Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Happy Anniversary to Me!!

Today marks one year that I have been serving as a part time, at home service missionary with the Family History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I am a World-Wide Product Support missionary. That means that I help support some of the products that the LDS church has produced to help people with family history. I answer phones calls that support www.new.familysearch.org and e-mails that support New Family Search, Family Tree, Personal Ancestral File, also know as PAF (you can download it free here), FamilySearch Internet, etc. I totally love what I do. I can not tell you how this has affected my life. I work with great missionaries, I have had great missionary leaders, team leaders and supervisors. We have wonderful uplifting and informative training meeting several times a week. All this from home. Isn't technology great??? I have learned a lot, and have a lot more to learn.

Every month we have to fill out a monthly missionary report with the number of hours we spent serving, the number of e-mails and phone calls we answered, the number of training meetings we attended and a spiritual experience. I thought I would share my spiritual experience for January.

"During one of the training meetings last week Mindy mentioned that every call has a reason to come to us. She said it was a “blessing for the patron to get you to answer their question for them.” When she said that my heart just swelled, and the Spirit whispered to me that it was true. It’s an awesome and at times an overwhelming responsibility that just fills me with gratitude. I can’t believe that a year is almost up since starting this mission. I can’t tell you how much this has changed my life. I was in that time of life when most of the children were gone and grandchildren far away. I was just trying to figure out what to do with my life. I was just wasting my time with activities that really had no value, not that they were bad, but just did not have any lasting benefit. This calling certainly has lasting benefit. In fact, on that very day that Mindy made the statement above I had a patron call needing help with her sign-in to New FamilySearch. When I was ending the call I told her, thanks for calling and invited her to call again if she needed help. She asked if she would get me and I told her probably not, that we had hundreds of wonderful missionaries all over the world to answers phones. Then she said, “When I get to the other side, I will look you up!!” My heart swelled again."

Well, it doesn't get much better than that. Yesterday, I helped this sweet sister from Hawaii. We talked for over an hour. Her pedigree was quite a mess with unknown names!! (As with any new technology there are bugs and glitches.) I helped her get a few things cleaned up, then had to send her on to the wonderful "tech guys" to help her with the rest. It feels great to be a part of something bigger than myself and New FamilySearch is big!! I signed up for two years and I don't want to stop!! I'm celebrating today by working on my own family history. Wish me luck!! Sometimes it's a mess too!!

5 comments:

Laurel said...

Awesome! Missionary service comes in so many forms. I love missionary work...I love family history...and I love you. Congrats!

Lynne's Somewhat Invented Life said...

That woman will be waiting and so will all the people that were "found" because of your advice. Your welcoming committee will be huge, Cindy. Congratulations on a year well served. I remember when you started. I wonder how the two of us hooked up?

Katie said...

That is very sweet!

regular grandma said...

Every missionary I have had the opportunity to talk with has been so kind and helpful. I have talked with people all over the world, from one sister I found out I was pronouncing my ancestors name wrong, the correct scotish pronunciation answered the question as to why there were so many different spellings to the name. You are truly blessing lives with your service. I keep hoping that one day I will get you on the line, but since I am usually doing this at "wee" hours in the morning I don't get California missionaries.
Katie is poking out nicely.
Love to all
Marlene

Sariah Price said...

Congratulation!! I'm so glad the church has something for everyone to do no matter your life situation.

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