Safe and Sound

12-year-old Houston and 10-year-old Hadley find themselves stranded offshore after the weather takes a turn for the worse on a paddle boarding excursion. The dropping temperatures and strong currents make their way home feel almost impossible, until the discovery of the family phone gives them a way to communicate with their mom, MeiLani, on shore, becoming a lifeline for them on their journey home. View shownotes at LDSLiving.com/thisisthegospel Follow us on instagram and facebook @thisisthegospel_podcast Transcript: Erika 0:03 Welcome to "This Is the Gospel" an LDS Living podcast where we feature real stories from real people who are practicing and living their faith every day. I'm Erika Free, one of the story producers, and I'm filling in for KaRyn today. I'm a huge homebody. I really like seeing new places, but my favorite moment is when I walk through the door and take my coat off after a long day or long vacation away from home. I feel like I have an unconscious meter in me that's always telling me how far I am and how long it will take me to get home. And I honestly think it started when I was a missionary in Japan. There was this rule in the missionary handbook that said we should always have enough cash on hand to get back to the mission home at anytime from anywhere in the mission. My mission was decently big, so it created this extra awareness in me of always tracking home base. I wish I could say that I always track my progress to my Heavenly Father and my heavenly home as much as I do the place where I actually live. I don't do that. But the story that I have for you today really got me thinking that maybe that's something I should do. It's told by some of our youngest storytellers yet. Houston—who's only 12—and Hadley—who's only 10—show their experience out at sea far from home. Whil MeiLani, their mom, tells us about her experience from the shore. We start with MeiLani, Houston and Hadley will join in later. Here's MeiLani MeiLani 1:22 So I was born in Hawaii, then I was actually raised in California. So I'm used to seeing the typical beach scene: the palm trees and the sand, like every picture you usually see of beaches is that type of beach. But 10 years ago, we moved to the East Coast. We live about three hours away from the beach. And these coast beaches are very different. There are these beautiful, I think they're called like fox tails and reeds that come up really—and these dunes that you go over and you take a long boardwalk out to the water, whether you're on ocean side or the sound side. The sound side doesn't have all the crashing waves. It's usually a little more peaceful, it's better for fishing, better, sometimes, for paddleboarding easy, that kind of things. Sometimes you'll see like oyster patches that they have a bunch of reeds. So very, very different than the West Coast beaches that I was raised on. We were headed to a friend's beach house to visit their property because we run Airbnb vacation rentals and so kind of to collaborate on that, but also to hang out with friends. We ended up bringing a couple of our family members. So it ended up turning from 14 people into about 30 people at this big house and we were going to be here for seven days. All seven days had pretty much rain and a little snow. So anytime we would see the sun, we'd be like, "Okay, let's go. Let's go it take advantage of the sun." So my sweet niece, her name is Dixie. Dixie went and took out two of my kids. Houston just turned 12 last week, and then also Hadley, who is almost about to turn 10, and then went out with one of our friends kids named Owen. Dixie is in her early 20s, so I felt like, "Okay, Dixie can handle this. Dixie can take those guys and all will be well. She's an adventurer. She's lived years in Alaska, like she can handle any sort of adventure." I totally trust her, 100 percent, that I was like, "Oh, okay, I'm down two kids, then I can totally go and hang out and just maybe I might