Our Marvelous Workers

An amazing service that A Marvelous Work is starting to offer is the creation of handmade mission books. These books are made up of letters, photos and emails sent home by missionaries. This effort came from the passion of two hard working friends of mine. Here is a little more about what motivates them,

Kelcie and Chris believe the family to be the most important social unit of our time. We encourage the strengthening of families and strive to provide resources that will help individuals pass on their memories and examples to their posterity. A Marvelous Work was inspired by a responsibility and a fear.

A Responsibility

We believe that we have a responsibility to teach our children to serve the Lord. Elder Holland said in a talk entitled We Are All Enlisted, "What greater gift could grandparents give their posterity than to say by deed as well as word, 'In this family we serve missions!'" This same same counsel can and does apply to parents. Parents have a greater responsibility to teach their children b y example what to do. Children that grow up hearing their parents' mission stories tend to want to serve missions themselves.

A Fear

We fear losing the precious memories of our loved ones. Memories are preserved in the things we write to each other.

On pdays, missionaries are careful to write as much in an email as they can. They yearn to report a week’s worth of time in about half an hour. Consequently, they often misspell or skip over some important details in their haste. They get their point across in the end and record three important things.

1) Personality. A missionary’s personality bleeds through their letters. The way in which they word their experiences gives them away.

2) Personal Growth. Even though grammar skills may begin to falter, there is no mistaking the spiritual and mature growth that shines through their experiences. You can see a missionary change by comparing their first month’s letters to their last.

3) Memories. These are precious. Our experiences are pearls to our posterity. They yearn to hear and retell our stories and cherish the family heirlooms, like journals, that we leave them.

Many proclaim that the art of letter writing is dead. We beg to differ. The art of letter writing is more prominent than ever before. It has simply evolved. Not too long ago, we painstaking wrote letters by hand. Now we type them into emails and messages. We write far more words per day and respond faster than ever. We want these memories to be preserved in books, for we fear losing them forever to age and faulty internet sites.