I delight in family history.

Today at church, we talked about Elder David A. Bednar's talk from October General Conference entitled, "The Hearts of the Children Shall Turn."

I remember going to a class about how to get started doing family history work and how to use PAF files. As my memory remembers (Craig, correct me if I'm wrong) Craig and I went to this class together during high school. He has always loved learning more about the relatives and needed to learn something more about how to use PAF files so he could store all the information he had somewhere besides his head. The course was an hour long and a good portion of that hour was used describing to the other participants (many generations older than us) how to turn on the computer, how to open files (including how to "double click" and how a mouse worked), and how to close files using the little red 'x' up there in the corner. Needless to say, I got a little bored, and while I learned enough to know how to get started, I realized that at the rate around me, family history work was never going to get done. No offense intended to those of the older generation who do family history work. I am so appreciative of your passion, desire, and motivation to learn things (like how to use a computer) that are foreign to your generation. However, in that family history class I took so long ago, I had an epiphany moment...my generation is being trained how to do this, and they don't even know it! Computers, and buttons, typing and searching is not foreign to us. Most of us could text or type with our eyes closed. We were made to do this work.

As the years have passed since that first epiphany moment the feeling I had then has only been confirmed. Elder Bednar says in his talk,

It is no coincidence that FamilySearch and other tools have come forth at a time when young people are so familiar with a wide range of information and communication technologies. Your fingers have been trained to text and tweet to accelerate and advance the work of the Lord—not just to communicate quickly with your friends. The skills and aptitude evident among many young people today are a preparation to contribute to the work of salvation.

I delight in just how mindful our Heavenly Father is of the skills we need to develop to carry on his work in every capacity.