Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] I think that our youth have a tremendous influence on their parents and their families, and their faith can really bring their families back to church. We're the Ennis family, and we've been members of the Church for a long time. However, we've had our struggles and our trials. We've been in and out of the church. We've been in and out of activity. Our oldest daughter really was the instrument in bringing us back to the church. They had moved into our ward, we got their records, we didn't know who they were, so we decided to go find them. We were in the back of our house, and we heard this really big bang and I thought, oh my gosh, it's the police. Something's happened. Sister Ennis came to the door. She wouldn't let us in, but she stood on the doorstep and we had a conversation. She talked about her daughter, her teenage daughter who was feeling a bit alone. We went back to our Ward Council and the Young Women's president, when she heard this, decided that this would be an opportunity for the Young Women to get involved. They brought paper hearts with messages on it like, we miss you, we love you, we want you to be with us. Those kinds of messages. And they brought them to the home and they decorated her door with them. And it had an immediate impact on that young woman, immediate. And she started coming regularly. Then I started getting really into it, and I found my scriptures old in my bag, and I started going on Sundays and Wednesdays more often. Well, I think that she could feel that this is where she needed to be. And she just started to come to activities more and more. My family, my mom and I would pick her up for activities. And we got to really love their family and they started to come more and more. They made sure that Christina had rides to Young Women's and church on Sunday, and they were just our friends. When I started going back, I was met with a lot of resistance. My dad didn't want to, and my family was kind of like, oh, well, we tried it and it didn't work. But I was like, there's something different. And I'm really stubborn and bold, I guess. And so I was like, well, this is what I believe is right, and I'm going to keep going. And you can choose to come with me, or you can just leave me alone to accept it. But I would rather us be happy than where we're at now. And they listened and they started coming. It helped build unity within the Young Women's program, and they had a spiritual experience from this. They were the ones that had something to do with reactivating someone, and they really felt good about themselves. It's crazy, because I didn't feel like anything was different. It was just, hey, we met a new family, let's just bring them along. And it didn't seem like missionary work. It was more of just, we have new friends. Let's have fun. Let's bring them. They're great people. For me, I found when I have the idea of, OK, I need to go do missionary work, it's a lot harder for me to connect to people or make it worthwhile. But with fate-- Gosh. We've made really good friends through missionary work just by who we are.

The Faith of Youth: The Ennis Family

Description
The Ennis family had become less active, but they responded when ward members reached out in love.
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