Letters: Sometimes you just need a direction...

Every month on Fast Sunday we have a Ward Walk-About.  We live in Utah so our boundaries are quite small...not that it matters.  It would be a great missionary tool!  In the evening on Fast Sunday someone's house or sometimes two are the designated gathering place for our walk.  Everyone gathers in the yard and in the street...some bring chairs, sometimes there are blankets on the grass, often there is a treat of some kind but for the next couple of hours we just visit...and laugh...and usually we do something for the plethora of missionaries and the one member of the military that we have serving from our ward.

 

I had noticed that when just a blank piece of paper is put out that people tend to just sign their names.  Nice, but a letter or note is so much better.  This month I was asked to come up with what to send (the missionary moms in our ward take turns).  I decided to give everyone a direction...a starting off point for their letter and it worked great!  I found rolls of brown package paper (not sure what it's called) at Walmart and it was really inexpensive and thinner than butcher paper.  With the plastic wrap still on the paper, I used my handy, dandy chop saw and cut each roll so it was a little smaller than a business size envelope.  I decided that I would rather use two stamps than have to send our letter in a box...that's just too pricey for the 16 missionaries that we currently have out.

I created a document in Word (shown in the photo above) that said: "Advice:  How to have a great mission", then I just used my light box to trace it onto the top of each paper.  You could also tape your template onto a window and use that as nature's light box.  I wrote each missionary's name at the top then I just taped them all to a long table, actually a couple of them but you could also just tape them to a garage door just don't hand out Sharpie's for everyone to use or you might have a much autographed garage door when you're finished.

If people are intimidated by writing to a lot of missionaries, remind them that they don't have to come up with different 'advice' for each one...just write the same advice over and over!

 

This worked GREAT!!  People just don't know what to write about.  Giving them a direction is sometimes all it takes.  The possibilities are endless!

 

 

Note:  If you're worried about the expense of mailing to all the missionaries in your ward or maybe to all of them in your extended family, just give them to the missionary's family to mail.