When I became bishop of Baker Second Ward 23 years ago there was a family in the ward with identical twin daughters less than a year old.  During my six-plus years as bishop I worked hard to know all of the children in the ward by name.  The Baxter twins, however, were a great challenge to me.  I could not keep them straight.  I couldn’t tell Tia from Tonya.

I recall sitting in Primary opening exercises as I studied the two girls.  Suddenly I hit upon the method whereby I could tell them apart.  Tia had a mole on her left cheek, whereas Tonya did not.  I’d known that before, but still couldn’t remember from one time to the next whether Tonya or Tia had the mole.  Sitting there in Primary I decided that the mole was the dot on the letter “i” in Tia’s name.  From that point on I was always able to accurately call the girls by name.

Tia apparently caught on to my method of identifying them.  To this day I can clearly see her as she impishly sidled up to me one day at church with her finger pressed over the mole on her cheek as she asked, “Which one am I?”

I laughed hard at that.  She was a cute little girl, and that was a cute thing to do.  I appreciated it.  She’d recognized that I was trying hard to know and acknowledge them, and that was her way of letting me know that she acknowledged and liked her bishop.

Neither of us at that time or for many years thereafter had the slightest inkling that 16 or so years later she’d be living for a time under my roof as the wife of my son.

I was talking to Margie and reflecting on how odd it was that that little girl could grow up and become my daughter-in-law, when Margie shared a memory of her own with me.

I was released as bishop in May 1988.  Tia’s and Tonya’s father, Dean, was sustained as the new bishop.  Sometime during that next winter the Baxter family had a terrible sledding accident.  The twins and their older brother, Tory, were all injured while being towed on inner tubes.  It was a crisis that deeply affected the whole ward.  Tonya was the most severely injured.  She was flown to a hospital in Boise, and her survival was very much in doubt.  The whole ward began a fast, and rallied around to help the family in any way that they could.

Margie took the accident very personally, and very much to heart.  She was so affected by it that she couldn’t go to bed that night.  She felt like she needed to stay up and pray for Tonya.  Her feelings were that if she didn’t, Tonya wasn’t going to survive.  So she stayed up and prayed.  Everything depended upon her.  As she was praying and thinking, she was also praying for Tia.  She thought how devastating it would be to Tia to lose her twin and best friend.  Through that experience she became aware of how intertwined our lives are, and how the ward members become our family.

But Margie never dreamed that Tia would become her daughter-in-law, either.  How odd the twists and turns of life can be, and sometimes how very, very sweet.