I grew up overseas, and given all of the transitions of frequent moving, the Church was a place of safety and stability to me. My immediate and extended family are all LDS members and have been for generations.
I chose to serve a mission because I wanted to find people to bring to the Savior. I served in the Baltic States Mission, and enjoyed the experience. However, I was concerned that we, as missionaries, didn’t seem to be able to do much to truly help the people we were there to serve.I remember teaching one older woman about the law of the fast, and she laughed and said she was already doing that, since she didn’t have enough food to eat. One time the Relief Society President came to us, in tears, because a member family had come to her for help to feed their children and she had referred them to the Branch President, only for them to be denied. There was nothing that we, as sister missionaries or the Relief Society President, could do about it. This amazing woman, who was already giving so much of her time and energy to fulfill several callings in the branch, purchased food for the family herself. I believe that if women were ordained and called to leadership positions, the Church as an organization could work more compassionately and do so much more to help people with their very real temporal needs.
There is another reason I support Ordain Women. My first marriage ended in divorce and I am now married to a non-member. I wanted to cancel my sealing, but I was told that Church policy is to keep the sealing in place unless I was going to be sealed to someone else. I was told this rule existed so I wouldn’t lose out on the blessings of being connected to the priesthood lineage. I kept asking about getting my sealing cancelled, and finally was advised by a bishop that one way to negate the sealing would be to resign my membership. When I was pregnant, the idea of my child being born under the sealing to my ex-husband, instead of being sealed to his own father, disturbed me very much. I chose to resign so that the sealing would no longer be in effect. If women had the priesthood, the sealings of divorced women would no longer have to remain in place to keep that connection to the priesthood, and children would not be sealed to unrelated men.
For these reasons, I believe women should be ordained.