Missionary Work

"Missionary work is the lifeblood of the Church. There is no greater work, no more important work. It blesses the lives of all those who participate in it. It will continue blessing future generations.”

-Silvia H. Alred

The youth participated in a Missionary activity yesterday. Due to my work schedule, I hadn’t volunteered to help, but I did end up staying and helping my friend in the mailroom. What a wonderful testimony I gained from that experience. As parents, we were asked to drop off care packages and letters for our “missionaries” in the mailroom. We didn’t have an attendance sheet to know who didn’t have packages or letters. We could tell that many had packages, but no letters or letters but no packages. Or, even worse, they would receive nothing when it came time to deliver the mail. I had some note cards in my car. We began trying to quickly guess who needed a letter of encouragement. We didn’t want anyone to feel left out. Then we were trying to figure out who might need packages, and learned that about half the kids needed packages. There was no way to execute packages for that many kids in such a short amount of time. We did have letters of encouragement from adults in the ward, so we made sure that we had enough of those to hand out to the ones without letters and packages.

When it was time to deliver the letters, it was chaos. I noticed two brothers without letters. I called their names out and handed each of them an unmarked letter of encouragement. As I handed a letter to the thirteen year old, his face lit up. He exclaimed, “She remembered!” I turned away, because I didn't want to see his face when he realized that it wasn’t from his mother. It was at this moment that I learned something very valuable. As members of our Church, we need to be sending letters of encouragement to our missionaries. I so desperately wanted these sweet youth to feel loved, encouraged and special, but what about our wonderful young men and women in the mission field? We should be writing them often. They are out there doing amazing things and they should be hearing encouragement from those of us back home.