The following is excerpted from the Church News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
Editor’s note: This is part one in a series on the healing blessings of family history based on Elder Dale G. Renlund’s April 2018 general conference talk “Family History and Temple Work: Sealing and Healing.” While many with feelings of anxiety and depression have found strength in doing family history, this is not a replacement for professional help in addressing mental health. For more resources, please visit mentalhealth.ChurchofJesusChrist.org or talk to a health care provider.
After surviving her first year of teaching in northern Texas as a recent college-graduate, Christie Blair decided to take a trip. The first months of teaching are always tough, but dealing with anxiety made them even tougher, she said.
But this wasn’t a relaxing vacation to Hawaii, the Bahamas or Mexico. This trip would energize her in a different way.
Blair packed up her family history files, tossed a tent in the car and took off in her little Ford Escort to drive from Texas to the Midwest to see the places where her ancestors had lived.
“Taking pictures of gravesites, finding handwritten documents in small libraries, and just seeing for myself these places I had seen on microfilm … all of this energized my soul, day after day,” recalled Blair, a Latter-day Saint who is now 44 and lives with her husband and children in McAllen, Texas.
She gives credit to strengthening moments on that trip, as well as a family history trip she took two summers later, with helping her manage anxiety and “broaden my world, rather than letting it contract and suffocate me.”
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
