Tender Mercies on our Mission

It is a privilege to work in the Training Zone because we get to know the family history of other missionaries. Our love and respect grows as we learn about them. This past week has been particularly meaningful.

John’s student was Elder Mani Seangsuwan, a former Buddhist monk from Thailand. He and his wife are going to Thailand to be the Mission Office Couple for the second time. However, the mission president requested that they have additional training in family history before they leave for Thailand on Nov. 8. He was baptized at 25 and was called to serve a mission in his own country at age 26. It was a very difficult mission for him because people knew that he had been a Buddhist monk and consequently he was often insulted and received hateful persecution. Because he understood the culture, he helped educate other missions and save time from making mistakes that could great offend the Thai people. (In the early years, a missionary went to prison for sitting on a statue of Buddha as he posed for a picture.) He later married in the temple and raised a family. He translated General Conference speeches for 20years and served as a temple ordinance working in the Ogden Temple. (There were 200 members in Thailand when Seangsuwan joined the church. Now there are about 15,000.)

My student was Delza Swallom from Brazil. She joined the Church and served a mission in her country then came to the US in 1998 where she met and married her eternal companion and became an instant mother and grandmother. She and her husband are waiting for a visa so they can go to Brazil on a proselyting mission and have been auditing records in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. She speaks Portuguese, Spanish, and English. She began having dreams about her family so requested that she have time in the Training Zone to help her update her family history skills. Through the years she has collected about 350 names of relatives and has done much temple work using Temple Ready. However, she had little experience with New FamilySearch and didn’t know how to connect the families. We cleaned up her PAF5 file then went to NFS. Many sealings were ready to do, including her own sealing to her parents as well as her brother who died when her was seven. Another especially tender sealing involved her favorite cousin when they were children. The two little girls were playing near a stove and her cousin’s clothes caught on fire which caused extensive burns. The little cousin died a few days later. We went to the Salt Lake Temple make arrangements for the sealings to be done two days later. As we entered the temple, a powerful feeling came over both of us that these people were rejoicing to finally have their work done and that they were grateful for our efforts. I have felt these feelings in the sealing rooms or in other areas of the temple, but this time it came at the instant that they knew that their work was really going to be done! It was a tender love note from heaven letting us know that what we are doing is of eternal significance.