Personal Progress: Good Works

For my Good Works value project,  I did family history work.  That included finding names with ordinances that needed to be done and doing temple work for these relatives.  It also included enlisting the help of many family members to help in getting the ordinances done.  Many accepted that challenge.  I spent a lot of time preparing cards to send out to people, always including self-addressed, stamped envelopes for them to mail the completed cards back to me.  

  Most prominent was the work of Patty and Hal Mickelsen, my sister.  About the time I started the project in earnest, they were called on a mission to the Hilo, Hawaii temple where they served for a year.  During that time, they had the opportunity to do many saving ordinances for our family members.  They were so faithful at completing the work and sending back the cards.  

Others that have helped:  Ken does by far the most (he was baptized 125 times one day!), Kristen, Jared, and Brielle Mackrory, Shonna and Blake Cameron, Michelle and Brian Prince, Nan and Clark Hinton, Joan, Whitney and Tom Morris, Pam and Roger Stratford, Mark Hinton, Jim and Leslie Hinton, , John and Cindy Gabrielsen, Rick and Sherrie Hinton, Don and Ada Hinton, and many children and other relatives of the above, including Micole and Sean Hinton and Ali and Justin Allen. Also, the young women of my ward have helped with the baptisms, as well as a young adult young woman in our ward, who loves to do the baptisms.  Oh man, I hope I haven't forgotten anyone.  I am so grateful to each and every one.  It is impossible to say when this project is complete as it is ongoing, something I work on almost every single day.  And I will probably continue to do so for the rest of my life.  I love doing family history work.  A couple of weeks ago, I counted the cards that we have completed.  There were 675.  Since that count and since I wrote up the project in my personal progress book, we have accumulated over 100 more cards (Patty sent a batch, and Ken and I both have done a lot of Initiatory ordinances.)  I need to explain that there are far more endowment ordinances than we can do, so I share a lot of those with the temple system.  So, sometimes a completed card is just the baptism, confirmation, and initiatory ordinance.  It has been a joy to be part of doing these essential ordinances for our forbears.

Completed ordinance cards

The work has been/ is being done in many temples.

An impressive stack of completed ordinance cards.  675 to be exact.

I keep the cards separated in envelopes by what ordinance needs to be done next.  You may notice one envelope marked "Sharing Box at the Temple"  This is a great idea in theory- you put up to 10 cards in your stake's box.  Then stake members can help you by taking a card and doing the work.  But it hasn't been too helpful to us.  There are so many cards in our stake's box, and few have been done from there.  I have to admit, it is a huge disappointment to me.  I so looked forward to the completion of the cabinet that holds the boxes.  But it hasn't done what I hoped.  It was after a few weeks of having it that I started sharing endowments with the temple system.

This has been a great project for me, and continues to be.  If you would like to help by doing ordinances, your help would be very much appreciated.  Right now, we are pretty caught up on baptisms, confirmations, and initiatories, but need help with endowments and sealings- especially endowments.  I will send you however many you would like.  Together, we can help a lot of our ancestors in work they cannot do for themselves.