The school bus packed with seventh graders broke down in the parking lot of the ornate, white stone Hindu temple.

It was already the second predicament of the field trip. And the day had just begun.

I had volunteered to be one of the parent chaperones on this daylong adventure. We would begin at the temple, head to a church, stop at a synagogue and end at a mosque before returning to school. This whirlwind tour of world religions started to fall apart three days before we even boarded the buses.

Teachers had locked down the itinerary two months before the trip. It originally included the Cathedral Basilica, an iconic religious landmark in St. Louis. But the very day the school had to turn in the final schedule to the bus service, the Basilica informed them that a funeral service was booked for the same time they planned to bring 125 students.

Oh, the best-laid plans.

World history teacher Neil Daniels had less than half an hour after school to frantically call nearby churches to find a replacement. The Baptists came through. Daniels juggled some of the time slots to accommodate the last-minute change. He also left a message for the speaker at the Hindu temple, to let him know that we would arrive earlier than expected.

The speaker never received the message.

When we showed up at the temple, we wandered into an empty meeting space. One of the seventh-graders whose family worshipped at the temple stepped up and shared tenets of his faith and their religious practice with the ease of someone years older. Another Hindu middle-schooler sang one of the devotional songs she knew. Their classmates respectfully asked questions about a religious tradition completely unfamiliar to nearly all of them. Afterwards, we walked through the sanctuary filled with murtis adorned with garlands and jewels.

By the time we boarded the bus, it seemed the mix-up had actually brought the group closer together. So when our bus broke down, we piled into the other one, sat three to a seat and continued on our way.

It was a small miracle that we arrived at our next destination just a few minutes behind schedule. The youth pastor at the Third Baptist Church welcomed us into their historic building and talked about the basic beliefs of Christianity. At our next stop, the rabbi at Central Reform Congregation shared the history of the only Jewish congregation located within the city limits. We happened to be visiting on the first day of Hanukkah.

Since we were running late, the students ate lunch at the synagogue an hour later than they normally do. And yet, no one complained.

If you’ve been around hungry 12- and 13-year-olds, you know this may have been an act of divine intervention.

Our final stop was no less dramatic. We arrived at the mosque earlier than the time given to our speaker. She was at the gym when she received the message that we had arrived, so she threw a jacket over her yoga pants and rushed over to meet us. We listened to her explain the steps of how Muslims pray and talked about the commonalities shared among the religious communities we had visited.

Daniels said the purpose of the field trip was to expose students to major religions in their communities, teach them how to talk about a subject not often discussed in school, work on critical thinking skills and discover that they can disagree politely with those who have different beliefs. Some of his students said they didn’t know anyone who was a Buddhist or Muslim, but some of their peers actually belonged to those religious groups. It was also a chance to find common ground.

It seems the point of major religions is to remind us that there is something larger than us in the universe. We control and plan for what we can -- and then funerals come up, buses break down and schedules get delayed. And these challenges can make a journey even richer.

Field trips work in mysterious ways.

Joyce Ann Huston had been scrolling through microfilm for hours when she saw a familiar name and screamed.

She had found Ellen Fisher, the maternal root of her family tree, in the Latter-day Saints Family History Center in Las Vegas on a census record from 1880. She had been searching for Fisher for years. Until that moment in 2000, Fisher had only existed in the stories passed down at family reunions since the 1930s.

Huston, now 55 and living in Ferguson, Missouri, had discovered the link that connected her black O’Kelley family to their white plantation-owning ancestors.

She had found the O’Kelleys’ slave.

“Ellen Fisher was a slave on the O’Kelley plantation in Mississippi, and she refused to succumb to the advances of her master, so he blinded her in one eye and threatened to toss her into a burning bush,” Huston said. Fisher did, however, have children with two of the O’Kelley brothers -- her master’s sons.

Huston had heard this oral history for decades at family reunions. The story helped explain her grandmother’s silky hair and light skin. But the family had no proof.

Huston eventually learned the slave-owner’s name, and then found a book about the oldest proven progenitor: David Kelly, born in 1763. (The Kelly surname changed over the generations.) Huston reached out to the author of the book, one of Kelly’s white descendants.

“I’m trying to get more information to find out where my slave ancestor came from,” she wrote.

Huston received a chilly reception.

Then, she connected with Argie Shumway, an 81-year-old, white, Mormon genealogy enthusiast in Provo, Utah. Shumway had posted her detailed family history on a genealogy site, which showed their common ancestor. Shumway had been working on the O’Kelley ancestral line for years, just as Huston had been. She gave Shumway a call.

“Oh, I have black cousins?” Shumway said to Huston, without a moment’s hesitation. “That’s fascinating. How can I help you?”

This connection started an unlikely 17-year relationship between the women. In 2002, Huston went to meet Shumway in Utah, making copies of records and books while there. The two share the same great-great-great-grandfather and a love of family history.

“It’s easier not to believe something than to believe it,” Shumway says about the white author who seemed reluctant to accept Huston’s claims of an ancestral connection. That’s especially true when information challenges the world as you’ve always seen it.

A turning point in the genealogy search came in 2012.

Huston already had the death certificates of Fisher’s three mixed-race sons, which listed the names of their respective white O’Kelley fathers. But they got solid confirmation of the link when a black male relative’s DNA turned out to be an exact match to the O’Kelley paternal line.

“We had found a relationship in our family trees, and our DNA proved it,” Shumway said. “What an exciting day it was.”

There’s still a lingering gap in this branch of Huston’s family tree: She hasn’t been able to find an authenticated record of how Fisher ended up with the O’Kelleys. They know she was a house servant, laundress and nanny in Wilkinson County, Mississippi, whose grandchildren eventually went to college. But Huston hasn’t been able to find a ledger or bill of sale to determine who sold Fisher and where she came from.

“That’s our genealogy brick wall,” she said. “It’s devastating.”

She and her cousin, Nikki Williams Sebastian, have self-published a book about their family’s lineage.

“We have ancestors who came to America to find freedom and ancestors whose freedom was ripped away from them,” Williams Sebastian wrote in the preface.

Their book is about one family, but also about who we include in that bond. It’s a story that helps explain why some black Americans have Irish surnames. It’s a story of journeys, common roots and how our past informs our present.

The fact that some of the white O’Kelleys embraced them and others rejected them is the story of today’s America, too, as is the fact that they still don’t know what happened to their slave ancestor. Oppression, freedom, loss, rediscovery, rejection, reconnection -- these are still the stories of race in America.

But for the black O’Kelleys and white O’Kelleys who took a connection in biology and history and forged a relationship out of it, their story is ultimately about family.

When Shumway’s son and his family visited St. Louis this summer, Huston threw a party. The Mormons from Utah got to meet their black relatives.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” said Bradley Reneer, Shumway’s son. He didn’t know if there would be resentment or bitterness, given the brutal roots of their connection. Instead, he said, “I felt like family.”

A friend I met 25 years ago suggested a life hack with such compelling evidence that I have followed it faithfully ever since. He told me about an Ivy League study on goal-setting, in which only 3 percent of a graduating class wrote down specific goals and a plan for how to achieve them. Years later, the story goes, those 3 percent were earning 10 times more than the rest of their peers.

This widely shared anecdote was later debunked by a Fast Company article. But I had already became a goal-setting devotee. Even without the backing of an Ivy League study, it makes sense that people who write down their goals would be more successful at attaining them. It’s a reminder of how to prioritize your time, if nothing else. As a parent, I ask my children to set personal goals at the start of the new year, academic goals at the start of the school year and spiritual goals at the start of Ramadan.

They don’t always write them down, but at least it starts a habit of being purposeful and intentional about what they want to accomplish.

I started to notice a disturbing pattern in my own list, however. A few of the things I wanted to do kept recurring year after year. And yet, I still haven’t finished writing my book, lost 10 pounds, learned a new language, completed a triathalon or mastered a musical instrument.

Perhaps I have been writing my goals all wrong.

There’s an entire industry around how to be more productive and accomplish what you set out to do. According to these experts, what I should have been doing all these years is writing smaller milestones toward larger goals, with measurable benchmarks and time limits. So, instead of saying I want to write a book, I should make a goal to write a certain number of words each day or week.

This creates a way to measure progress and hold yourself accountable. Each benchmark also needs a subset of concrete steps to use as a roadmap to get where you want to go. It helps to find a person to commit to a project alongside you. Reporting progress to one another increases both your chances of success. It’s also useful to remind yourself of why you want to make a change or complete an endeavor in the first place.

But just like simply wearing a FitBit won’t make you walk more or get more sleep, writing something down isn’t going to magically bring it to fruition.

Of course, it takes consistent and relentless work.

I thought about what has prevented me from completing some of what I set out do each year. Time is an easy scapegoat. Parents of young children and teens don’t get blocks of uninterrupted time to work on side projects outside our professional and personal obligations. But another culprit may be focus. It’s very easy to become distracted and lose the precious extra time we can carve out for ourselves.

It’s also important to accept that ambitions can change over time. If, by the end of a month or year, you haven’t made any progress toward what you thought you wanted, maybe you didn’t want it that badly, after all.

My son takes another approach to goal-setting. When I asked him if he had accomplished his goals, he listed the highlights of what he achieved this year. He couldn’t remember his specific goals, but he was happy about how the year turned out.

That may be better than a fake study.