Return to Arizona

Last year at my grandpa's funeral, someone mentioned that they had written Grandpa while serving their LDS mission and asked him if he'd really thought about the gospel. Grandpa wrote back and said something like, "I've been waiting for this. Every single grandchild who goes on a mission writes me a letter like this at some point!"

I guess that makes Baby Sister the first missionary not to write a letter like that. For one, our grandpa passed away before she left on her mission. Nay, before she was even thinking about it. For another thing, back in October, we went back to Arizona and had Grandpa's temple work done!

Some people find posthumous temple work polarizing. I feel like it's pretty straightforward. There are a lot of restrictions on who you can do work for, and we believe that if someone doesn't want to be a Mormon, they're free to reject the ordinances in the next life. We just happen to believe that the living cannot be saved unless all of the dead also have the opportunity to be saved. It's, like, equal-opportunity salvation.

Being in the temple and seeing that ordinance performed was really special. I for one feel strongly that my Grandpa did accept it and that he now wants to be Mormon. All those missionary grandkids finally wore him down, I guess. But I won't know for sure until I see my grandpa again...which hopefully won't be for a while.

(This trip was also a road trip. It was also very short, although we did leave a day earlier than we did last year (Thursday instead of Friday). This time, we had no Baby Sister but we did have Mr. Little Sister, making this the first time we ever took a family trip with more males than females. Oddities of the trip included Baby Sister and Mr. Little Sister obsessing over cacti, Baby Brother spilling syrup on his pants during the hotel breakfast and being called "syrup pants" by Little Sister and Mr. Little Sister, and all three of the brothers arguing over whether "hash browns" is pronounced "hash browns" or "hash browns." (The dispute over this literally went for like a half hour.) We also swam, night and day—that's how I met the Canadian I mentioned in an earlier post. Plus, we were able to spend some time with Grandma, which was great because it's unlikely she'll make it back to Utah anytime soon.)