Our Little Village: In Tragedy and in Joy

I was doing garden work when two of my children ran up to me, panting. “Somebody got hit by a car!” my daughter managed.

I inhaled sharply. My immediate reaction was to be sure my own children were safe. At these unthinkable moments, our deepest fear is that it was OUR child who was hurt.

“I think it was the Randall kid,” my daughter said.

Now I heaved a sigh—not just at relief that it wasn’t my personal tragedy, but that a friend had likely just lost her son.

Matt Randall was our neighbor, a toddler in diapers, just younger than my youngest son.

I ran to the front yard. There he was, unconscious—dead, it seemed—in the street exactly in front of my house. Remnants of his disposable diapers were scattered around him in strips and tufts. My neighbor, Vicky Jones, was with the woman who had hit Matt. He had run in front of her car from behind some garbage cans and she hadn’t seen him. The impact threw him forty feet. The woman was in shock, and Vicky was speaking calmly to her. Matt’s mother, the remarkable Janene, was running down the street yelling, “Is he dead?” Other neighbors surrounded the little body, careful not to move it. I went inside and called our bishop, who worked at the hospital. “Matt Randall has been hit by a car,” I said. “The ambulance is on its way.” By the time Bishop Fred Bandley arrived, the ambulance was there. Fred looked at the scene and realized that we would have a funeral in the ward. “Should we give him a blessing?” someone yelled. George, Matt’s father, shook his head and said, “Let’s get him to the hospital.”

Somehow, my home became the gathering point. The Randall boys, Matt’s brothers, came over, all stunned. Someone else followed and yelled at them, “If he dies, it’s your fault! I’ve seen the way you run across the street without looking! You set a bad example for him!” I could tell that the boys were verging tears and were mostly confused. Another neighbor, Greg Jones, came and promptly offered to give each of the Randall boys blessings. Each took a turn on one of my chairs, and Greg laid his hands on their heads to pronounce a blessing of comfort. All of this was in my living room. Eventually, everyone left and I thought about calling the hospital. I didn’t want to. I was sure that I would hear that Matt was dead. The worst thought was that I might be connected to his room and have to talk with one of the grieving parents. What could one ever say after such a loss?

I did finally call. George answered and said, “He broke his arm.”

What? That wasn’t what I saw. Just a broken arm? The kid had been thrown forty feet!

Indeed, Matt was home within a few days.

Years later, I was talking to Janeen in her mother’s home. She showed me a photo of her grandfather and said that Matt, after the accident, had asked about that man. “You don’t know him,” Janeen had said. “He’s my grandfather.” Matt answered, “I do know him. He’s the one who sent me back here.”

In Sunday school, not too many years ago, I mentioned that Matt had nearly been killed when he was hit by a car. Matt stayed after class. “You know I died, right?” he said. I replied that I did know, but that it was his to tell, not mine.

Well, I’m telling it now. It became a sacred event shared between Matt and my youngest son. And today, Sunday January 18, 2015, Matthew J. Randall, now age twenty-one, reported on his two-year LDS mission to Arkansas.

I wiped tears throughout the talk, thinking of tender mercies and feeling gratitude for our little neighborhood, where we have at least tried to bear one another’s burdens and lift each other up. All of us have had moments when we have needed those around us.

Matt Randall is a handsome, radiant man now, full of life, full of gospel-joy. Here is his talk:

I want to share a story about a man I met on my mission. Buddy was about 36 years old. He wasn’t sincere about anything. (Of course, he became sincere in some things.) He was a man who had been deeply involved in drugs, causing him to do anything just to slide by. He stole—he did anything.

(At this point, Matt sees a former companion in the congregation and stops, then says, “You gotta be kidding me!” And thus the family expands.)

Anyways, Buddy was an amazing man. We’re very close now. We met him in a gas station. My comp had to go to the bathroom, and while he was gone, Buddy looked at me and asked, “What Bible do you have there?” I told him it wasn’t a Bible, but a Book of Mormon. He said, “I’ve heard of Mormons. What’s that book like? I’m pretty open.”

So we met with him and taught him. He didn’t feel like he could change. He couldn’t see change in his life, but he wanted to change. He wanted to repent.

So I’d like to share a scripture from Mosiah 3:12:

But wo, wo unto him who knoweth that he rebelleth against God! For salvation cometh to none such except it be through repentance and faith on the Lord Jesus Christ.

This scripture came very hard, because Buddy had been one of those rebellious people. But he wanted to change. So he made it his priority to begin to change. He still struggled along the way. And he ended up getting baptized. He saw a lot of changes in his life, especially in the way he showed himself—his aura, I guess you could say.

There’s another man I met on my mission. His name is John. He was one of my prized converts—except for one other person. John was married to a “less active” woman, who hadn’t been active in thirty years. We went to visit her, thinking she was single. We visited her and saw this man, John. We asked if we could meet him, and she said, “No. He’ll never be a Mormon. He’s a straight Baptist and he hates the Mormons. No way it’d ever happen.”

So, we began to visit with her and she came to church the next Sunday, which surprised us. Then, one of my companions got the chicken pox, which threw me for a loop. Awkward. We didn’t do a lot of work for a couple of weeks. But the first counselor in our mission presidency was the ward mission leader, and he decided to go with tracting with me to go visit John. We went in there and we posed the question to John, “What would it mean to you to be a Mormon?” He answered, “That would be a great privilege. I would love to have those blessings.” We invited him to be baptized. He said, “This is odd.” He said that he had been given a lot—A LOT—of anti-Mormon material by his grandparents and parents, but it was not consistent with what he was seeing and feeling. He agreed to be baptized.

Then his wife, sitting back in her recliner, flipped up and said, “No! No! No! You will not baptize my husband. I know about you guys. I know you’re all about the numbers. You’re all about baptizing as quickly as possible. You will not baptize my husband. He needs to read the Book of Mormon two or three times before he gets baptized. He needs to go to church several times.”

Well, we continued to teach John, and he did stick with the baptismal date we had proposed. We promised him that if he read just two chapters of the Book of Mormon, he would have a testimony of it. We went back for the next lesson and sat by John. Tears began to flow out of his eyes, and he said, “I know the Book of Mormon is true. I want to be baptized on October 26. There was something you said about reading only two chapters.”

“We read only two chapters,” his wife said.

But that was when John began to feel the Spirit. That’s when everything began to fall into place. Now John is planning on going to the temple with his wife.

I do know that this gospel is true, and that if we have the integrity to be bold and share our testimonies, we can change lives.

Thus I record some of the scriptures in the Book of Matthew J. Randall, the one we thought we had lost years ago.

In the congregation were many of us who had stared helplessly at Matt’s little body as the paramedics loaded it into the ambulance all those years ago. My own son lives elsewhere, and I write this partly for him, so that he can have Matthew’s record. Their friendship has been important, and each has inspired the other.

It takes a village. Not just to raise a child, but to be there embracing one another in moments of tragedy and in moments of joy. It is my solemn belief that the “village” extends to another world, that angels attend us, help us, comfort us, heal us. Tender mercies.