As I made my way down a dark expressway in very heavy traffic I noticed something truly extraordinary. At all the major intersections that would have become gridlocked like the one it had taken an hour for me to get through, ordinary people had stopped, were standing in the dark in the middle of the intersection and with the help of a flashlight or flare were directing the flow of traffic!

They were risking their lives to help others! And equally wonderful was that the public responded by following their directions! The traffic was actually moving at an almost-normal pace. It was amazing! I’ll never forget the kindness, consideration, and courage of those people. Because of them, I was able to get home much sooner than I expected.

I pulled into our driveway and ran into our house. It was an enormous relief to see that that my family all safe. My beloved wife had even had time to check on her parents who lived about 5 blocks away and they were safe too.

That quake had a lot of aftershocks, and some were alarmingly large. We sometimes huddled under our very sturdy dining room table for safety. It was there, by flashlight in the dark, with the earth trembling, that I saw the photo for the first time of the miracle that was soon to be our infant daughter. The photo we’d been waiting for had finally arrived in the mail earlier that day.

I’ll never forget that magical moment. We’d been waiting and working for months and jumping through all kinds of hoops put in place by the U.S. and Chilean governments so that we could adopt a little girl. We thought we were doing it in large part to help a little girl and the world, but we soon quickly discovered that we were getting far more than were giving.

But those are stories for another day. So I’ll just say that that moment sitting under our dining room table in the dark looking at her photo by flashlight was one that I’ll always cherish.

Gotta run. Part three hopefully soon!