Read about this inspiring experience of how a Latter-day Saint youth overcame his gaming addiction as he immersed himself in family history work.
I am Paul Andrei Caasi and I am seventeen years old. I became a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I was eight years old. I love going to Church with my parents and four siblings.
For many years as a teenager, I had been hooked to mobile and computer games. I was an athlete at school but when I got home, I was facing my phone all the time. I was either playing a game or scrolling through social media. My parents were always so worried about me. One day, my father shared with me a promise he received in a blessing - that his family would be blessed by temple and family history work. That left a deep impression on me.
As I was holding my phone one day, I just had this thought of installing the Family Tree application. I heard about it in Church that there was an application where I could put in the names of my family and upload my family stories. I installed the application and I started to really enjoy doing it.
As I got more interested in family history work, I heard about this activity called indexing. It’s when you enter information from historical records into the Family Search database so more people can find their families. I thought it was a good idea to try it out so I did. The next thing I knew, I didn't want to stop anymore! I was loving it. I started to set goals for myself on how many records I could index. The more I got into family history work, the more I noticed that I did not crave my mobile games anymore. It was as if all I could see on my phone and computer was Family Search!
Last March, my local Church leader gave me an assignment as the Temple and Family History Consultant. In one of the training sessions I attended, I found out that indexers in my area had a goal to index 1 million records. Brother and Sister Reyes, our Multi-stake (diocese) Consultants, shared inspiring words from our leaders about how we could contribute to this work. I got inspired and set myself to work.
We have long since achieved that goal of indexing over 1 million names but I have my own goal now. My goal is to index and review 200,000 records. I started in May 2021 with the goal of indexing 1,000 records. But gradually, I’ve increased it to 11,000 per month. I have already done over 48,000 so I have a lot more to go before I reach my end goal. But I am loving it!
When I was into games, I was always insensitive, irritable, and cranky. But ever since I started immersing myself in family history work, I felt a change in me. I started to murmur less and became friendlier. I became more concerned and sensitive to the people around me. I also began reading my scriptures and my desire to serve a mission has grown a lot. This has brought so much joy to my parents and my leaders.
I love the work that I am engaged in. Sometimes I do get tempted to go back to my old ways but whenever that happens, I just pray and turn to family history work. For those of you who are addicted to games, I say you should try indexing! Don’t waste your time doing nonsense things, try and do something good!
Speaking about the healing blessings of Family History, Elder Dale G. Renlund of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles taught: "You will find not only protection from the temptation and ills of this world, but you will also find personal power, power to change, power to repent, power to learn, power to be sanctified, and power to turn the hearts of your family together and heal that which needs healing" (2016 RootsTech Family Discovery Day).