Why We Do What We Do!

Among book lovers, there is a fairly common sentiment, and it goes something like this: "No one is ever going to say, 'Look! There's the kindle Grandpa used during the war!'"

Ebooks are great and convenient; when it comes to preservation, nothing beats digital. Now, more than ever before, our communication is recorded and stored. Many people communicate digitally far more than in any other medium, especially when you have a missionary in the field. All of this correspondence is saved, and to make things better, our communication is often enhanced by photos, attachments, etc.

The problem is, all of this preserved correspondence is inaccessible to anyone other than the person with the login name and password. Inboxes are messy and even the most organized among us forgets.

A Marvelous Work was started to help you take the step from preservation to heirloom. We help you compile correspondence, photos, announcements, letters from the mission home, and all of the other moments into a priceless volume for the coming generations. We believe that your experience is a blessing not only to the missionary, but also to the family. These faith promoting stories and experiences need to be shared to strengthen in the years to come.

We started A Marvelous Work because we believe that these 2 years are among the most important for now and forever. Thank you for your decision to serve, we are excited to be a part of it.

Kelcie Beck

Co-founder and Owner

A Marvelous Work

Our Friend Chris

I asked our friend Chris if he could tell us all a little more about how he got into the business side of A Marvelous Work. Here it is in his own words!

"For me, the idea behind A Marvelous Work comes from a desire to remember my stories. I was an inexperienced, 6' white male from Vegas assigned to serve in the tropical Philippines Bacolod Mission riddled with rumors of eating dog and hacking through forests to get to appointments. I figured there was a good chance I'd get a few exciting tales to tell my grandchildren. Upon completing my mission, I found that I not only had a few crazy tales to tell, but also countless testimony building experiences that strengthened my spiritual foundation and set me on the path of lifetime discipleship.

"I'd like to say that I wrote faithfully in my journal throughout my mission. I can't though. After about a year, entries diminished to about once a month. I want my children and grandchildren to experience my experiences through my eyes, and now the only continuous record I have is recorded in the emails I sent to my family. This spurred me on to create a mini-version of A Marvelous Work for an assignment and later, talk to Kelcie about making it a product that people could use to preserve their own memories for future generations."

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.