Featured on my Facebook page, and posted here for archiving.

Iola Bird Embry (1895-1967) of Logan, Utah, sent her three sons on missions, to Mexico, to Germany, and to the Northwestern States. She wanted to send her daughter Elsie to serve in 1942, but the Church was not sending lady missionaries anywhere during wartime; instead, Elsie joined the women’s naval auxiliary.

“Don’t ask me how we have supported them,” Iola wrote of her missionary sons, “as we cannot tell very easily. Except that we usually do the things that we wish to do the worst. Of course it has meant doing without a great many things which perhaps are important, and to many people a nice home, with nice things in it, with nice clothing and all the other things which we have come to call ‘culture’ would mean more to them than the missions of my sons have meant to me. However, I doubt this.”

There was more: Eight months before her oldest boy came home, her second boy left. Before the younger boy came home, the older one had married and moved to Massachusetts; the younger one soon moved to Georgia. “I am very glad that my boys both had the opportunity of going on a mission. The only thing that hurts me is that this mission separated my two boys, who are not quite two years apart in age, so very widely that they very likely will never be close to each other again.”

Missionaries rightly win laurels for helping to advance the Kingdom of God. The service and sorrows of the mothers of missionaries is every bit as great.