Missionary Letters

Plenty has changed in the Latter-day history of missionary work, but one thing has not changed: Missionaries love to get mail!

I’ve written on this subject before (here) and it’s one of my most-Google-searched posts. Now that I have a daughter who is serving and I’m writing to her often, it seems like a good time for an update:

I remember serving in Germany over three decades ago, and a day with a letter (ANY letter!) was brighter. It rarely mattered to me what the letter said – just having it in the mailbox when I got home meant something to me. I was fortunate that the folks who did write to me (mostly my mom and dad and siblings – oh, and the young woman who would become my wife) wrote great letters – news about what was happening in their lives, favorite scriptures, words of encouragement. But I did know a few missionaries who got awful letters, so it’s worth talking about what to write.

The New Era thought it was important to talk about, too. You can read a 2007 article on the subject here.

Here are things I liked reading about as a missionary:

1. Real life – what’s going on in the lives of the people I care about. My parents lived in Lagos, Nigeria during my mission, so my mom always had a great story of discover or adventure. My wife-to-be (I don’t really know what to call her; we had no commitment to one another when I left, so she wasn’t really even my girlfriend, though I think we both hoped from the beginning that things would work out, and fortunately (for me, anyway) they did) wrote about her schooling or work, and about the friends we had in common, and about her family. She ended up spending six months during my mission on study abroad in Austria, so she often had interesting adventures to report, too.

2. Inspiration and encouragement – one of my sisters liked to send me quotations from famous German composers about the divine inspiration they felt contributed to their work. It was cool to read those quotations while serving in their homeland. My brother, who had also served a mission, occasionally sent me ideas for scripture study or district meetings. I like to share my own mission experiences in my letters to missionaries.

3. Questions about me – I liked that letter-writers were interested in what I was doing. I never got so many letters that I could not answer them. The only letter I sent every week was to my parents. My girlfriend and I wrote about every two weeks, which allowed us to respond to one another’s letters rather than having to force a letter each week. And all the other letters were infrequent enough that I could respond to questions. I will often ask missionaries questions in my letters, but I also tell them I don’t really expect an answer. Lots of missionaries now have weekly letters posted to blogs or Facebook so their friends can keep up with what’s going on.

4. Testimony – it was helpful to me to have letter writers share their faith and testimonies, either based on their study of the scriptures or their own experience.

Here are some other observations:

1. Short letters are ok, too. Letters need not be long epistles. In fact, most missionaries don’t have time to dwell on long letters, and family emails that are long will rob a missionary from writing time. A thoughtful card might be as helpful to a missionary as a long doctrinal discourse.

2. Some subject matter is better avoided. A long standing joke with my wife is my reaction (which has expanded in the repeated telling of the story) when she told me in a letter that she had gone out with a friend of mine – an RM from my dorm. She never ever mentioned dating anyone again after that. I remember visiting another companionship’s apartment when one of the elders got a letter from a young woman who recounted in great detail (I know because he insisted on reading it to us) a pool party she’d attended with their mutual friends. As he read the letter out loud, the Spirit fled from the room and he was completely unfocused for quite some time.

3. Dear John letters stink, but like removal of a band-aid, they are better done quickly. An elder in one apartment we shared suspected for weeks that his girlfriend was dropping him. Her weekly letters stopped abruptly. For several weeks he complained about her silence. Finally he got word that she had, in fact, decided to end their relationship. How much more of a blessing it would have been to get that letter earlier on.

4. Packages are always a welcome surprise! But the New Era article reminds readers to check potential customs costs. In some countries packages are not practical. (A mission president who served in South America said they told families who were sending new shoes to missionaries to send each shoe in a separate package to reduce the risk of theft.) One of my sisters sent a spectacular package my first Christmas, filled with my favorite goodies. It was a lot of work for her to put the package together, and shipping it wasn’t cheap for her, either. Unfortunately, the day before it arrived, they had repainted the lobby of our walk-up apartment and taken down the mailboxes. When they put up new mailboxes, it took us a day to get our name on the box. In that city, if your name wasn’t on the box, they marked your mail as undeliverable and returned it. She got that large Christmas package back around Valentine’s Day. (Of course that wasn’t her fault, but it illustrates one of many possible complications with package shipments.)

Here’s my advice: write to your favorite missionary! Even a postcard or a note of encouragement will be welcome. One of my daughters wrote to her missionary friends every few months – often enough to stay in touch, but not so often to have it be an onerous task.

Feel free to share your thoughts about what, how and how often to write.

The Law of the Letter

Dear Reader,

Ok, it’s not so much a law as a discussion.

Maybe less a discussion than a remembrance.

Recently I wrote about letters written by my lovely wife to a friend in their youth that were recently returned to her. They’ve been interesting for her to re-read. In addition to exposing the lie that was my story of when we met, the letters also reveal things my lovely wife thought about in those days and provided some insights into her character.

I’m not going to reveal any of that. Let my lovely wife write her own blog if she wants to spill all that. (Don’t hold your breath, by the way. My greatest surprise was seeing that my wife wrote actual letters at all: she really does not like to write, and I understood her remarkable sacrifice to write to me during my mission.)

But these letters do demonstrate some things my children may never know: the value of the written word – and by written word I mean word written by hand on paper and put in an envelope and mailed – not half-words typed into a telephone keypad to be sent out into the ether to be captured by another phone, consumed in seconds and deleted forever.

These letters used complete sentences, capitalization, spelling, paragraphs – all that stuff your English teachers have been trying to get you to do! These letters required some organization of thoughts, because each letter included multiple thoughts and stories (unlike texts and tweets); each letter included reflections and conclusions and even promises of what was to come.

And, perhaps most importantly now, these letters could be saved to be read later. They are historical artifacts. I suppose there may be some giant repository of electronic stuff that contains tweets and texts and Facebook status lines, but I certainly don’t know how to get at it.

Letters still have a place in our world, even beyond credit card offers that come in the mail. In my lovely wife’s family, for instance, there’s a monthly family letter to which each sibling (or spouse of sibling in the case of my lovely wife) contributes. That letter (which is emailed as an attachment, ready for printing) serves as part of an ongoing family history, recording events and milestones.

I have written specific letters to my children at key times in their lives or mine. Most of those go as e-mails now, but I hope they’re still saved for future reference. I save copies of each one. Topics range from financial planning to politics to family relations to gospel principles. Some are sent to individuals and some to the children as a group. The value of the letter over a phone call is that I can think more carefully about content, and my child can choose to read or not read, and I’ll never know the difference.

We still encourage our children to hand-write thank-you notes. It’s our small contribution to their letter-writing education.

May you engage occasionally in the great art of letter writing.

Best Regards,

Paul

On writing to missionaries

We have two nephews and a niece on missions now, and I try to write to them once a month or so. We also have family friends who have sons on missions, and I try to write to them.

I write to missionaries mostly because almost no one beside my family wrote to me when I was a missionary. As I was leaving on my mission, my folks moved out of the ward of my youth because of an overseas assignment for my father’s work. They lived in Nigeria, away from any unit of the church, so in my home ward I was literally out of sight and out of mind.

I received letters regularly from my mother, somewhat less regularly from my siblings and from my girlfriend (who is now my wife). I received one letter from a member of my home ward. (He was a family friend and also had been called as elders quorum president.)

When I served as bishop I wrote a letter to missionaries serving from our ward once a month. They all got the same letter, but it came regularly.

I have no idea how these letters are received. For all I know these missionaries I write glance at the letters and toss them aside. They almost never respond (I tell them not to – they have more important people to write than me), though most write at least one or two letters back during their missions. And I typically get plenty of news from their missions through their parents who often share selected letters on their own blogs or emails or family letters.

I have one young friend who is serving in Brazil – coming home very soon. His father and I are good friends, though I haven’t spent any time with this missionary since he was about four. It has been awesome to read his letters (forwarded by his dad) and see how his mission has affected him. He expressed to his dad that he was surprised that someone who did not know him would write to him.

My letters aren’t great epistles. I write briefly about my own mission experiences, usually trying to match roughly the recipient’s mission timeline. I share my testimony, and maybe a thought about something I’d recently read in the scriptures or heard in church.

I send almost all my letters using dearelder.com. Super easy for me. A brother-in-law recommended it to me when I asked the easiest way to write to his son and I've been hooked ever since. I have also emailed missionaries directly, though I hear they often prefer to get paper letters and save their screen time for more important letters than mine.

What’s your experience? Do you write to missionaries? Did you receive random letters on your mission? How did you respond?