive an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints around. That was the experience Ragnar and I were able to have yesterday evening.

Here are the L.D.S employees at the Rockets organization.

This is how the story began and what brought the encounter into our reality. Ragnar works for the Houston Rockets and some of the games that they have are themed to generate a certain population and get more people to the game. There are actually about 5 people in the organization that work for the Rockets who are L.D.S. With that, they decided to do an L.D.S. night at the Rockets and see if they could get people to come. This is where Ragnar's magic came into play. Ragnars family knows the Uchtdorfs, so when Ragnar found out L. Tom Perry would be in town for stake conferences for our church, then he contacted President Uchtdorf to see if Elder Perry would want to come out to a game and talk to the members of the church. Any of you who know Elder Perry know that he is a big basketball fan, so his secretary contacted Ragnar and they were able to arrange Elder Perry and Elder Snow to come out to the game last night. Ragnar then was in charge of his transportation, so he invited my brother Corey to go and pick him up, and entertain him at the game. It was a neat experience, my mom, dad, Natalie, Corey, Steph, John,Madison, and I were able to sit right in front of him the whole game. They handed him a ball at center court during half time and then after the game he spoke for a few minutes to the members and then shook a few hands (I think that some people wished he could have stayed longer, but let's be honest, he is 87 years old, it was 10:30 and we lost an hour of sleep due to day light savings!) Then Ragnar and I had the opportunity to take him back to the hotel and talk for a few minutes. It was a nice experience and one that I am grateful that we got to have. Both he and Elder Snow have such delightful and peaceful demeanors. They are so calming that neither of us were nervous, just grateful to be in the presence of two men who we believed in and who we felt were on the Lord's errand.

P.S. And the Rockets gave them a win!