“On My Property Occurred This Miracle”

In 1961, Alfonso Torres identified the grounds for the first chapel in Nicaragua. By 1962, building missionaries and local Latter-day Saints, such as Mercedes Leiva Castillo, had begun construction on the Las Palmas Chapel. Francisco Rojas Rosales, a member of the Church who was an engineer, designed tall concave ceilings for the sacrament and cultural halls.

Building the chapel united the local saints and missionaries as they worked toward a common goal. When the time came to fill in the concrete ceiling, “the mixer worked nonstop for three days and nights with members taking turns,” said one local Saint. “Everything was like a party. The families and the Relief Society brought food and drinks for those who arrived to work at night.”

Building missionaries from Panama boasted to their fellow Saints in Nicaragua that the islands of their homelands “were a paradise, and there was nothing better on earth.” The Nicaraguan Saints decided that their Panamanian friends needed to see some Nicaraguan beaches and planned a group outing to visit a bay about 130 kilometers (81 miles) from Managua.

The day of the trip, they met at the chapel at 4:00 a.m. to make their bus. “We arrived exactly at sunrise on the bay,” a member recalled. “It was something marvelous to see the sunrise at San Juan del Sur, to admire our Heavenly Father’s creation, and to see such a splendorous sun and contemplate the water in its immensity.”

After a fun day of swimming and food, the group began the journey home. On the road, they realized that they had forgotten to pray for a safe return. Mercedes’s husband, Felipe Silva Castillo, said not to worry, they would say a prayer at their next stop.

That stop came more quickly than expected. The bus blew a tire on a sharp turn and fell three or four meters into a cornfield. The cornstalks broke their fall and prevented the vehicle from tipping over. When the bus slid to a halt, the group was relieved to discover that among the 110 passengers on board there were no fatalities and almost no injuries.

The field’s owner heard the commotion. The Saints feared he would charge them for the damage, setting them back in their efforts to pay for the chapel. Felipe offered to repay him. “No, my friend, I feel lucky that on my property occurred this miracle,” the man said. “When I am old, I will have to tell this to my children.”

While two men maneuvered the empty bus back onto the road, the other Saints knelt as a group in the cornfield and thanked God. “All of us agreed that the Lord protected us from a serious tragedy, but we also recognized that in forgetting to pray, we had forgotten our God, and this strengthened our testimony of the Father’s love for His children.”