Coincidences

Shortly after Mitch received his mission call, I received an email from one of my good friends from high school that I still see about once a year.  She has a son the same age as Mitch.  She asked in the email if Mitch was going on a mission and told me that her son, Austin, had received a call to Nebraska and was entering the MTC on June 27^th.  I replied telling her that Mitch also reported to the MTC on June 27th!  We emailed back and forth a few times saying how glad we were that they were staying in the United States, wouldn’t it be neat if our boys could meet, that that they should look for each other at the MTC, etc.

A few days before he left I reminded Mitch to watch for an Elder Mansfield.  He reminded me that there are thousands of missionaries in the MTC, with several hundred new missionaries each week, so it was pretty unlikely that he would meet him.
The day after we dropped our sons off at the MTC, Kerry and I were talking on the phone about how the last few days had been.  I told her how Mitch had requested homemade oreos at his farewell and how disappointed he was that they were gone before he had gotten one.  Since I was still in SLC, I told her I was thinking of making oreos for him and taking them on Friday to one of those same day MTC delivery places.  She thought it was a great idea and said she should send cookies to Austin too.  I suggested that since a batch makes a lot, that I should just make them and share the batch with her and maybe in a week or two she could make cookies and do the same.  

The next day I went to her house with the cookies and we boxed them up for our boys.  As we addressed the packages we were surprised to discover that Mitch’s and Austin’s MTC mailbox numbers were the exact same.   I had also just received our first email from Mitch & he told us about his companion, Elder Chapell, and how he wasn’t going to New York like rest of them in his room, but was going to Omaha Nebraska.  That is the same mission Kerry’s son is going to!   So we stood in her kitchen and figured out that our boys have got to be in the same district (group of 8-12 missionaries).  We also talked about how they were likely to share their packages with the guys in their district.  We laughed about what their response would be when they got similar packages from their moms, on the same day, with the same individually wrapped homemade oreos in them.   We wonder if they will put two and two together and figure out that they were the ones they were told to keep an eye out for.