Recognize and Rejoice with Joella Gifford

Have you ever looked back on your life and realized that what once seemed like a coincidence was actually the Lord quietly preparing the way?

In this week's episode of Recognize & Rejoice, Joella Gifford shares deeply personal experiences that have taught her to trust God's timing and recognize His hand, even when she couldn't see it in the moment. From an unexpected move across the country that eventually led to a life-saving diagnosis for her son, to finding peace during profound loss, Joella's stories remind us that Heavenly Father is aware of every detail of our lives.

One of the most beautiful themes throughout the conversation is that we often recognize God's hand by looking backward. The paths that once seemed confusing become clear as we begin connecting the dots and see how the Lord was quietly guiding us all along.

If you've ever wondered whether God is truly involved in the details of your life, this episode will encourage you to look again. His hand may have been there more often than you realized.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello everyone. Welcome to Recognize and Rejoice, where it is my honor to rejoice with you as we recognize the hand of the Lord in each of our lives. I'm Megan Jorgensen, and I'm excited to meet with you again to rejoice in the Lord through the stories of our lives. I would like to recognize and thank our sponsor, Coach Katie Swift School, which helps keep our episodes available indefinitely. Welcome to Recognize and Rejoice. This is Megan, and today I am excited to introduce you to Joella Gifford. She is someone I personally have not met, but she was suggested to me by Katie Huddleston, and she comes very highly recommended as someone who has followed the savior and is a definite go-getter. If she feels like she needs to do something, she does it and gets it done. And I am excited to hear her stories and how the Lord has influenced her life to help her accomplish so many amazing things. We are going to let her tell her story by telling us her stage of life and then how she followed Jesus Christ or when she chose to follow Jesus Christ. And then she'll go on with her stories. So Joella, go ahead and take it away.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Thank you, Megan. I'm really excited to be here. And that was quite the introduction. So thanks to Katie for that. I am remarried. I'm a widow. So this year will be 10 years that I've been widowed and seven years that I've been remarried. And so we have a combined total of nine children and 11 grandchildren. We have eight boys and one girl. They live as far away as Mississippi and Missouri, and then the rest are in Utah. We love our grandchildren and just enjoy being with them and being able to play and to be at their activities. And for the ones that are far away to talk with them and to visit with them as much as we can. One of the things that I love to do is volunteer. I've volunteered most of my life. And just recently in the last year, I decided to get a job. I've been a stay-at-home mom my whole life. My husband retired and I got a job. And so I currently work for the Washington County School District and I work serving our students that are experiencing homelessness. And so for me, it's like I'm volunteering, but I'm getting paid to do it. And so it's something that I really love and I've learned so much. And it's just right up my alley. Along with that, I like to sow, I love the water, any kind of water. When we moved, we just moved down here to St. George about a year ago. And so we have a pool, and that's one of my favorite places to be. So that's just a little bit about me. When I decided to follow Jesus Christ, I thought about this quite a bit. I was raised in a home where the restored gospel of Jesus Christ was available to me. My mom was a convert to the church. My dad was baptized a member of the church, but at 12 he was ordained a deacon and then never went to church after that. So my mom met my dad, they got married, and then I was born, and then my grandma started taking me to church. And that's how my mom learned about the church and got baptized and started taking us to church. I don't ever remember a time not going to church, but when I was almost nine, I remember was like, oh, you're eight and you're almost nine, and you need to get baptized. Because, as you know, once you turn nine, you get turned over to the missionaries, and then it just becomes a bigger thing. And my mom just wanted me to get baptized. And I'm sure that I've had a say in that. So I was just sitting with my mom on the side pew and my siblings. I had younger siblings, or one that was born at the time, and I just stood up. And my mom says, I just wanted to pull you back down and have you sit back down. Because I was like, what is she doing? And I bore testimony. I bore testimony of uh the truthfulness of the restored gospel and of my Savior Jesus Christ. And as I've thought about that, I thought that was the moment where I chose to follow Jesus Christ. And I didn't look back. Um, it was never a question of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to live my life. It's just been the path that I've been on to be on that covenant path and to follow Jesus Christ and to try and live like he did and to serve others and to just be a witness and a testimony of him.

SPEAKER_01 4:52

That is a really cool story. It wasn't like you were searching for it or you were thinking you were just in a situation where you were supposed to be, a spiritual place, and the spirit was just like, stand up, and you just did. It wasn't something big or dramatic, but it was a turning point. I think it's such a sweet story. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 5:15

It makes me think that it's probably what I go back, like that feeling is what I can go back to. That's what the spirit feels like for me. And that moment I just knew. Of course, over time I've learned different ways to recognize the spirit to help me act and do the things I need to do. But I could always go back to that moment and say, oh, I remember this is how I felt, and that was the spirit. And so I know what that feels like in my life, which I think is so incredibly important as we're trying to see the hand of God in our life and do the things that He wants us to do. Um, we have to be able to recognize the spirit and what that feels like for us. Because for each person, it's different, and it can be different multiple ways. I can feel the spirit or you can feel the spirit, but we have to recognize that and learn how to feel that what it feels like for us.

SPEAKER_01 6:10

Amen. That's very true.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

Okay, I have a lot of stories, but obviously I'm not gonna share them all. Oh, I hope you do, and they're not gonna be in order, I don't think. I have them written in order, um, but I don't think they'll be in order. In order of my life, I mean.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

One that stands out to me and that I share often is my late husband, his name was Sean, after we both graduated from BYU, and then we went on to well, he went on, I went with him, but he was uh getting his master's degree at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. So as he was applying for graduate schools, he applied to several and had interviews, and he ended up with an offer at Arizona State University and the University of Michigan. And Arizona State University offered him full tuition and a stipend. And so we would come out of graduate school debt-free. And the University of Michigan said, Well, we can give you half tuition, which that's amazing, except for it's just so, so, so expensive. And so we wrestled with that because we knew the Prophet's Council was to stay out of debt, you know, be out of debt. And so we thought, that's great. We can go to graduate school and we don't have any debt from bachelor's degrees for each either of us. And um, but we really struggled with it because we thought that we were supposed to go to the University of Michigan. And we hadn't really told anyone, you know, what our decisions were or where we were headed. But one Sunday we were at church and our bishop uh just walked up to my husband and said, Hey, I just want you to know that you don't need to be afraid of a big school. And walked off and left it at that. And so we decided, okay, we think we want to go to the University of Michigan, prayed about it, felt good about it, nervous about it, um, far away and expensive. And we were gonna have debt when we graduated. There was no question about that. And we kept thinking, like, why would Heavenly Fathers ask us to do this? Like, why when we had this opportunity to come out of school debt-free? And so we thought, okay, this is gonna have something to do with his career, the people he meets, like, we just thought of all these reasons. And while we were there, we were just there two years. And while we were there, um, we just had one son, and he was born in June, and then we left in August. So he was just a brand new baby. And he started getting ear infections really quickly, maybe four or five months old, and they just continued to be really chronic and all kinds of antibiotics, which we know are not good, but and he would just scream all night and it just miserable, and the doctors just didn't know what to do. He was on a round of antibiotics. My brother-in-law was getting married, and my husband was like, I'm gonna take Brady as his name, I'm gonna take Brady out to Utah for my brother's wedding. You'll be here, you can have some quiet time, and I'll take him out. And at that point, the nurse practitioner we were seeing said, you know, just watch him. And he had also started every night at 6 p.m. throwing up all the food that he had eaten undigested. And so every night at six o'clock, he would throw up all this undigested food. And so she said, just watch him. She they'd given us some medicine and he'd been doing okay. And my husband took him out to the wedding. At the wedding, he got into the trash where all the wedding cake was that people had thrown away, and he started eating it. Uh, shortly thereafter, he threw it all up. And so I called the nurse practitioner and she said, as soon as they get in town, I want to see him. And so she waited at her office late because they got in late, and we saw her, and you know, she looked at him, she weighed him. He had lost like four pounds in that week, and his little belly was distended. And she said, I'm gonna call the gastroenterologist and I'll call you in the morning and let you know what you need to do. Well, I was expecting a phone call around nine or ten o'clock in the morning, and she called me at like 6:30 and said, He can't see you. He said it's gonna be six weeks, and I told him that Brady will be dead in six weeks. He doesn't have six weeks. She said, So go to the emergency room. So I took Brady, I went to the emergency room. My husband was in the middle of uh midterms, and so he went up to classes to take his tests, and they ran all these tests, all the basic tests, and everything kept coming back negative. And they came into the room and they said, Uh, we think that your son might have cancer. And so we're gonna take him upstairs to do some tests. And I was like, Can't take him anywhere until his dad gets here. So I called the university, his the office of his program, and they got him out of class and brought him to the hospital and ran all the tests and came back down and said, actually, he doesn't have cancer, and so that was a huge relief. They said, but we don't know what's wrong with him. So that gastroenterologist that couldn't see him for six weeks, now he was brought to the emergency room. Turns out that he had, which is more common now, but he's 32 now, and so he was 17 months old at the time, so 30 years ago, and he was diagnosed with celiac disease, which is gluten-free. And so we were like, we can do gluten-free, it's better than cancer, we can do it. And so we did it, it was great. Um, we were in a part of the country where they had a huge support group of gluten-free celiac, it's called a Celiac Sprue Association, and they were right there in Michigan, and so I had this huge support system, and just it was so, so great. And then my husband graduated from college and with his master's degree, and we took a job and we went to New Orleans for our first job, and nothing great happened. He didn't meet any amazing people, and it was sad to say, several years later, I said to him, I said, I know why we went to the University of Michigan. It had nothing to do with your career, absolutely nothing. The gastroenterologist that we saw in the emergency room had studied celiac disease during his residency, and so he was so familiar with it that when he saw our son and saw the symptoms, that he immediately was able to run the test to get him diagnosed, which at that time was very uncommon. You just didn't diagnose for that. And so that was one of the experiences that just really sticks out to me about having God's hand in my life. He directed that for us to attend the University of Michigan when we thought it was for a career success, or the people he would meet had nothing to do with that at all. Those are all great things, but it was so our son could see the doctor that he needed to see so he could be diagnosed at a young age and be healthy and be able to do all the things that he's been able to do. Just as a side note, when he graduated, when Brady graduated from high school, I looked up that physician and sent him a letter and told him, Hey, here's your patient 18 years later, and look at all the great things that he's done. And I just told my husband the other day, and I looked him up, and he's still alive, and I said, I need to send him another email and let him know, hey, this child that you diagnosed, look at all the amazing things he's doing now. And so I'm just thankful for one, for the opportunity to follow the spirit and for Heavenly Father and for his guiding hand that he would direct that so that we could get the help that we needed in what was a scary time for us.

SPEAKER_01 14:05

Wow. So you had Brady and then you moved to Michigan like two months later. Is that right? Yes, yes, and then all the things happened while you were in Michigan for those two years and you got it all figured out with in that time period. Oh my goodness. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

Yeah, yeah. It's one of my favorite look back and see how Heavenly Father was guiding that. Because in the moment, I didn't recognize it. Um, it was when I looked back that I and I think that's that's kind of common oftentimes, um, that we don't always see the little ways that Heavenly Father is guiding us along the way. I'm thankful to be able to look back on that and know that he does have a hand in our lives.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

I just love the fact that Heavenly Father loves his children, all of us. He loves us old, he loves us young, he loves us all the time. But you were in charge of Brady, of that little baby, and he inspired you to go where you needed to go to take care of his child, which was in your care, and how he took care of you so that you could take care of your son. The whole thing is just one eternal round that's just really, really awesome, and it just makes me stand in awe of God.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

I agree. My husband Gray. Gray is my husband now, and we often talk about that and connecting the dots and how God is mindful of us all the time, from the very beginning to the very end. He's mindful of us and loves us and wants what's best for us if we will just listen and follow. Yeah. My next story um is actually when I was at BYU, and that was when girls could go on missions at 21. And I was 21 and I wasn't married, and I was like, oh, my patriarchal blessing talked about me serving a mission. I'm not married, it's a good thing. I'm gonna go on a mission. So I started my papers and I did all my medical visits and all my dental visits and uh did those in the summertime and then came back to BYU in the fall to do that semester. Maybe I was 20 and was gonna be turning 21. So then I could go when I turned 21. I had met with my bishop at my BYU ward, and he was like, amazing, awesome, yes, let's do it, uh, and supported me in that. And then I made my appointment with my state president, and I had it like, I don't know, a week later after I made it. And I started to get these impressions that maybe going on a mission wasn't the right thing. And I was like, how can that be? And then I thought, well, I didn't even really I didn't pray about it. I was just like, it's a good thing. Like a mission's a good thing, so I'm gonna go. And so uh, you know, Enos in the Book of Mormon talked about you wrestled, wrestled before God. And that is the experience that I had one night in my apartment through the night, wrestle before God. I really want to go on a mission. I think it's the right thing, it's a good thing, and no, you're not supposed to go on a mission. And I just kind of back and forth and back and forth, and I finally fell asleep at some point. And when I woke up the next morning, I was like, Yeah, I'm not supposed to go on a mission. And that was really surprising to me. And so I called my bishop and I said, Bishop, can I come and meet with you? And he said, Yeah. And I went in and I said, Uh, I'm not gonna go on a mission. It it's not the right thing to do. I prayed about it, and it's not the right thing to do. And he said, Yeah, you're right. But I knew that, but you needed to figure it out. And then he said, Hey, there's this guy in our ward. You know him, you serve with him. His name's Sean. I think you should ask him to preference. And I said, I am not wasting my money on that guy because I didn't he was fine, but I don't really like him. And uh and my bishop was like, Well, I really think you should. And I said, I'm not going to. And I didn't, I didn't listen to the counsel of my bishop. But thankfully, we have a kind heavenly father who softened my heart at some point. And Sean and I ended up dating and getting married. I just love that it's kind of the opposite, right? I thought I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, and it was the right thing. It is the right thing to do. Go on a mission is a great thing to do, an amazing thing to do. And yet the spirit said, No, no, I've got other things in store. Heavenly Father's got this plan for you, and it doesn't include a mission right now. And so Sean and I dated and we got married, and that was a blessing in a lot of ways.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

That's really cool. And what I think is interesting is he didn't tell you not to go on a mission, but then he turned around and told you to go date Sean. Like one thing he's like, you need to figure this out for yourself, and I'm not gonna tell you. But then the other one, he's like, you should take him to preference. But still, even though he told you that, you still had to figure it out on your own. Yeah, even with his nudging. That's really fascinating. I'm just thinking as a parent and as an adult who's trying to give guidance and counsel to people that are making choices. No matter what, they have to make the choice on their own. They have to come to the conclusion on their own.

SPEAKER_00 20:08

Yeah, and that's what that's what our agency is all about, right? Our father in heaven loves us, he's our father, he's not gonna make us do anything. Right. He gives us our agency, and I think that is what my bishop was exemplifying is I know I feel like you're not supposed to go, but I'm gonna give you your agency and let you make that choice. And then when I came back, he said, Yeah, you're that's exactly right. I already knew that. And then again, he gave me my agency again by giving me this great suggestion that I was like, nope, not gonna do it right now. And so, um, yeah, that principle of agency, so incredibly important in our lives, in all that we do as we parent, as we guide. It's just really important in our lives. And I'm thankful that agency is part of the plan. People used to ask my late husband all the time, how do you get your kids to do all the things, you know? And he used to joke, and it was a joke, he'd say, Oh, agency isn't allowed in our house, you know, which is so false. But that was kind of his, that was just his little joke, like, oh, we don't allow agency in our house, you just have to do what I say, which is not true, but it was just kind of it's it just makes me smile to think about him telling people that when that's clearly not part of the plan and he knew it. So that is so funny.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

It sounds like he was a jokester.

SPEAKER_00 21:35

He was, he was a fun man and a disciple of Jesus Christ, and he just had fun in living the gospel of Jesus Christ.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

That is a beautiful tribute.

SPEAKER_00 21:49

Um I was talking to Gray before this and showing him my list and of the things that I wanted to talk about about. Um God's hand in my life. And he said, I don't see uh your experience with Sean dying. And I said, Oh, I didn't have to write that down. But that's that's just an experience that you don't have to remember and have it on paper. And I have to ask myself the question, it seems to be an odd question, but how do you see the hand of God in your life when you're watching someone die? And how do you how did you see it during that time? And for him, it was an unexpected, quick death. He just got an infection. It was a misdiagnosed infection. It it turned out it was just a staph infection. But because it was misdiagnosed for almost two weeks, by the time they found it, it had attacked his heart, and that's ultimately what killed him. And so this is one of those times where you kind of have to look back because in the moment of those six weeks when you're just trying to figure out what's going on. Um, but one of the things that I do remember, there's a lot of things I don't remember. One of the things I do remember is that in the hospital, when they finally decided to, I had to ask, like, what are we treating him for? Because I thought this is what we were treating him for. And they said, Oh no, we're treating him for a staph infection. And then the cardiologist came in and I recognized in that moment that we were lucky that he was still alive. Like a staph infection could kill people so quickly. And he had gone undiagnosed for two weeks. And so I was thankful. I saw God's hand in preserving him up to that point because the doctor had told us it was something that would he would be fine in a couple weeks. And so I had a son going out to college at BYU and he said, Yeah, take him. And my mom came and stayed with my kids and my husband, and because he was gonna be fine, you know, he just had this little infection and they're gonna give him the medicine, and he was gonna be fine. And then he wasn't fine. The doctor's office called me in Utah and said, You need to get home, like there's a problem. It would have been really tragic if he would have died while I was in Utah, only for those few short days. But it was quick, how quick it came on. And so I see the hand of God in allowing him to live for six more, like six full weeks. Now, part of that he was on life support, but my kids got to fly in that needed to, and I got to get home, and we got to just have that time with him. And so I see God's hand in that. I see God's hand in all of the people that were touched. Um, he was an administrator at the hospital where he was being cared for, and all of the physicians, all of the staff, all of the people that he had influenced in the 16 years that he was there, all of those people, all those people that came and um supported me and whose lives were touched because of him and the life he had led and the experiences that people got to share with me. I got to see God's hand in their lives by virtue of Sean and our family. I got to see God's hand in my life as so this was prior to Come Follow Me being announced. And as part of our family scripture study, Sean would prior to that at nighttime when we'd have family scripture study, he would have little sticky notes and he would study the chapter that we were gonna read as a family, and then he would provide little sticky notes for each kid with a question that was specific to their age about what we were reading. And then we as a family would read and then we would talk about those things and we would counsel together about them. And so when Come Follow Me was introduced, I said to someone, Wow, I don't even have to learn how to do this because in that moment I anything new was too hard for me. So having something that was familiar to me just made it that much easier. So when Come Follow Me was announced, I was I told someone, I was like, I can do this. This is what we've been doing as a family already, and so it was not hard for me, and that for me was the hand of God in my life. Like he knew that. He knew that I this was gonna happen, and so we had been prepared for that, and I saw many things like that in my life where we had been prepared for this, and so it wasn't hard for me to do, um, and it wasn't it was hard easy for my kids to continue because I could do it, and then there wasn't this huge commotion of things. There was already commotion because their dad had died and they didn't need more commotion, and so I just look at that and I'm really thankful for an inspired husband who was doing these things, but I saw the hand of God in my life um in those moments. After he died.

SPEAKER_01 27:29

That's so amazing. Something you say, you said it multiple times. Um, okay, twice each. So I just want to point them out because I find them very profound. One, you see the goodness of a life. You talked about your son and how you wrote back to the physician who diagnosed him with celiac disease to say, because of your diagnosis, this life has happened. And just the goodness of life that just one person has. And then talking of your husband, he lived such a good life, and all these people that he touched because of his life. So, what I feel is just how important each life really is, because each life touches so many lives, and each life accomplishes so many things, and each life is so important. That's what number one that I've heard, and then number two that I've heard is how Heavenly Father has set up things in motion in your life for something that's coming next, and how completely individual that is. Because as you were saying about the sticky notes, I was like, oh, I don't do that. Like, oh yeah, come follow me. Like, I do it totally different than what you do. And um, and I was like, I wonder why I don't do that. And then I just got the answer that because you're not living her life. Like just the Heavenly Father is taking care of me and my family for the life that we're living, and he's preparing us with our situations and our inspiration that we're receiving for what our life is gonna be like. And so I love how you just see the hand of the Lord in your life as He is molding how things happened because it reminds me to look at my own life and say, okay, how has the Lord molded our inspiration and our pathway for the things that we're experiencing? So I just really appreciated both of those things. They really opened my eyes and my mind to new thoughts. So thank you for sharing those things, of course.

SPEAKER_00 29:36

I will share uh shortly after my husband passed away, I had a son who was a senior in high school. And so my husband passed away in September of 2016, and he was gonna be graduating high school and going on a mission. And so he started his mission papers and submitted them, and in his birthday was in February, and so I believe he got the mission call in February sometime, and you know, that's always exciting. And we lived in Missouri at the time, so lots of people who are unfamiliar with you know what this all means and all the friends he'd grown up with, and so they all came over. And before I tell you the rest of the story, though, he had two older brothers who had served missions. He had a brother who served a mission in Norway, and then married a sister missionary from his mission who also served in Norway, and then I had a son who served in Ecuador, and then my late husband's family immigrated from Norway. And so my son that was opening the mission call, his name is Carter. And Carter, we had all the friends gathered in our home, and you know, you open the letter. That was still when he got it in the mail, and he opened the letter and he started reading. And his mission call was to the Norway Oslo mission, the same mission that his older brother and and my daughter-in-law had served in, and he was so excited, and it was amazing. And later that night, I again saw the hand of God in my life because I still could not do new things. And I had done a mission call to Norway. I knew what to buy, I knew how to prepare, I knew all the paperwork that needed to be done. It did not require me to think of one thing new to do. I could just do it and I didn't have to worry about it. Um, and so as much as that mission call was for my son and he loved it and loved being able to serve in that country, that mission call was for me also.

SPEAKER_01 31:40

Just another sign of Heavenly Father saying, I've got you.

SPEAKER_00 31:43

Yeah. Yeah. Um and then I wanted to, I have so many, but I wanted to talk. Speaking of Norway, Carter was still on his mission. And my late husband, Sean and I had always said that if one of us died, that we would want the other one to get remarried. And that was just something that we always said. We didn't want the other person to be alone. And so I think it was something that I don't know if my kids know that they heard it, but I think that they heard it. And so when I told them after about a year that I was ready to start dating, their response probably inside was like, Whoa, and I asked them, How do you want to handle this? And they just said, We don't want to know till we have to know. It's fine, we're fine that you date, but we don't want to know till you have to know. And so I had some men ask me on dates, and I did not go with them on those dates because I just had some things that were important to me. Um, if I was gonna date and marry another man, and if they couldn't fulfill those things, then I didn't want to go on a date with them. And so although I had opportunities, I didn't. Um, and then there is a LDS widow widowers Facebook page. It is a support group, it is not a dating group, and it's amazing. There's over 8,000 widows and widowers on there, mostly members of the church, but you don't have to be, you just have to agree to uphold the standards on that page. And so it's a great place when you're grieving and trying to figure out what's happening in your life, if it's normal, if it's not, like you can just read and see, like, oh, that's normal, what's happening to me or how I'm feeling, or whatever. And and so, anyway, one day I was on there reading and um there was a post from a man. So this was in April or March, maybe, and his wife had passed away in December, and it was March because her birthday is in March, and um, he just said, you know, I just celebrated my wife's first birthday after she died, and here's what I did. And uh her name was Lisa, and Lisa had worked for the church um in interior design for the temples, and so yeah, really cool. And so he had taken flowers up to her co-workers to remember her on her birthday, and so I thought that was really sweet, and I didn't comment much on that Facebook page, but I just made a comment and just said, I love this, so sweet, what a great tradition! Happy birthday, Lisa. And I just left it at that. I didn't look at a picture, nothing. I just left it there. And as I was sitting at my computer, the spirit said, You should friend request him. And I was like, uh, I don't even know what this guy looks like. And so the spirit's like, Well, you should friend request him. So I went and looked at his picture, and the way my husband likes to tell the story is I said, Wow, he is so hot. I love it. I did say, Wow, he's pretty handsome. But then I was like, I wonder how long his wife has been gone. You know, I knew it was her first birthday since she had passed away, but it had only been four months. And I was like, nope, not friend requesting him. I know what I was like at four months, and I don't know why my mind immediately went to like if I friend request him, I'm gonna marry him, but it did. And so I was like, nope, I'm not gonna do it. And the spirit just kept on and kept on, and finally I just hovered over his little picture, and finally I was like, fine, I'll friend request him, but I'm not doing anything else. That's it. And so I did. I friend requested him. Um, unbeknownst to me, he still to this day does not accept a friend request unless he's met you in person. That's just to be safe. And so when my friend request came through, he was like, Oh, that's that woman that made the comment on my post. She seemed nice, all except her friend request. And so he accepted my friend request, but I did not know that because I just didn't pay attention to Facebook that much to know that I could see that he'd accepted it. And so a couple weeks later, now my son Carter, who was on his mission in Norway, he would send letters home and I would put them on a blog, and then I would post them to Facebook because he had a lot of friends who were following him who weren't members of the church. And that was kind of a way for them to see. And I had other stuff on there so they can, if they had questions, they could click on things. One day I came home, I had posted his letter, and I came home and there was a comment on that Facebook post, and it said, This is really cool. This is where I served my mission, and I was in the area right next to that. And I was like, Who is this person that's commenting that? And so I looked on it and it was gray. It was my husband now, and I was like, What? And so I was like, Well, that's cool. So we chatted a little bit, just really quick things on there, and I was a little uncomfortable of having everything out on Facebook, and so I switched to Messenger and just said, you know what, I'm not comfortable this way, but if you're not, I get it. Anyway, four months later, we were married. Four months, whoa! Four months we were married. There's a lot of cool things as we've looked back, so Norway is a connecting point for sure, but when Gray got his mission call to Norway, he was in the MTC and was like, I'm so homesick, I can't leave the country. I gotta stay in the United States. Oh, actually, what he said was, I want to go home. I'm so homesick. And the mission president or the MTC president at the time was George Durant. And Gray went in and met with him, and he said, Gray, he said, I don't want you to go home. Give me a minute. And Gray and Lisa had been dating before his mission, and he called Lisa and had her come to the MTC. And Gray and Lisa went and met in the MTC together in his office, in President Durant's office, and she just told him, I really want to marry someone who's been on a mission. And so he said, Okay, fine. I'll tell President Durant I'll stay, but if I can stay in the United States, and he and President Durant said, Okay, well, I gotta call Salt Lake. And he said, Then he went off to a fireside, and at the fireside they sang, I'll go where you want me to go. And so he was like, Okay, I'm going to Norway. So our Norway connection that led us to, you know, being connected and getting married, I like to say Lisa had a hand in that because she's the one that said, I need you to go on a mission, right? And so see the hand of the Lord in our life from really far back. Um, one other really cool moment was the first time we were gonna meet. I said, I will meet you, because I still didn't know him. I will meet you there. And then we were talking, and I said, something happened, and I said, Oh, just come pick me up. I was out in Utah visiting my sister-in-law, and he said, Great, where does she live? And I gave him the address and he said, Uh, I think my sister lives right by there. And he said, Let me look it up. And he said, Yeah, they're in the same ward together. No way. And so when Sean died, Sean's sister and Gray's sister were in the Relief Society presidency together. No way. So Gray's sister knew all about my story and my late husband. Yeah, just these little, little dots we like to call them, the hand of God. We call them dots, but they're the hand of God in our life all all this way alone, you know, that led us to this point. And so I I have so many experiences in my life where I have seen the hand of God in my life. It's amazing. It's so amazing to be able to see them.

SPEAKER_01 39:55

That is so amazing. I was just thinking, since we're studying the Old Testament, Joseph of Egypt, God knew that this was all gonna happen. It wasn't surprising for him. You have Moses who was born and given to Pharaoh's daughter. That wasn't a coincidence. And these are the big stories of the Old Testament, but he knew all of this was gonna happen from like Adam, he knew what was gonna happen with his kids, and these things are not unknown to Heavenly Father and to Jesus Christ. And the fact that he's so aware and connecting dots in your life, I mean, we can just know that he has not left us alone in these last days. He knows what he's doing, he's connecting all the dots. There is nothing that is new or surprising to him. All we have to do is trust and recognize his hand and rejoice in it.

SPEAKER_00 40:44

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 40:45

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 40:47

I wanted to share a little bit a smaller um experience that I had shortly after my husband died. I was in my closet and the spirit said, You're gonna be the relief society president. And I was like, well, that's strange because we just got a new relief society president. And then her husband a few weeks later got called into the bishopric. And so I was like, Oh, they're they'll release her, and I'm gonna be the relief society president. They didn't release her. Uh, a couple years went on, and then I married Gray in August. And I don't know, a month later, after we got married, they announced that they were gonna be kind of rearranging our stake so the ward boundaries could be, you know, the youth. There could be even amounts of youth in the wards, which meant that our release society president, our ward, was now going to a new ward. Prior to that, because I moved from Missouri to American Fork with Gray in his ward that he lived in, and we would go on walks, and he would take me around the ward and he would tell me all the houses who lived in every house. And I would be like, I don't know. Like, I can't memorize all of this. I don't know. Why are you telling me this? I don't know. So then the ward changes were coming, and they were giving us a two-week break or a two weeks for the change to happen. And in my head, I was like, Oh, maybe I'm gonna be the relief society president in this ward. But then the two weeks came and it was like Tuesday and Sunday was gonna be the change, and I'm like, I'm good. They're certainly not a relief society president picked out at this point. Well, the night before, Gray said to me, He said, Oh, you could be the new relief society president. And I said, Oh, I said, You don't want to say that. And he said, Why? So I shared my experience with him, and he was like, Oh. And I said, But they have somebody picked, I'm sure. Like, I'm sure. And then the next night the bishop's executive secretary called and said, Could you meet with the bishop on Thursday? And I was like, Oh, this is it. This is it. And sure enough, I was called to be the relief society president. But I just remember that because Heavenly Father prepares us way ahead of time. That was like two years earlier, like, hey, you're gonna be the Relief Society president. And I just kept thinking, when and how and what is this gonna look like? And then Gray walking me around the neighborhood. Why? I don't know. And I don't think he just thought he was being helpful. But all of those things, again, God's hand in my life just preparing me for that moment.

SPEAKER_01 43:26

You had to choose your counselors really fast if you got called on Thursday and the changes were made on Sunday.

SPEAKER_00 43:31

Yes. Like that was well, the interesting thing is that I got the phone call, and then Wednesday night, our new ward had a relief society get to know you. So even though I didn't know for sure I was gonna be the relief president or I hadn't been called, I kind of knew, and so I took that night to again God's hand preparing those things in place. I took that opportunity to get to know sisters so that I could call counselors.

SPEAKER_01 43:57

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 43:59

Yeah. Yeah, so good things. All good things. Okay, I'll tell you a story. After graduate school, we moved to New Orleans, Louisiana for my husband's first job. Two things. One, we moved down there with our stuff and nowhere to live. Like we had two children. Uh one was born in May, and we moved in July down there, maybe June. Like it was pretty fast, probably July. So again, two-month-old baby moving down to New Orleans. You really like moving with young children. Yes, yes, yes. And so we got down there. We did not know anything about New Orleans. We did not know what was a good part of town, what was a bad part of town. We we didn't know. Um, so we asked some people, we did our best, and we found this cute little townhouse, and it was perfect for our family. It was great, it served us well. We were attached to our neighbors, and they were an older couple, but they had a son who I don't believe had ever been married, but he was probably in his 30s. And one thing about New Orleans is when it rains, it floods. Like you're below sea level, so if you get any hard rain, you're it's gonna start flooding. And we had one little car, that's it, and it was a little Nissan Centra and it had no air conditioning, and it was our car. It got us to where we needed to go, and we just made it work. Well, the waters on our street just started rising and rising, and pretty soon our car is flooded. We were like, okay, now what? So we just wait for all the waters to go down, dry it out, and in those cars, I did know this, but in those cars, the beach electric board, or I don't know the proper term, but whatever it was, was actually under the seat, the driver's seat. So it got wet, it was fried. So our car was not gonna work or starved. Well, our next door neighbor, the son, happened to work on cars, and he knew these people that had this junkyard, and he just went to the junkyard and found our exact car and pulled the whatever we needed out of the car and brought it in and fixed our car for us. Whoa. And I just thought of that story today because I thought, you know, it didn't seem like much. It was just a neighbor, coincidentally, not coincidentally, because there are no coincidences. But he was able to fix that little car. We had just come out of graduate school, really far in debt, had barely started a job, didn't have a lot of money. And he just got that for us and said, I'll pay for it. It's fine. And he fixed it for us and off we went. And I was thinking about that day and thought, you know what? That is, that's the hand of God, just putting those things in place for us so that it wouldn't be super stressful. And I found that in my life that if I will trust Heavenly Father and the things that are happening in my life and that he loves me, I'm his child, and he wants what's best for me. That even when things seem really hard, or how are we gonna make this, or who knows? That if I will just trust that that I will see his hand and that it will be okay. When my late husband was dying, when he was on life support, my mom and dad came out and they'd been out a little bit before, and I said, It's gonna be okay. And I think my mom took that to mean that he's gonna recover, he's gonna live. And when he died, she said to me, Well, now what? And I said, It's gonna be okay. My it's gonna be okay never meant he's gonna live and it's gonna be great. It was it's gonna be okay. God's got me. I'm his daughter, and he loves me, and he has a plan, and I have to trust in that, and I do trust in that, and I've seen it as I've testified tonight over and over and over again in my life that he is guiding me if I will follow. I've shared a lot of big stories, you know, because those are the ones we tend to remember the most. But I have others too that that aren't quite as big, and some that are really sacred and really special to me that no one else would probably even appreciate, you know, because they're so sacred and special to me. But I'm just really blessed. And we all are, we're all really blessed if we will just look. If we will look, God's there and he is a part of our life every single day.

SPEAKER_01 48:57

Joela, thank you for that testimony. I've really felt the spirit testify that God is in our lives if we look. He loves us, he loves us so desperately and so deeply, and he is in relentless pursuit of us, not just to return home to him, but to help us. No, he's not gonna give us everything we pray for, but he knows when you're gonna have a son with celiacs and he's gonna help you through it. He's not gonna take the celiacs away, but he's gonna help you through it. He knows your car's gonna get fried. He's not gonna take that away, but there's a neighbor next door that can help you. He knows that your husband is going to pass away, but he's gonna help you through it, and it's gonna be okay. And he knows that you're gonna remarry Gray, and he set it up way in advance so that you would have all of these touch points. It's been an absolute beautiful testimony that you have laid out for us. And on that note, I want to ask you what action or practice would you suggest to help others to recognize and rejoice in God's hand in their lives?

SPEAKER_00 49:58

Well, I am have not been very good at this, but as we've been um studying the Old Testament, and I'm sure that you've heard it referred to as the Red Sea moments in our lives, um, I've kind of been called to repentance. I have a son on a mission right now in Honduras, and in the beginning of his mission, he was really, really struggling, like really struggling. My counsel to him was write down the daily ways that you see God's hand in your life. Write them down, even if it's just one thing. God is there, he's aware of you. Find it and write it down. Even if it's, I got to get a slushie today in Honduras. God provided someone with a slushie, and that's one of your favorite things. Just find something that shows you that God is there. And so I take little notes on my phone, like, oh, I had this experience. I'm not super great at it. But as I we've been studying the Old Testament and talking about those Red Sea moments, um, I've tried to be better. And so being able to reflect on those for this podcast has been amazing. And so I have more things that I need to write about. Um that would be what I would say is a is a best practice for remembering and seeing the hand of God. And President Iring taught the same thing, right? He taught that in his conference talk, and that's what he did every night. He wrote down the way he saw God's hand in his life. I can't think of a better way because it's something to look back on and to remind you, just like they talked about in the beginning, that experience after I got baptized. Like I won't forget that. That's not something I will ever forget. That was a pivotal moment in my testimony, and I will never forget it. But I there are many, many experiences that I've had that I know I haven't written down, and I don't remember them. And I wish I had written them all down. And so that would be my encouragement, my counsel, my advice to myself and to everybody else is to take a minute, and even if it's in an in your notes app on your phone, just write like this happened today, or I had this experience, and it's so great. And it allows you the opportunity to share with people. And I get really excited when I have moments like this that I can, you know, markle pull on my kids and say, Hey, this really cool thing happened today, and it's there every day. And this week, as I've been thinking about this and writing down, I've been looking for God's hand in my life, and it's there, he's there, he's there every day. That would be my advice is write it down, write it down regularly so that you have it. I told my kids on the phone that I was doing this podcast on Marco Polo today, and they're like, Oh, what? And I was like, Yeah, I've done a few other ones, and they were like, What? You've never told us, and I'm like, I know. And I thought this week I probably should write them down somewhere so that when I die, posterity can be able to see them and you know hear my testimony, because it's not very often that we get to spend this long sharing testimony, you know, and somebody can sit and listen to it. So thank you for that. Thank you for that opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 53:12

My pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us today and your testimony. And I do hope that your posterity listens to this again and again because it is very special. I agree with you. Thank you for listening to Recognize and Rejoice, where we come together to rejoice in the many ways that the Lord shows up in each of our journeys in unique ways. We hope you have found peace and joy in the time you've spent with us today, and encourage you to continue recognizing and rejoicing in the hand of the Lord in your own life. We would be honored if you followed and shared this podcast so others may come and rejoice with us. If you or someone you know would like to be a guest or co host, please send us a text and we'll see what we can do. See you again next week.