Crayon Messages: A Visiting Teaching Adventure

The nurse looked at Cath with raised eyebrows and then laughed out loud with a raspy smokers' laugh. &ldqou;Let me get this straight,” she snickered. &ldqou;You are new, and the ladies from the Mormon Church, who probably knew exactly what they were doing, strapped you with a totally incoherent visiting teaching companion and a bunch of inactives? That is rich. What did you do to get on their bad side?” She chortled again.

Cath Reed has been feeling desperately lonely. With a husband always traveling, a daughter on the brink and still adjusting to her new ward, she hopes her new visiting teaching route will bring some much needed companionship. Then she finds out she has been given the hardest visiting teaching route ever with the surly inactive Bishop's wife at the top of the list. At least her companion Gwen seemed nice, an older woman in a nursing home who said no one had visited her in years.

Using this to her advantage, Cath calls her new sisters and convinces them to cheer Gwen up. Surprisingly most agree but when Cath arrives at the Pleasant Valley Home for the Elderly she is disappointed to find Gwen fast asleep. Apparently Gwen has a sleeping disorder called KSL and no one knows when she will wake up — it could be weeks. Armed with a bucket of crayons and a handful of paper, Cath convinces the sisters to write Gwen notes so when she does wake up, she'll know some cares. What no one guessed is that Gwen would write back and change all of these women's lives forever.