Watched Over

A guardian angel is watching out over the dental clinic. 

I observed an instance on Thursday. 

Sister Stewart had gone to help at the Mabuhay house on Wednesday so Sister Hoem’s and I were the ones keeping up the paperwork. When we pulled up the patient charts for the next day we realized that most of them had already been seen, so that meant they hadn’t been reprioritized on the shared computer drive.

It is called the U drive and everyone from the MTC, Dental Clinic, MRC and Area office uses that same computer drive to keep schedules, pictures and information all in one place on a shared computer – it is complicated and amazing. When we prioritize the missionaries according to need the computer spits out our schedule for the next day according to all the parameters set.

I decided not to wait for Sister Stewart to come back – it could be early or late entirely depending on traffic. After re-prioritizing and printing up a new schedule I realized that there were not as many appointments as the previous schedule had, in fact there was a three hour gap between the early appointments and the afternoon appointments. I brought my concern to Sister Stewart when she came back and realizing I had already made the schedule she threw up her hands and said, “I’m not touching it. You made it, you own it.” I laughed and inside am deeply grateful for her leadership style. Whenever I work hard on something - I own it.

Thursday rolls around and after the early morning missionaries from the MTC are gone we are waiting for one missionary from Manila – who doesn’t show up. But an hour later two missionaries from the field come in for an appointment. I scramble quickly and get the chart and take him into Dr. Stewart asking if he could see him. Dr. Stewart loves to have a patient in the chair and hates waiting for someone to show up – so I know in the back of my mind he’s going to say yes.

About 45 minutes later two more missionaries show up for an appointment and I scramble again and take him into Dr. Stewart.  But I’m thinking, “Hey what is going on?” The expected missionary (and his companion) wasn’t there but two more appointments just walk in?  So I start searching through my records [I am the only one in the office who schedules all the field missionaries] I find out I have muffed it big time and these Elders did have appointments and the missing Elder was scheduled for an entirely different day.

That’s when I know in my heart that someone is watching out for the clinic and taking care of my mistakes – (ahead of time). The day went like clockwork, smoothly and well instead of wasted time with Elders waiting around - because someone unseen put in a three hour block especially for these hard-working missionaries.