I was two minutes away from being a gypsy's daughter.
Let me explain.
One cold Toronto winter, my mom sat huddled on the bus, her mind stumbling over the accounting concepts she had just barely learned, and noticed two shiny black tags. The tags were worn by two girls, young and bright eyed, as they animated Jesus Christ and salvation with their excited hands, deep in a conversation with an indulgent Indian woman.
My mom, who could never mask her facial expressions particularly well, simply stared. The girls must have noticed and smiled. They eagerly pulled out their notebooks and asked for her phone number. My mom, who had recently awakened to her blossoming yearning for higher meaning, started reciting her familiar digits. All of a sudden, the bus pulled to a violent screech and the girls got up to go. It was their stop. They hurried off the bus, while twisting behind to catch the last of my mom's number.
The door closed with a stubborn finality. My mom shrugged. She never did finish telling them the last two digits of her number.
--
Another frustrating accounting class. Another bus ride.
This time my mom plopped down tiredly beside a large woman. The woman looked at my mom intensely and asked her if her birthday was May XX. Spot on. My mom whipped her head around, frowned, and consciously checked to see if her ID was exposed.
The large woman with the fleshy hands and the exaggerated rings ('a really gypsy type' as my mom later explained) patted her and told her to stop checking. She nonchalantly explained that she had looked into the crystal ball that morning and foresaw that she would sit next to a person that day who was born on May XX.
For the next few stops, my mom sat, spellbound, by tales of stars and tea leaves. She promised that she would make it to their large convention on divination later that week.
And she tried. Through trains, buses, crowds, she made her way uptown after class one day, racing to catch the shuttle that took everybody to the convention. She arrived, panting, just to see the bus pull out of the parking lot. Through the blue-tinted window, the gypsy woman pursed her lips and gestured resigned acceptance with her large palms face up, shaking her head at my mother who was standing pathetically on the lawn.
Two minutes. She was two minutes late.
A little down, she retraced her steps back to the temporary house she was staying in. She had barely sat down when the tired old phone rang.
Hello? Hi, we're missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Saints! Did you happen to meet some sister missionaries on a bus around a month ago and start giving them your number? Well they relocated to a different zone, but er, if you're this woman, we would love to teach you more about Jesus Christ.
There were 100 combinations of the phone numbers. There were endless number of scenarios where my mom could have missed that fateful call. There were two minutes that could have launched my mother, and our family, down a completely different path.
But God chose this particularly curious sequence of events. And that was how my mom became a Mormon.
Let me explain.
One cold Toronto winter, my mom sat huddled on the bus, her mind stumbling over the accounting concepts she had just barely learned, and noticed two shiny black tags. The tags were worn by two girls, young and bright eyed, as they animated Jesus Christ and salvation with their excited hands, deep in a conversation with an indulgent Indian woman.
My mom, who could never mask her facial expressions particularly well, simply stared. The girls must have noticed and smiled. They eagerly pulled out their notebooks and asked for her phone number. My mom, who had recently awakened to her blossoming yearning for higher meaning, started reciting her familiar digits. All of a sudden, the bus pulled to a violent screech and the girls got up to go. It was their stop. They hurried off the bus, while twisting behind to catch the last of my mom's number.
The door closed with a stubborn finality. My mom shrugged. She never did finish telling them the last two digits of her number.
--
Another frustrating accounting class. Another bus ride.
This time my mom plopped down tiredly beside a large woman. The woman looked at my mom intensely and asked her if her birthday was May XX. Spot on. My mom whipped her head around, frowned, and consciously checked to see if her ID was exposed.
The large woman with the fleshy hands and the exaggerated rings ('a really gypsy type' as my mom later explained) patted her and told her to stop checking. She nonchalantly explained that she had looked into the crystal ball that morning and foresaw that she would sit next to a person that day who was born on May XX.
For the next few stops, my mom sat, spellbound, by tales of stars and tea leaves. She promised that she would make it to their large convention on divination later that week.
And she tried. Through trains, buses, crowds, she made her way uptown after class one day, racing to catch the shuttle that took everybody to the convention. She arrived, panting, just to see the bus pull out of the parking lot. Through the blue-tinted window, the gypsy woman pursed her lips and gestured resigned acceptance with her large palms face up, shaking her head at my mother who was standing pathetically on the lawn.
Two minutes. She was two minutes late.
A little down, she retraced her steps back to the temporary house she was staying in. She had barely sat down when the tired old phone rang.
Hello? Hi, we're missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Saints! Did you happen to meet some sister missionaries on a bus around a month ago and start giving them your number? Well they relocated to a different zone, but er, if you're this woman, we would love to teach you more about Jesus Christ.
There were 100 combinations of the phone numbers. There were endless number of scenarios where my mom could have missed that fateful call. There were two minutes that could have launched my mother, and our family, down a completely different path.
But God chose this particularly curious sequence of events. And that was how my mom became a Mormon.
