Spiritual Experiences--January, 2012

We are teaching interesting full-time missionaries this week. John’s student is a young missionary who has his BS in Physics and is an expert on the computer. My student, Karlak meaning “most hungry” is an Inuit (Eskimo) whose specific tribe has been reduced to twenty members. She was born in an igloo and lived the nomad life until she was nine, living in an igloo in the winter and in a teepee in the summer in Northwest Territories, Canada. Her father was killed in his attempt to obtain food for the family, and the mother and the children were left alone in the igloo until they were rescued (dug out of their snow covered igloo) by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police weeks later. The police fully expected them to be dead. Karlak, her mother and her sister were still alive though other family members had perished. Karlak was profoundly deaf and was sent to Winnipeg, Manitoba, then to Vancouver to a school for the deaf where she learned to read and write English and American Sign Language. She had communicated with her family with home signs but reads and writes English beautifully. She also reads her native language with its unique alphabet. When she was twenty-one, she learned about the LDS Church and was baptized. When she was thirty, she married her husband in the Alberta Temple. They had known each other for four years. He is also deaf. They are amazing, capable, faithful people who now live in West Jordan. It is our privilege and sacred charge to train the incoming missionaries. They teach us as we teach them.

Saturday morning we did sealings at the Jordan River Temple. It was an incredibly spiritual experience to seal John Rogers and Maria White. He is a second cousin from Denton, Kent, England born in the mid-1800’s. John did the research necessary to connect his large family and it has been a joy to do their work because they have been so receptive. We have been doing sealings once a month since 1993. We used to have a group every Saturday morning but now there are groups only two weeks of the month. John and I were the only married couple in the group this time though we had nine people there to do the work. It is a special opportunity to be able to participate in these sacred ordinances.