Sunday, July 3, 2016

~~FAMILY HISTORY TALK~~

My talk I gave in sacrament on June 12th on the temple attendance challenge.  Mike was lucky he didn't have to speak!! :)

When the ward council was given this temple challenge by the stake presidency the beginning of April my first reaction was seriously spring is such a busy time how on earth am I going to fit this in my own busy schedule but knowing the obedient person I am there was no doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t take it serious and I am sure glad I did.  I decided that I wanted to take this challenge and try to utilize as many of our family members as I could since it was after all a “family history challenge”.  So even though we have awesome family history leaders in our ward that offered to help us we decided to find our names, we would ask Mike’s dad Roger who is on the family history committee in his ward and does indexing at the prison for his church calling to come over and show Mike and I how to find a name.  It was fun to see him do something he has a passion for and that he is good at.  We sat at the computer for maybe 30 minutes and we each found a name.  Well I put my name on reserve and when I went back to the list I noticed the woman I had picked had 3 brothers and 3 sisters that also need their work done.  Well how could I just pick her and leave the rest of her family waiting for someone else to do the work so I reserved all 7 names.  Mike said are you sure you want to commit to doing all those?  I thought yes I feel like we could do it.  Well because I had 7 names and Mike ended up finding 2.  We decided that 9 names were enough to take our kids with us to do the baptisms.  We ended up going to the Draper temple for this ordinance one Saturday afternoon and it was neat to see Mike baptism and confirm Jake, Will and Sadie for these family members.  For the initiatorys Mike and I went one night to the Salt Lake Temple.  With the help from my mom, my brother Jed and his wife Mandy and visiting the bountiful and Ocquirrh Moutain temples, Mike and I have been able to get all of these endowments done.  The last thing we need to do now is the sealing of these 7 kids to their parents which we will schedule in the next few weeks. We are hoping to have my whole family and parents that can come be there for this sealing.  I was so surprised with how easy the church has made it to find work for people that needs to be done.  I was under the impression that both mine and Mike’s family had done all the work and to my surprise they hadn’t.  I am so grateful for temples.  Each time I go there I feel peace and love not only for my savior and heavenly father but for all of our sweet ancestors that have passed on and that are waiting for their work to be done.  I want to Thank our stake president for this challenge.  I am so grateful to have been able to focus these past few crazy busy months not only on my own busy schedule but on those loved ones that have passed on and to be able to spend lots of time in our beautiful temples with Mike and my family.  I love this gospel and I am so grateful every day for the blessings we have in our lives because of it! 


I say this in the name of Jesus Christ Amen

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