The Best Kept Secret

In the last months of my mission, my companion’s brother was travelling through Europe on business and got permission to take my companion and me to lunch. As we visited over pizza, he observed that one of the church’s best kept secrets is what a mission is really like.

I’ve reflected on that reality over the three-plus decades since my mission. This week, my niece, whose brother is leaving the MTC this week for his own mission, pointed me to an article that captures some of the secrets beautifully. You can read it here.  Betsy VanDenBerge gets it just right as she contrasts real mission life with the caricatures we sometimes encounter. She busts a few popular myths, including:

1. It’s all about converting

2. It’s an insular bubble protected from the world

3. Missions foster intolerance

Indeed, she points out what missionaries learn, including the fact that they don’t convert anyone.

Of course there are other mysteries of mission life, including how hard it really is. And one reason it’s an unspoken secret is not that anyone is trying to hide the truth, but rather that experience is the only way to learn it. I will never know the pain of childbirth, even though I’ve observed my wife give birth seven times. Why? I’ve not experienced it. Similarly, I would never have known the pain of mission growth had I not lived through it.

That’s not to say missions are miserable. Quite the contrary, I still speak of my mission with almost a romantic enthusiasm, highlighting the miracles I witnessed (including real live miracles of healing), the conversions I saw (including my own), and the growth I felt in myself over those two years. To say the experience was transformational for me is to master the obvious.

To say I left a boy and came home a man is far too simple, however accurate the description may be from 50,000 feet up. The growth was in the day-to-day journey, negotiating my relationship with companions, mission leaders, church members and non-members, both interested in the church and not. And it was in my negotiating with my own sense of who I was and what I was doing – a vision that was in constant flux during my term of service.

I did not come home an expert in the country where I served, nor was I fully fluent in my mission language (though I’m sure I told myself I was; in truth I was pretty good at church German and had shed most of the most offensive parts of my American accent by the time I came home). I was not a gospel scholar nor a master of the scriptures, though I had developed a pretty clear sense of testimony and could teach the missionary lessons with confidence. I was not the hardest working or highest baptizing missionary in my mission. (Actually I have no idea if I was; my mission didn’t publish any kind of statistics, but I assume I wasn’t.) I was probably a pretty average missionary – far more effective at the end than at the beginning. By the time I came home I had a pretty clear sense of what I was doing as a missionary and how to do it. I felt comfortable in my nametag and my missionary suit, and I knew that I loved the gospel and the church, and I loved teaching.

My mission president taught us that the first soul we’d bring to God (see D&C 18:15) would be our own.  I think that was true for me, and I think my mission experience had a great deal to do with that process.

As I write now to young friends and relatives who are serving missions, I often reflect on my own experiences. I share probably more than these young missionaries want to read – after all, the learning is in the doing – but I hope that by sharing my experiences I can offer some perspective on theirs. Their feedback tells me sometimes I get it right. (And they’re kind enough to say nothing when I don’t.)

Good things come in threes

No, this is not a follow up on my Three Good Things post from last week, but I suppose in a way it could be.

Last Sunday we had three departing missionaries speak in our ward – two young men and one young woman. The first of the three entered the MTC this week, and the next two go out over the next two weeks. And let me say this: they are awesome.

These are young people who are well prepared and have thought carefully about their missionary service. You could hear it in their talks and you could see it in their lives prior to their calls.

I can remember in years past sitting through some awful “farewell” talks that seemed to be little more than a thin travelogue through a young missionary’s life leading up to his call. My mission president taught us that anytime we get up to speak as missionaries – particularly in our home wards – we should teach the gospel clearly and boldly. These three new missionaries met that test well.

Of course they were aided by a bishopric who gave them counsel on subject matter, but I was impressed how each of these new missionaries handled the assignment. Each talk was quite different from the others. Our sister missionary spoke first and she spoke of her struggle to get an answer about whether and when to serve. She spoke about a missionary experience she’d had in the Denver airport on her way home, talking, as it happened, to a lapsed member of the church. Her talk was particularly comforting to my lovely wife and me because it could have been one of our sons she described: a young man who no longer identified as LDS, but respected his parents’ love for him and for the church.

Our second missionary speaker based his talk on Elder Hales’ talk about being better Christians from a couple of conferences ago. The calm and quiet conviction he demonstrated mirrored Elder Hales’ own calm declarations of truth in his original address. (I have a soft spot in my heart for Elder Hales as he happens to be one of very few general authorities I’ve met personally, and that talk in particular is one that I really enjoyed.) This young elder will depart directly for England and enter the MTC in Preston.

Our final missionary is one I’ve known since he was little; I was his bishop when he was baptized. I told him later I remembered his dad telling me those many years ago that this young man was always ready to do the right thing, and I’ve observed that to be true about him as well. He’s going to a very small mission spread across the islands of the Caribbean. And he’ll be terrific. (Just like his older brother who is also on a mission now.)

They all will, if they remember who called them and why they are there. There is something exciting about the surge in missionaries. We had a new 18-year old missionary in our home for dinner on Sunday (well, it was his birthday and he was turning 19), and he was excited to be where he was (on his mission, that is, not just in our house).

It’s a good time, demographically, for our ward. With these three new missionaries, we have nine missionaries serving. We’ve had other periods where the demographics were not in our favor and we had just one or two. We’ve had our share of young men who chose not to serve (some of my sons among them, which is why our dear sister’s story of the young man she met in Denver was helpful to us). But I’m grateful for these three, and for the blessings their service will bring to those whom they serve.

Mothers Day Missionary Calls

We are looking forward to our call from our full time missionary daughter this weekend for Mother's Day.  I'm assuming my wife will allow the rest of us to participate in the call (though it occurs to me I haven't asked her; I suppose I should.)

I don't remember calling home for Mother's Day from my mission in the late 1970's.  Of course I was in Germany, so a call home was not cheap, and my parents were not in the US for Mother's Day (they were living in Africa where my dad was on a work assignment), but I don't even remember there being a discussion of whether it could happen or not. 

My brother, who served his mission 7 years before me, sent my mother roses on Mother's Day.  He had called our local florist in our home town to order the flowers rather than using FTD.

Still, we're thrilled to have a chance to hear our missionary daughter's voice (and to see her, too -- I guess we'll be Skyping for half of the hour we're allotted for the call).

We assume she'll be as prepared as the elders at this link.

Happy Mother's Day!

How I know the number of missionaries is increasing

In last October’s conference came the announcement of reduced eligibility ages for full time missionary service for young men and young women. And it’s clear that the number of applications and calls are increasing. I don’t need the news reports to tell me that. And I don’t even need my daughter’s reports of increasing numbers in her mission. I just need to look at my own blog’s statistics.

My top post in the last two months is this one, which I published last year in July when my daughter entered the mission field. For quite some time, one of the top Google searches that brings people to my blog is the phrase “missionary letters” or the question “What should I write to missionaries?”

It’s awesome to me that so many are choosing to serve. And it’s awesome to me that so many are choosing to write to those who serve.

I’m hopeful that these new missionaries are as prepared as they are eager to serve, and I have no reason to doubt that they are prepared. Certainly the fine elders we see in our ward each Sunday are well prepared. They are working hard, and their efforts are showing in the success in the work in our ward. They were in our home last night and did all the things you hope good missionaries will do.

Our missionary daughter has nothing but excellent things to report about the missionaries in her mission, as well. (In fairness, our daughter is exceptionally positive, so I’m not sure we’d hear about it even if the missionaries she knew were total slugs. But still I want to believe her that the missionaries she knows are as awesome as she says they are.)

Personally I do have some concerns about the lower ages for service. For me, my year away from home between high school and my mission was really helpful in my maturing process, and in helping me to make the decision to serve. (I was at BYU and was surrounded by other young men who were also making that decision and preparing to serve.) I recognize, however, that not every young man goes to BYU, and we likely lose some (maybe many) who have that post high school year to become more distracted from serving.

Of more concern to me is if 18 becomes the new 19 for young men. My understanding is that young men may serve at 18, but so far there is no official push to have them serve at that age. I’m not a big fan of social pressure to serve, and I believe the best missionaries are those who serve when they are ready, not when they are socially pressured to go. I doubt anyone sets out to apply social pressure, either, but we know that happens at church.

I’m less worried about sisters. In fact, I think it’s awesome that sisters can serve earlier, making a mission service more likely (or so the surge in sisters would suggest). As many have written, sister missionaries bring a lot to the missionary effort, and mission service is likely to bring a lot to the sisters, as well.

I welcome the expanding ranks of missionaries. I welcome the creative solutions to deal with increased needs for training, increased numbers of missions, and increased numbers of letters to missionaries (including those who seek advice from my blog!).


BTW: You can read my latest post at Real Intent, "God's Greatest Hits: Moses v. Satan," here.

Safe In The Storm

Yesterday afternoon, our daughter’s normal P-Day, we received her email confirming that she’s fine despite the fact that, thanks to Sandy, she was a couple of days without power in her apartment in Chinatown in New York City.

Of course, we knew she was fine because we’d already gotten three e-mails from her awesome mission president. (For one of them, he had to wait until a large tree was removed from his driveway so he could drive to a place with power to send the email! Kudos to him for the effort to keep us, and all his missionaries' parents, informed.) And, because of his notes, we knew that the missionaries were prepared with extra days’ food, water, batteries, and so on. And the missionaries had been instructed about what to do and how to behave.

We are grateful that our daughter is safe. We’re also grateful for a mission president and an organization that plan carefully for such emergencies, and were thoughtful enough to keep us posted.

We have another daughter and two nieces who were also in the path of the storm, all safe and sound.

My brother remarked a number of years ago after a huge snowfall in Chicago that one benefit of these large weather events is that we’re reminded that we are not in control of everything we see. There are things bigger than us, and there’s value in learning to rely on the Lord’s help when we simply cannot help ourselves.

Our family lived in Taiwan for 2-1/2 years and we had three or four typhoons (including the week we moved back home) while we were there. The first one was very frightening for us because we’d never been through it. The subsequent ones were curiosities, but not so completely scary. Still, we learned to be prepared at home, and to stay put until it was safe to leave.

Those were two key principles: being prepared and being in a place of safety in the storm. There are, of course, gospel parallels. As we live providently and keep commandments, we can be prepared not only for temporal storms, but spiritual ones, as well. And knowing the place of safety – whether our home, at the sacrament table or in the temple – will help to protect us in spiritual storms, as well.

Continued prayers for those who are rebuilding and cleaning up after the storm.

And if you'd add action to your prayers, consider a donation to the Red Cross -- click here for more details.

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BTW, follow this link to Everyday Mormon Writer to vote for your favorite story from their Four Centuries of Mormon Stories contest.

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.

Preparing our children to serve missions

I can guess what you're thinking. "This guy just put his first missionary in the MTC and already he's an expert?? Who does he think he is?!

As a matter of fact, I’ve always been leery of the title of this post. I’ve been nervous when someone purports to teach it in a class or to give a talk about it. But in the last few days I’ve realized that I’d been thinking about it all wrong.

I assumed the topic “Preparing our children to serve missions” meant “How to get your children to serve missions,” something at which I have not really succeeded (my first missionary – and my fifth child – entered the MTC last week).

But looking back, I hope that we have helped to prepare our daughter to serve. And I think we’ve prepared each of our children in similar ways, even though some have elected not to serve. In the end, if our children serve, we want them to succeed as missionaries. To me that means a few things:

1. They need to know the doctrine that they teach. We need to teach the gospel in our homes, first and foremost. Of course the standard memes of family scripture study and family home evening apply. But also our children benefit from seeing us, their parents, live the gospel – that is not only making good choices, but also repenting when we don’t. At the end of the day the Good News of the gospel is the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ, powerful enough to rescue us from sin. Our children would do well to see that atonement in action in our lives (and their own).

2. They need to be independent of us. Children who depend upon helicopter parents to meet their every need will be like those seagulls that become dependent on fishing boats to survive. Children who are allowed to grow and do things for themselves (even when it’s easier for us to do it for them) learn how to live their own lives. In our home, children learn to wash dishes, do laundry, clean bathrooms, cook and other practical skills. That’s all thanks to their patient mother who is willing to let them take longer to do something than she could do herself. And to allow them to figure out what they’re going to wear if they haven’t done laundry in time to have that certain article of clothing when they “need” it.

3. They need to suffer heartache and to feel joy. They will surely do both on their mission – either because the work goes especially poorly or well, or because of relationships with a particular companion or agreement/disagreement with mission leaders. Our children need to learn to cope with setbacks and they need to learn how to accept success when it comes, too. This idea is linked to #2 in that parents need to foster independence, but it’s much deeper than just learning how to do chores.

4. They need to learn to pray and to receive answers. I don’t believe that a pre-mission young person will have the same testimony as a returned missionary. Too much happens in the mission field to influence one’s spiritual growth. But departing missionaries are well-served if they have learned to take questions to the Lord and to get answers, or at least sufficient faith to move forward. There will be plenty of icky days in the mission field when things go poorly that they will need to rely on the Lord to help them get through it. My recollection of mission life is that the heartache I felt there was deeper and the adversity stronger than I had experienced before. I needed to know I could trust the Lord to lift me up when I needed it the most.

5. There’s value in being able to get along with lots of different kinds of people. My observation is that shy missionaries are often frustrated. I don’t exactly know how to teach a child not to be shy, but giving a child some specific behaviors to use in shy moments can surely help ease the anxiety. Shy missionaries (or know-it-all self-righteous ones) may not only feel limited in their ability to contact and teach new people, but will also feel the sting of not accomplishing what they came to do. (I’m pretty sure about this one – I started my mission shy and self-righteous…)

Of course there’s nothing on my list that cannot be overcome by a willing and faithful missionary who enjoys the blessings of the Holy Ghost. But how much better to have developed these qualities before entering the mission field?

Are there other things we should do for our children to prepare them to serve?

(I note that the things I’ve listed will serve anyone well, not just missionaries.)

Dropping our kids

As parents we spend our whole lives dropping our kids – we drop them off at a sitter’s home. We drop them off at Grandma’s house. We drop them at a friend’s house. We drop them off at their first day of school. We watch them roll into a surgical ward to have tubes put in their ears. We watch them go to the dentist for extractions before braces. We send them off to college.

And we send them on missions.

Thanks to other bloggers, I was aware of how this past Thursday would work. I’d pull up to the curb and the MTC liposuction machine would remove my daughter and her luggage from my car with surgical skill and send me on my way.

The fact that I knew what would happen does not mean I was prepared for it to happen.

We were told in the information she received with her call that we should say our goodbyes before arriving at the MTC. (I’ll point out that the family in the minivan in front of my rental car had obviously not followed that counsel. Their younger sons were super-glued to their older brother who was trying to start his mission. Sweet kids.)

And we began saying goodbye several days earlier. My daughter and I left for Utah on Tuesday. We had a goodbye breakfast of waffles (her choice, made by Dad…) and during our family prayer, I – who had been very stoic through all of the preparations – could barely eek the words out while fighting back the tears. Mom drove us to the airport and Mom and daughter had a tearful goodbye as she left us on the curb.

Once we arrived in Salt Lake, we began a short tour of selected family and friends, and each time, there were goodbyes. Some were more emotional than others. Some were warm embraces and some just handshakes (she had been set apart, after all). By Wednesday night, we’d seen them all. Thursday morning (Thursday, by the way, because of the holiday on Wednesday, the normal intake day at the MTC), we woke early to attend a session together at the Mount Timpanogas temple. (What a lovely temple, by the way – it was my first time there, and the folks who work there were very kind, and the temple itself is large and quite lovely. I think most of our “small” temple could fit in the celestial room of that large one!) There we happened to bump into a couple from our home ward. Another impromptu goodbye.

We did an errand at Deseret Book and grabbed some lunch at In-N-Out Burger (“My last meal,” she said!). We saw five or six other departing missionaries with their families there. (The elders were pretty easy to spot – one 19 year-old in a suit surrounded by adoring family members; my daughter was less conspicuous in her Sister Missionary clothes.)

We drove to the LDS chapel just north-east of the MTC. In the parking lot, I took a photo of my daughter pointing to the MTC in the distance (no time for pictures at the MTC itself, and there’s no longer a sign on the street, apparently because too many people stepped into the street to take pictures of it; I’m sure I would have done the same thing if I could!). We had been on the phone with Mom and the other kids at home. Our time came and we said goodbye, took a deep breath and drove the short distance to the entrance.

We were quickly waved inside, greeted by what appeared to be a senior missionary who gave us a yellow sticky to put on our windshield, and then waved into place by young elders ready to move us along. The elder who greeted us (well, greeted my daughter; it was as if I wasn’t there) asked if she had any keys or cellphone she needed to give me (nope, we’d done that already) and if she had her immunization record handy (yes, she did), and away she went. Another nameless elder (he had a nametag, but I wasn’t reading them very well…) waved at me and said, “She’s in good hands, sir. Have a great day.”

I got in my car and slowly moved away from the curb, drove down the driveway past quite a few numbered poles, thinking they really have this down to a science. I ended up in the lot next to the BYU laundry, and then I realized how well prepared they really were. The signpost included an I-15 sign with an arrow pointing to the right, reminding me that I had no place there where my daughter was.

Of course, she is in good hands. And I don’t mean hands of MTC elders or administrators or teachers. I mean the hands of Him who called her to serve. And for that I’m grateful.

Pixels Away!

My fifth child (second daughter) is the first of my children to choose to serve a mission. We received a call last night from the stake president that he had just pressed “Send” and her mission application is on its way to Salt Lake City.

The combination of emotions I have today is something else.

On the one hand, I’m remarkably proud of my daughter for her choices. She has talked about serving a mission since she was four, when she and my lovely wife hosted sister missionaries for lunch in our home one day each week when we lived in Venezuela. And she has spent the last 17 years since then preparing to serve.

Her choice to serve was not without some trepidation. More than once in the last few years at BYU she has wavered. She’s wondered if she would be better to stay and finish her degree, if she should pursue certain romantic endeavors, if there was some other way she would better serve. But more than once along the way she has received what she knows to be divine guidance that she was on the right path, and that yes, she should serve.

I should point out her decision has been hers and hers alone. In fact, at times I’ve told her she does not need to serve; she has no obligation to do so, except if she really feels moved by the spirit to do so. She has three older brothers who did not serve. Her mother and I were sad about those choices, but we have not pressed her to serve as some form of compensation or validation for us.

Her older sister has also not served. When our oldest daughter’s friends were leaving on missions, she called me and asked if she ought to serve. I told her what I told daughter #2: only if she felt strongly called to do so. As much as my own mission meant to me, and as much as I loved serving (most days, at least) I firmly believe the Lord does not need an army of unwilling missionaries. And sisters have always been in a place where they have considerable more choice whether to serve, without such social pressure to do so. Perhaps that’s one reason why the sister missionaries I have known almost without exception have been truly remarkable missionaries.

So, yeah, I’m very proud of her and her decision to serve, and her preparation to serve. (And yes, I am really proud. I have recently re-read President Benson’s words on the subject: there is no enmity in my properly placed parental pride.)

I’m also awestruck by the work that she will do. Yesterday in sacrament meeting we happened to sing Hymn #263, “Go Forth With Faith” as a closing hymn. As we sang, it occurred to me what my young daughter is about to do. She will

Go forth with faith to tell the world
Of Jesus Christ, the Lord.
Bear witness he is God’s own Son;
Proclaim his wondrous word.
Go forth with hope and courage strong
To spread the word abroad
That people of all nations
Are children of our God.

As I write to other missionaries in our family and serving from our ward, I regularly remind them of the awesome work they are doing. Now that I am three decades removed from my own missionary service, I’m amazed what we trust these young people to do. And at the same time I realize that there are few others who could do it. Somehow as I have aged, I’ve lost the childlike faith that propelled me to proclaim a gospel I barely knew with enough conviction that someone would listen long enough for the spirit to bear witness of the truth.

So I’m also pretty amazed that my little girl will participate in this great work.

And it’s very cool to me to see how – and where -- the work is progressing. Even the application process is digitized. We talked in the beginning of my daughter’s mission “papers” because we remembered when it was all paper. Now I talk of her Mission Pixels. Soon someone will sit in front of a screen an meet her as Elder Rasband described a few conferences ago.

Of course we’ll all be excited to learn where she will serve and when she will leave. But mostly I’m excited when I hear her honestly say that she doesn’t care where she goes, but just that she can. Already she is preparing to go where He sends her.

Mission Moments: Unexpected Meetings

My nephew is serving his mission in Arizona where several of my wife’s siblings (and therefore his aunts and uncles) live. He is presenting living and working close to all of them, and they see him on the street pretty often. He is, by all accounts, an outstanding missionary, and there’s no evidence that his occasional brushes with his extended family are distracting in any way. Reading recently of their sightings of said missionary made me think of the very few times I bumped into people I knew from home while I was on my mission.

I served in Germany over three decades ago. When I went, I assumed I would be in a completely different world from friends and family I left behind. (My brother had served in Kentucky, and was never more than a day’s drive from our home his whole mission.)

To my surprise I did see people I knew from before my mission a few times. The first was most startling. My companion and I were changing trains in Mainz, trying to make a quick connection to get back to our city of Bad Kreuznach. We were running for our next train when I heard someone call my first and last name. A female someone.

I’d been out more than a year and no one had used my first name except in letters, so just the hearing of it startled me. I did not recognize the voice, but stopped and began to look around. A few feet away on the platform was a girl I’d gone to high school with. We had been good friends and had many friends in common. She was not a member of the church, but she knew I was, and probably knew that I was a missionary. As we chatted briefly (we missed our connecting train, of course), she introduced my companion and me to her male friend who was with her. The two of them were distributing Bibles for their Christian group, and had been in Europe for a while.

After a few minutes, we shook hands (I was a missionary, after all, and in Germany everyone shook hands) and went our separate ways. The chance meeting was no big deal to my companion, except for the great coincidence; nor was it a big deal for me. I think my reaction was helped by the fact that I was well into my second year; I don’t know if I would have been more distracted by such a meeting earlier in my mission.

Within weeks of that experience, I had another chance meeting. I had just put my companion on a train to go on an exchange, and I was waiting for my temporary companion to arrive. Since I had an hour to wait, I decided to walk home. As I was leaving the station, a young man showed up at my side and called me by my first name. Turns out he was a kid I’d gone to church with in my youth. He was the only member in his family and had slipped into inactivity, and was in Bad Kreuznach to visit his brother who was in the US Army. We chatted until I got to my apartment.

The last one came a few weeks later, when my stake president and his wife dropped by my apartment on a P-Day. They were in Germany visiting their daughter whose husband was stationed at a base not too far from where I was assigned. When the bell rang, and we let them up, I was surprised to see them, and even more surprised when she gave me a big hug, saying, “I probably shouldn’t do this, but I promised your mother I would!” I didn’t mind. And I’m sure my mother wouldn’t have minded, either. They stayed just a few minutes.

These chance meetings, each quite brief, were actually blessings to me. They helped me to see even more clearly how much I was on my mission. They were little blips, pleasant moments, but not distractions. I knew what I was there to do, and I was happy to be about the work I was doing.

The Real Elder Price and the Mormon Boys

For your own good, please go read Margaret Blair Young's wonderful series on Mormon missionaries in Africa at Meridian Magazine. The fourth article in the four-part series is here. You can link the other tree from the fourth, and it's well worth the trip.

Missionary moments

I’m the ward mission leader in my ward. And I’m afraid I'm not particularly good at it.

Yes, I love the missionaries, and I love teaching with them (and I’m pretty good at that), and I love teaching the Gospel Essentials class from time to time (and I’m pretty good at that, so I’m told). But I’m not great at sharing the gospel one-on-one with those I meet.

But I came across two things this week that have motivated me to make a greater effort.

First, an article in Forbes about Clayton Christensen. Brother Christensen served as an area authority seventy in our area and attended our stake conference a number of years ago. His teaching on missionary work (and everything else) was superb. Shortly thereafter, he and his wife had an article in the Ensign about how to share the gospel with others.

In the Forbes article, Christensen discusses his own health concerns (suffering heart attack, cancer and stroke in succession) and his views on health care. Christensen is a Harvard professor and consultant and super smart. He’s highly respected, oft-quoted in his field, and in demand. And in this Forbes article, he talks about his gospel life as much as his research and his own medical experience. His gospel experience is just as much a part of him as his skin and he speaks about it freely.

For instance as he begin to talk about his first heart attack:

For seven years I was one of ten people who have responsibility for the Mormon Church in the northeast quadrant of North America. Almost every week I had to go to a city where all of the churches in the area [known as a "stake"] came together to have a conference. My job was to help them be better Mormons.

I got assigned to go to Montreal. The stake president in Montreal was a physician. We stayed at his home. At the meetings on Saturday the feeling of the spirit of God in that room was deeper than I have ever felt in my life. It was extraordinary. You walk out of it just committed to improve your lives for better.

He was talking about his heart attack. He could just have easily said, “I was on a trip in Montreal and staying with a doctor,” but he didn’t.

Even more intriguing is what he says next:

We were sleeping in the extra room in their basement. At about 3 o'clock in the morning I just had a horrible pain in my chest. I never had a heart attack before. This was something bad. I was thinking, if I wake Christine and tell her, she'll wake the stake president and they'll take me to the hospital. It's going to mess up a wonderful meeting on Sunday. And there are 1,000 members of the church who are going to come to that meeting. So I knelt down at the side of the bed and I said to God, "I have a problem. Whatever this is could you please just make it go away?" And it went away. I fell asleep and the meetings on Sunday were comparable to the ones on Saturday. The meetings ended about 9 p.m. on Sunday night, so then we started to drive back to Boston.

He then explains that the next day (Monday, Veterans Day) he had another heart attack while raking leaves and then finally went to the hospital.

In those brief paragraphs he covers church leadership, feeling the spirit in church meetings, personal prayer, and miraculous healing.

If it were me, I might have said, “I had my first scare on a trip to Montreal, but the big one came the next day when I got home.”

The second thing that motivates me? This video from the Church’s Youth website: (Note: I haven't quite mastered how to embed videos, so it may already be playing. If so, run your cursor over the video and you'll get a chance to reset it to the beginning.)



Watching it, I was reminded of my own experience of being invited to church by a friend.

I need to talk more freely about my church experience, and I think I need to invite more.

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?

My second mission Christmas

It's important that it was the second Christmas of my mission.

The first had not gone so well at all. The first Christmas I'd been in Germany just over a month in a very difficult companionship (and I'd only realized later that I shared the blame for that). The families we knew best were all away for the holiday and finally the branch president and his wife invited us for Christmas dinner. I couldn't reach my parents by phone because no circuits were open and by the time I got through a few days later they weren't at my brother's home any longer.

Poor me. It wasn't a great Christmas.

But the second Christmas was almost magical.

I'd been on my mission over a year and felt more comfortable with myself as a missionary. While my companion leading up to Christmas would never be my best friend, we got along ok and we worked hard together. I was planning a Christmas surprise for him when we got word of his transfer, so I left his gift in his suitcase and he discovered it as he packed.

My new companion, a German, was spectacular. He was relaxed as he entered our companionship four days before Christmas, was calm about the slowness of the work over the holiday, and was quick to engage the members of both the German and American serviceman's branches we worked with. We grew to have an outstanding companionship and we enjoyed working together.

We spent Christmas Eve with our landlady, a widow who lived in one apartment in the house while we had the top floor. She was always kind to us, but Christmas Eve was delightful. We had bought a small tree and decorated it to surprise her and she made a great fuss over our gift. We feasted on hard breads and cheese and meat, sang Christmas songs and shared the Christmas story in her comfortable and well-furnished apartment. Her husband has been a rubber chemist and had a long career with the famous tire makers and his pension left her quite comfortable. She was grateful to have us in the house because we shoveled the snow in the winter, the only demand she made of us besides our very low rent we paid. (When two of the four of us left the apartment a few months later, she cut the rent in half.)

We also benefited from the kindness of members. The American branch had collected food for several weeks before the holiday and we assumed it was for some needy family. We were astonished when it was delivered to our apartment – three boxes of great US-Px food that we hadn't seen since we'd left the States. And on Christmas morning, a gift from the German members arrived on our doorstep, providing us ham and other Christmas meats. (We did no shopping in January thanks to the windfall!)

We spent Christmas Day in the home of the American branch president, and December 26 (Zweiter Fiertag, or Second Holiday in German) with the German branch president and his family.

We were warm, well fed and well loved that Christmas. This Christmas as I have some, but not all of my children at home, I am glad to know that they also are all warm, they will be well fed and they are well loved.

On new missionaries

Another nephew entered the MTC this week, and one left the MTC for his field of labor. How cool is that? I'm glad that these young men, who come from great families and are well prepared, will serve missions. They are part of a tradition in our extended family that includes many, but not all, of their similar aged cousins.

I'm excited for them because of what they'd do and what they'll learn. Their serving causes me to reflect on my own missionary service. And it causes me to reflect on the missionaries who taught my parents and me over forty years ago. And it reminds me of young men and women whom I interviewed as a bishop several years ago prior to their serving.

The rite-of-passage missionary service can be a remarkable thing in the life of the missionary, especially if the blessings to the missionary are incidental to his or her efforts. It was true on my mission and it is true now in my life: some of my greatest lessons come when I least expect them, and some only upon reflection of what has already happened.

I had a companion whose brother (with permission from our mission president) visited us for lunch late in my mission. The brother observed that one of the best kept secrets in the church is what a mission is really like, implying that the hardest parts of a mission are often not discussed in priest quorums or homecoming talks. My companion and I agreed, and also suggested that at least part of the reason for that is the need to "be there." Just as an inside joke is funny only to those who share the experience, just as only women who have experienced childbirth really understand it, so are there parts of a mission that only those who live it will know and understand it.

I'm grateful that young people choose to serve. I remember while teaching in the MTC years ago that there were lots of reasons missionaries came on their missions. My own service showed me that my greatest success (however you define that for missionaries) came when I served out of love for the Lord and for His children. I trust my young nephews will learn that lesson, too.

I'm a missionary, too?

Let's be clear from the start. I love the missionaries, and I'm grateful for what they do. My parents and siblings and I joined the church so many years ago after missionaries taught us. We had them in our home regularly, and my older brother and sister and I all served missions.

And I loved my mission, too. I served in Germany in the late 1970's, and yes, Germany was a tough place to serve, but like so many missionaries, I found it (because it was my mission) the best mission in the church (for me).

And I really like the concept of member missionary work. After all, those missionaries who taught us when I was a kid came after my friend invited me to Primary, and his family invited our family to FHE, and then his parents invited my parents to have the missionaries over. Our family's conversion was pretty directly the result of pretty amazing member missionary work.

So you'd think that I'd be out there spreading the gospel like a sprinkler spreads water, right?

Aye, there's the rub.

I've thought a lot about my own personal reluctance to open my mouth. Sorting this out is important to me because I do want to share the Good News I have found with others: I would like to help others find the happiness I have found in the church. So here's a list of why I'm often reluctant:

1. Many of my friends are deeply religious and active in their church already. I know that some might think this would be cause for believing the friends would make great church members. But I know how I feel about my church, and I know I'm not interested in moving elsewhere. So I'm reluctant to rock the boat with these friends.

2. My closest friends are already in the church. This is not as true as it once was, as I have consciously trying to build a network of friends outside the church. It's not that hard where I live, since I live in the Midwest where the concentration of church members isn't so great. But still it required my taking time away from other church social events in order to develop some relationships with my neighbors and parents of my kids' friends.

3. I am not a perfect example. I know this seems like a cop-out, since, after all, who is perfect anyway? But there was a time when we definitely would not have been comfortable having people taught in our home. Some of our kids at the time were making choices that seemed to drive the spirit away. Those things have calmed down a bit, so maybe this is one to be revisited.

4. I don't want to cast my pearls before swine. Now I'm not calling my friends swine, but I don't want to put my testimony, which is very precious to me, out on a table only to have someone whack it with a hammer. So I'm protective about how much I say and to whom (and even the circumstances of our conversation).

Of course, I'm also nervous, I fear rejection, and sometimes I just don't know what to say. But I overcame those feelings on my mission; I assume I could find a way to overcome them now.

So why talk about this? Because despite all of those things, I really do want to share the gospel. So here's what I do:

1. I do try to live the gospel. I'm not perfect, but I'm aspiring to be better than I am. (I have a friend who suggests that if we can avoid embarrassing the church by our behavior, that's a step in the right direction.)

2. I look for ways to invite people to things. I can invite someone to a special event (a talk, a baptism, a church activity) without a deep doctrinal discussion or a commitment to baptism. Interestingly while on a long business trip last month, I invited two different colleagues to church. And they both went, but not to mine – they each found their own denomination's meetings. At least they went somewhere, right?

3. Talk more freely about my church participation. This is actually a huge step for me. In the past I never mentioned church attendance or activities when I talked about my weekend, even though at the time I probably spent 10-12 hours at church on Sunday. Somewhere along the way I figured it was ok to talk about what I did. That wasn't a doctrinal discussion, but it sent a message that I was a church going guy.

It's interesting to me the opportunities these simple steps have given me to share, or at least acknowledge, the gospel. For instance, a former boss noticed that I don't swear at work, making me kind of unusual in my office. And there's the whole not drinking alcohol or coffee that leads to questions. Even then, however, I rarely dump the whole cart over; usually I give just enough information to answer the specific query, and if the person wants to ask more, he can.

As I invite and talk about my church participation, at least more people become aware of the church and my membership in it. I suppose theoretically, once that door is open, someone might come back and ask some questions. (Elder Clayton Christensen, an area seventy, wrote about this practice in an Ensign article a number of years ago.)

In fact that happened to me a few years ago. I was working with a person at my alma mater (not BYU) regarding recruiting for my company. We were setting up a room for a presentation and chatting about a range of shared interests that we had previously discovered. During the course of the conversation, I happened to mention my calling in the church at that time, and we chatted politely about what it was like to serve that way, and moved on. Later my friend came to me with specific questions about the church, and particularly the Book of Mormon. Over the course of several months, during which time we saw one another only sporadically, I shared with her a Book of Mormon and ultimately invited her to hear the missionary lessons. She said no, but was very gracious about it; she seemed to feel as if she were declining a precious gift I had offered her, but for her the timing was not right.

It turns out that experience was very positive and encouraging to me, even if it's end was different than I had hoped. Not so encouraging that I still don't have those concerns listed above, but encouraging enough for me to continue to open the door in conversations to see if my acquaintances will step in or not.

Happy to hear your thoughts.

- Paul