How Great the Importance

To my daughter,

               Today we had the privilege of listening to the Sister missionaries who taught us about the word of God and holding fast to the iron rod. I hope that someday you will think about following their example and serving a mission for the Lord. Here is what President Nelson taught a couple years ago about sisters serving a full-time mission: “For you young and able sisters, a mission is also a powerful, but optional, opportunity. We love sister missionaries and welcome them wholeheartedly. What you contribute to this work is magnificent! Pray to know if the Lord would have you serve a mission, and the Holy Ghost will respond to your heart and mind.” You have a natural love for people, and if you chose to serve the Lord as a missionary you would be able to bless the lives of many people as you served them and taught them to develop faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. You are young, so perhaps the thought of serving a mission is a scary one because you would leave your home for eighteen months and be in a place very foreign to you. You might even have to eat snails (like I did) or some other strange food that you would never eat at home. But that’s okay because the incredible experiences you would have helping people come unto the Savior would be worth the sacrifice. President Nelson added, “All missionaries teach and testify of the Savior. The spiritual darkness in the world makes the light of Jesus Christ needed more than ever. Everyone deserves the chance to know about the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Every person deserves to know where they can find the hope and peace that ‘[pass] all understanding.’”

               In my last area on my mission in France there were a lot of people who were from Cape Verde. We met one lady from there named Catarina on a bus, and she gave us her address to come and visit her. She immediately came to Church after we started teaching her, and within a few weeks she was baptized. Her mother had joined the Church in Cape Verde several years before, but she did not know how to find it where she was in France. When we met her, she knew right away that it was her mother’s Church and was ready to join. She was a single mother with a young son named Ziko, and it was amazing to see the way the gospel brought joy into their lives. She told us after she was baptized and had received the Gift of the Holy Ghost how before she had been sad every day and cried every night, but now she was filled with joy and peace. She was a wonderful lady full of faith, and we came to truly love her family. She even helped bring two other people as well into the gospel. That is the reason you would choose to serve a mission, so that you could touch people’s hearts and help them to find the joy through faith in Jesus Christ and repentance. I love the way that Lehi put it for us: “Wherefore, how great the importance to make these things known unto the inhabitants of the earth, that they may know that there is no flesh that can dwell in the presence of God, save it be through the merits, and mercy, and grace of the Holy Messiah, who layeth down his life according to the flesh, and taketh it again by the power of the Spirit, that he may bring to pass the resurrection of the dead, being the first that should rise” (2 Nephi 2:8). What matters most is that we help people come unto Jesus so they can have his mercy and grace and forgiveness in their lives. I can tell that you are already a missionary as you show a good example of living right to your siblings and your friends, and I encourage you to keep doing that. Always remember these words of Paul to Timothy, and never underestimate the difference you can make in the lives of others: “Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12). 

Love,

Dad