Oh, to be the size of an ID card!

Life is full of those funny moments where you just think, "How in the world did THAT happen?" This details one of those moments in my recent history.

I work at the Missionary Training Center as a custodian in the early mornings. The building I work in has a barbershop on the first floor, a call center on the second floor where people can call in for free items from the LDS church, and dorm rooms for elders on the third and fourth floors. The dorm floors are locked and can only be accessed by blue cards given to the missionaries that live there, or by student ID cards that the employees are given. I lost my card a couple of weeks ago, but I knew that it had to be in my building, and I kept expecting it to show up again. So I didn't replace it for about two weeks. I went out of town (for my Washington trip) and came back and it STILL hadn't been turned in, so I decided it was time to replace it. I couldn't figure out where it could have been lost in the MTC where no one would have found it, but I decided to go ahead and replace it anyway, which I did last week.

Well, on Monday I got a message from my friend Tyler who works in the call center saying that he had my ID and that I should come pick it up! I wondered why he had had it this long and didn't say anything about it. I was kind of annoyed about replacing it because it costs $10 and I've had to replace my ID three times since January (although before that, I had kept my original ID ever since I started at BYU in 2002!). When I went in to his office today, Tyler gave me the card and I asked him why he hadn't told me about it earlier. He explained that someone else from his office had found it (I must have dropped it while I was dusting in there) and had looked up the name to find out where the missionary who had dropped it was going. That's right! Whoever this was thought that a missionary had left their student ID card at the MTC, and he mailed it to my mission! Of course, they returned it to the MTC. I'm sure the mission office in Nauvoo was surprised to be getting mail for a missionary that left the mission more than a year and a half ago!

I lamented that I hadn't been sent to Nauvoo along with the ID. I haven't been back to my mission since I left it in November 2006, and I would have loved seeing it again. I recently heard about an opportunity to go there as a counselor for Especially for Youth (a week of spiritual summer camp for LDS youth), and I think I'm going to look into it. My source tells me that they only hire EFY counselors for Nauvoo if they've been to Nauvoo before, so I think I've got a chance of being chosen because of my 10 months experience there! That would be so nice!