2024/34 MUDDY MIRACLES

 We live in the foothills of Farmington UT, a small city halfway between Salt Lake City and Ogden.  If you’re at all familiar with Farmington, you would know the power of the east winds that come whipping down through the canyon and out toward the Great Salt Lake. Just yesterday my husband Dave took the trailer full of tree limbs and trunk to the dump, finishing a three-day task of cleaning up a large tree felled by the east winds of last week. This place is used to the wind. The century old scrub oaks on our property stretch their branches out toward the lake as evidence.

When we first moved here, from Pennsylvania, we experienced intense east winds that left us without power for three days. I recall standing at the window in our house watching a full section of the neighbor’s fence swirl through the air like the Wizard of Oz. Not long after that an unseasonably hot Memorial Day weekend melted the snows in the mountains too quickly and we had flooding all over the valley. People were floating in canoes down State Street in Salt Lake City. Here in Farmington, we had a mudslide that completely buried three houses and partially covered others. Gratefully, no one was killed. I remember helping with the cleanup of that, pregnant with our daughter Kate. This was in 1983. That mudslide occurred in downtown Farmington, near the old rock chapel.

When Farmington was settled in 1847 it was untamed and fertile, a little space of workable land in the bottleneck between the Great Salt Lake to the west and the Wasatch Mountains to the east. A few families were sent here by Brigham Young. Tasked with creating a community, they worked together to build a livable space. Eventually they had a small town and a whole passel of kids who eventually became part of the first children’s Primary organization for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The community being comprised of religious pilgrims, they gathered faithfully to worship in various houses in the town or in other small public spaces. Yearning for a structure in which to worship, the townsfolk began to try to raise funds to build a chapel. It was slow going. Few people had any money to spare. In the end they did what any faith-driven people would do, they fasted and prayed. They prayed as individuals, as families, as a community of displaced saints. They prayed that they would find people with generous hearts, that they would be able to find work to help raise funds. They prayed for good crops so they could preserve and sell their goods to the masses in Salt Lake. They prayed for affordable materials to be made available.

What they got was a mighty storm with a wicked east wind that whipped their crops and flooded their fields.

From out of the storm there came a crack of thunder and a mighty rumble. A piece of the mountain ripped through the canyon. It rolled down through the crevice of earth, tearing trees and rocks as it went. It all came toppling head over heels down through the foothills till it came to rest near the center of the city. When the storm and winds had finally ceased, people emerged from their houses to assess the damage and begin cleanup. They looked at the pile of mud-covered rock and timber, likely overwhelmed with anticipatory exhaustion. Finally, someone saw it for what it was. 

“Look what we have! Stone and timber with which to build our church.”

So began the gathering of wagons and horses and ropes and chisels. That muddy gift sent down the hill to the feet of prayerful saints looked quite different than that for which they had prayed. And yet the sturdy timber and eternal rocks still, to this day, hold up that sacred old edifice in the heart of our hometown.

We gathered in that old rock church on a toasty August day to bid farewell to my beloved mother. Her casket rested in front of the large painted mural on the wall of the original chapel, where the first LDS Primary was organized. Those old rocks and timber spoke to us.  They whispered, in reverential tones, that the Lord is aware of us, that he responds to our most pivotal needs, and He does it in organic ways that others might not see as miraculous. In muddy stone and tumbled timber, and in the fleshy places of the heart, He gives to us exactly what we need.