You may have served a mission yourself or you may joined the church recently and been taught by the missionaries. Missionary work is a very important part of the church. Nearly everyone knows someone who is on a mission. The people who decide to serve missions give eighteen months or two years of their lives in order to go and serve the Lord. It is important to support those you know who are missions. Here are five easy ways to support missionaries.
1) Write your missionaries. This is a great way to support your missionaries. If you are family you should write about once a week. If you are not family, you should write about once a month. Do not send distracting letters. A missionary needs to focus on his mission.
2) Another great way to support your missionary is to increase your missionary efforts at home. It is fun to write to your missionary and share the experiences you are having with sharing the gospel as well. This will help him to stay focused on his mission as well.
3) Another way to support your missionary is to support your ward missionaries. This includes having them over for dinner and giving them rides to their appointments. When my sister was on her mission, I made it a point to have the Elders over for Christmas dinner. I felt that I wanted someone to provide that for my sister, and I ought to provide it for the missionaries around me. You can also provide referrals for your ward missionaries.
4) You should keep your communication positive. My family has kept illness and other problems from those on their missions. One reason we did this is so that the missionary would not worry needlessly. For example my dad had to go in for screenings for possible cancer. We chose not to tell the missionaries, until the test came back negative. We would have shared the result either way, but we didn’t want to cause undue worry.
5) Share your spiritual experiences with your missionary. It can be helpful to here the positive stories of others. These experiences can be shared with investigators as well.
Related Articles:
General Conference: “A Gospel Sharing Home”
General Conference: “Your Mission Will Change Everything”