Two days before Christmas 2007, my husband of 27 years laid down to rest and for unknown reasons lost his airway,resulting in an anoxic brain injury. As a result of his injury, Art had difficulty walking, talking and suffered from serious medical issues. He fell frequently and sustained numerous injuries. He had to undergo multiple corrective surgeries. Unable to work, we sold his Oral Surgery Practice that we had built together over the previous eleven years. For many months I prayed for guidance on how I could support my family after being absent from the workforce for ten years.

Throughout my mothering years, I had the hidden desire to write a children’s book, but had never made any authoring attempts. One Saturday morning, just four months after Art’s injury, I had an idea to write a children’s book that would prepare children for full-time missionary service. That very morning I wrote the entire book in just a few hours and only weeks later I submitted the book for publication but was rejected.

I felt strongly that publishers did not understand the impact this book could have on Latter-day Saint children. I decided to see if I could help them better realize the power of the book by including some artwork. Since I have no artistic capabilities, I decided to use photos of missionaries in place of illustrations as a temporary solution. As I began gathering missionary photos from friends and family, I found myself spending numerous hours searching through hundreds of photos, trying to find the ones that could capture my vision for the book.

I began to recognize that compiling and sorting through these photos brought me great joy. I would look forward to my late nights alone refining the book after completing my days of care giving, mothering, chauffeuring, and grieving the great loss that impacted my family daily. I eventually realized that the joy I found in these missionary photos was powerful and that by using these actual missionary photos in place of illustrations, readers would truly catch the spirit of missionary work.