The Miracle of the Marker

This year was the first year that I have had the opportunity to attend Young Women's camp since I was a teenager in the Young Women's program. It was a hoot. On Friday morning our ward was responsible for doing a morning devotional, it was to be on Testimonies, but the morning got busy and the devotional overlooked and we were off and running before we remembered. But all was good. The plan for the day was to hike to Forum Lake. We decided we would do a shortened version of the devotional once we reached the lake and we had already planned to do a little activity there to tie into the mornings devotional. The activity was to make "I believe" rocks, an idea that was sparked from rocks that our family has found in the Lake at Waterton with positive messages written on the and also from this blog post I came across. We had one young women that was unable to go on the hike because she had had back surgery earlier in the year, so  one of the other leaders stayed with her in the town site while the rest of us headed up the mountain. Before we split up I reached into my ziploc bag that contained about eight permanent markers and handed the leader one. I told her what our plan was once we reached the lake and asked her if she would do the same kind of thing with the young woman that couldn't go with us.

The hike was a good one, but these 12 and 13 year old girls did amazing. I thought I was going to have to coax some of them up the mountain, but they never once complained and they all just kept going. When we reached the lake they were in complete awe and everyone of them said that they were so glad that we had done this hike.

We sat them down on the shore and shared with them our shortened devotional about testimonies. Then I pulled out my bag of markers and told them that I wanted them to find a rock and write their own "I believe" statement on it and toss it into the lake, and then here, part of their testimony will always be. I passed out the markers, and one by one the girls handed them back telling me that they didn't work. I was stunned, I hadn't even thought about testing them, they were just markers that I had at home and were frequently used, so I had just assumed that they would work. But not one of them did. Here enters my 12 year old daughter to save the day. She had stashed in her back pack on black permanent marker because she had wanted to write messages on rocks and throw them into the lake, like the ones we had found earlier in the summer. She said it was just a last minute thing that she had thought to grab the marker when packing her gear, but by so doing, we were still able to accomplish our planned activity. But then my thoughts turned to the two we had left behind and how I had built them up for this great faith building experience, and then given them a dud of a marker and they wouldn't be able to do it.
When we met back up in the town site, the first thing I asked was if the marker I had given them worked, they looked at me surprised and answered that it had and that they had had a wonderful experience. I was dumbfounded. What are the chances that of all the markers in that bag, the one that I pulled out, was the only one that worked? They aren't that great.
But here's the thing that I shared with the girls later that night at our fireside testimony meeting. Heavenly Father knows each one of us personally. He knows what we need. He knows what we want. He knows what is important to us. And not only does He know, but He cares, and He cares deeply. He cared about our little activity at the lake, and so He prepared a way for us to be able to accomplish that activity by prompting my daughter to pack a maker her back pack. He also guided my thoughts as I looked into that bag and saw that dark green marker and thought "green will be a good colour to write on rocks with" and so I pulled out the green marker, not the blue one or the red one or even the black one. The green one, the only marker in the bag that still worked and that was the one that I had left behind. I told those girls, that Heavenly Father loves them each individually and He cares about they things they care about, the big things and the little things. In the great grand scheme of things, whether or not we made "I believe" rocks and tossed them into that mountain lake really didn't matter. But at that moment it mattered to us, and so it mattered to our Heavenly Father.
I encouraged them to always remember that Heavenly Father loves them and never to forget the Miracle of the Marker.