I Am Grateful For My Family

I read an article on LDS Living and I have many of the exact feelings about serving a mission as the folks in the article. I forwarded the article to Robert to read. He IM'd me back with the yellow crying face because he feels the same way. We are going to serve at least one mission and hopefully more.

The feelings are about missing your children, their families, grandchildren growing up, parents getting older, selling homes, learning a language, etc. and not being there when all these life events are happening.

We have some friends who just left to go to Cambodia for two years. When I asked them if they had advice they just said, "Start early." They have had the same issues, selling homes, setting up funds, getting shots, organizing money and insurance, etc, etc, etc. It is really a giant leap of faith and not just as easy as turning the key and walking away from a house or your life.

I have this picture of most of our family at my desk at work and I was looking at it and thinking how blessed I am to have such a wonderful family and how I want others to have the same blessing of eternal family ties. This is enough of a reason to share the gospel not only on missions but also every day.

One of the comments in the article was about the senior couples children's challenges in life (everyone has challenges whether great or small) and how the family would be blessed by the mission. If the blessings that come from us serving a mission are as great as when Jared, Amanda, and Spencer served THEIR missions we will have so many blessings bestowed on our family that we won't be able to contain them all! We can be a blessing to other families too.

I am grateful for my family because I know that they support us in our desire to go on some missions and they will support us while we are gone. I just love them all from teeny to tall.

"Grandma and Grandpa are going away on a mission....I always thought it was necessary, to be young to be a missionary, what a surprise that my Grandma and Grandpa could go!" (Janene Brady)