Week 10: My New Mission Call
Update: Independence, Missouri!
Dear Loved Ones,
If any of you have the slightest interest in emailing me back ever, doing that sometime this afternoon would be great, because my mission president has my call, but my mission president is 125 MILES AWAY IN TWIN FALLS AND HE NEEDS TO GET OVER TO BOISE ALREADY. So I'm loitering in the office for the next three and a half hours.
Ugggggghhhhhhhhh there's not a lot to do here.
For those of you who didn't attend my farewell and are curious about why I'm getting two mission call, I have a mission blog called www.sincerelysistersmith.blogspot.com. I run it through a friend, and she's going to put up my farewell talk as a post. It explains everything.
Now, a very long email because I'm bored for good long while.
Abortion supporters often accuse people in the pro-life movement of being pro-birth, meaning they don't care about a woman or her child after the baby is born. In response to this, many pro-life people have labeled themselves pro-abundant life as they strive to care for mother and child post-birth. The best pro-abundant life person I know is Mary, the president of the group I volunteered with, Pro-Life Utah. I watched her help a woman, Bry, through a difficult pregnancy (Bry is disabled and pregnancy aggravated things so she couldn't walk towards the end of her pregnancy). After her son, Charlie, was born, Mary got legal kinship of him so she can do things like picking him up from school when his mom can't. She seems set to look out for Charlie for the rest of his life.
Mary isn't of our faith, but I got thinking of her Thursday night as a model for the type of missionary I want to be (Psst, Katherine and Deanna, tell Mary I gave her a shout out). Before my mission, it always made me queasy to hear ex-missionaries brag about baptisms. Especially when they served in third-world countries where people join the church easily but don't care to stay in it for long. It's like they're pro-baptism instead of pro-abundant gospel.
Some of my favorite work I've done is with inactive people and needy active members. We tracted into 29 uninterested people on Thursday, which is nice and all, but I felt more fulfilled the day I had an hour-long conversation with an active member who wanted my input on an important decision he was about to make.
Did that conversation lead to someone getting baptized? No, he did that 35 years ago. But what use is a religion that doesn't help its active members? I want to be a pro-abundant gospel missionary. If I don't have another baptism my entire eighteen month mission, but I can help a lot of struggling people, I'll feel satisfied.
I have been reading Saints: The Standard of Truth some more and I've decided that my favorite historical church figure is Mary Rollins. She and her sister are the young girls who saved the Book of Commandments from a mob and hid in a cornfield with the pages. That's her youth, but she was cool as an adult, too.
Mary married a man named Adam Lightner, who was not a member. During the siege of Far West, when Governor Boggs sent the militia after the Saints, messengers drew Adam and his relatives out of the city. They explained that an invasion was pending but Governor Boggs had said the Lightners could leave.
Mary said, "If that is the case, I refuse to go. Where they die, I will die, for I am a full-blooded Mormon, and I am not ashamed to own it." When the messengers urged her to think of her husband and child, she said, "He can go and take the child with him, if he wants to, but I will suffer with the rest."
Later, in Nauvoo, Joseph was teaching the doctrines of eternal marriage and also polygamy. Mary longed for the blessings of eternal marriage, but with Adam unwilling to be baptized, that was not an option.
Then Joseph had a revelation and broke the news to her as follows:
Joseph: Hey Mary, I had this revelation that you're supposed to marry me.
Mary: You had a revelation? Good for you, buddy. But what about me?
Joseph: Well go home and pray for your own revelation.
Mary: (praying) Joseph said I need to marry him so I'm requesting an angel.
Angel: Hey Mary.
Mary: (hides under blanket until angel leaves)
I love that. You always see these paintings where people are chill with angels appearing, but most people would freak out. The best angel painting I've ever seen is an Annunciation painting by Dante Rossetti where the Virgin Mary's just scrunched in a corner making this "angel what?" face.
Mary Rollins married Joseph for eternity only. That means she remained married to Adam Lightner until death do you part, but she also had the blessings of eternal marriage. Polygamy is weird.
I like Mary because these episodes of her life show her tremendous courage, but also so much realism. How many of you would hide under a blanket if an angel came calling?
We pass this house all the time that has a yard littered with bowling balls. Eighty-one bowling balls. I always wonder about it, and on Sunday we were out tracting, so we were already in knock-on-doors-of-random-people-we-don't-know mode. So the following conversation happened.
Me: (knocks on door)
Gary the bowling ball guy: Can I help you?
Me: Yes, I would like to know why you have seventy-five bowling balls in your front yard (I miscounted at first).
Gary: Oh, is that how many there are?
Me: Think so, yeah.
Gary: Well one time I saw a house with a few bowling balls on top of a fence, and I thought, "Hey, i could do that." So I put a few in the yard. One of them got stolen, but other than that, they've just been sitting out in my yard for years. One time a teacher asked if he could have one for a class project, so I gave it to him. People pull over to gawk all the time. My neighbors tell their friends how to get to their houses by saying "Head down eastgate and turn left at the bowling balls."
Me: Where do they all come from?
Gary: I go to a bowling alley where they discard old balls every two weeks. They're used to me coming in now.
Me: How often do you go bowling?
Gary: I have never been bowling in my life.
And there are EIGHTY-ONE IN HIS YARD. Who owns that many bowling balls and doesn't bowl?
Mission-centricness:
When I was twenty, I went out with a twenty-nine year old man who wasn't doing anything with his life. He had gone on a mission at age twenty, finished it at age twenty-two, and then moved to Utah, supposedly to go to UVU. But when I met him, he had taken exactly zero classes from UVU and had spent the last seven years working unfulfilling jobs at Walmart and similar places. He had no savings, no college, no hobbies beyond video games, no political or social issue passions, and had traveled nowhere other than his mission. Yet he thought he was dateable because he was a returned missionary. During our date, I asked him about his college plans, and he said he wanted to get a Ph D from Cornell or Itahaca-because those colleges were in his mission.
Yeah, buddy, they're not going to admit you just because you served there. His Facebook profile was a mission photo, too.
I can't entirely blame boys for this mission-centric approach to marriage and dating. It's the mothers and Young Women's leaders harping on it. We teach our women to only marry boys who serve missions, and then we tell boys rejected from missionary service that it's okay to not go. It's an irreconcilable discrepancy.
Your tip to avoid mission-centricness this week is to not describe a boy you're dating in terms of his past mission, or to describe someone you're setting up in those terms.
Dear Loved Ones,
If any of you have the slightest interest in emailing me back ever, doing that sometime this afternoon would be great, because my mission president has my call, but my mission president is 125 MILES AWAY IN TWIN FALLS AND HE NEEDS TO GET OVER TO BOISE ALREADY. So I'm loitering in the office for the next three and a half hours.
Ugggggghhhhhhhhh there's not a lot to do here.
For those of you who didn't attend my farewell and are curious about why I'm getting two mission call, I have a mission blog called www.sincerelysistersmith.blogspot.com. I run it through a friend, and she's going to put up my farewell talk as a post. It explains everything.
Now, a very long email because I'm bored for good long while.
Abortion supporters often accuse people in the pro-life movement of being pro-birth, meaning they don't care about a woman or her child after the baby is born. In response to this, many pro-life people have labeled themselves pro-abundant life as they strive to care for mother and child post-birth. The best pro-abundant life person I know is Mary, the president of the group I volunteered with, Pro-Life Utah. I watched her help a woman, Bry, through a difficult pregnancy (Bry is disabled and pregnancy aggravated things so she couldn't walk towards the end of her pregnancy). After her son, Charlie, was born, Mary got legal kinship of him so she can do things like picking him up from school when his mom can't. She seems set to look out for Charlie for the rest of his life.
Mary isn't of our faith, but I got thinking of her Thursday night as a model for the type of missionary I want to be (Psst, Katherine and Deanna, tell Mary I gave her a shout out). Before my mission, it always made me queasy to hear ex-missionaries brag about baptisms. Especially when they served in third-world countries where people join the church easily but don't care to stay in it for long. It's like they're pro-baptism instead of pro-abundant gospel.
Some of my favorite work I've done is with inactive people and needy active members. We tracted into 29 uninterested people on Thursday, which is nice and all, but I felt more fulfilled the day I had an hour-long conversation with an active member who wanted my input on an important decision he was about to make.
Did that conversation lead to someone getting baptized? No, he did that 35 years ago. But what use is a religion that doesn't help its active members? I want to be a pro-abundant gospel missionary. If I don't have another baptism my entire eighteen month mission, but I can help a lot of struggling people, I'll feel satisfied.
I have been reading Saints: The Standard of Truth some more and I've decided that my favorite historical church figure is Mary Rollins. She and her sister are the young girls who saved the Book of Commandments from a mob and hid in a cornfield with the pages. That's her youth, but she was cool as an adult, too.
Mary married a man named Adam Lightner, who was not a member. During the siege of Far West, when Governor Boggs sent the militia after the Saints, messengers drew Adam and his relatives out of the city. They explained that an invasion was pending but Governor Boggs had said the Lightners could leave.
Mary said, "If that is the case, I refuse to go. Where they die, I will die, for I am a full-blooded Mormon, and I am not ashamed to own it." When the messengers urged her to think of her husband and child, she said, "He can go and take the child with him, if he wants to, but I will suffer with the rest."
Later, in Nauvoo, Joseph was teaching the doctrines of eternal marriage and also polygamy. Mary longed for the blessings of eternal marriage, but with Adam unwilling to be baptized, that was not an option.
Then Joseph had a revelation and broke the news to her as follows:
Joseph: Hey Mary, I had this revelation that you're supposed to marry me.
Mary: You had a revelation? Good for you, buddy. But what about me?
Joseph: Well go home and pray for your own revelation.
Mary: (praying) Joseph said I need to marry him so I'm requesting an angel.
Angel: Hey Mary.
Mary: (hides under blanket until angel leaves)
I love that. You always see these paintings where people are chill with angels appearing, but most people would freak out. The best angel painting I've ever seen is an Annunciation painting by Dante Rossetti where the Virgin Mary's just scrunched in a corner making this "angel what?" face.
Mary Rollins married Joseph for eternity only. That means she remained married to Adam Lightner until death do you part, but she also had the blessings of eternal marriage. Polygamy is weird.
I like Mary because these episodes of her life show her tremendous courage, but also so much realism. How many of you would hide under a blanket if an angel came calling?
We pass this house all the time that has a yard littered with bowling balls. Eighty-one bowling balls. I always wonder about it, and on Sunday we were out tracting, so we were already in knock-on-doors-of-random-people-we-don't-know mode. So the following conversation happened.
Me: (knocks on door)
Gary the bowling ball guy: Can I help you?
Me: Yes, I would like to know why you have seventy-five bowling balls in your front yard (I miscounted at first).
Gary: Oh, is that how many there are?
Me: Think so, yeah.
Gary: Well one time I saw a house with a few bowling balls on top of a fence, and I thought, "Hey, i could do that." So I put a few in the yard. One of them got stolen, but other than that, they've just been sitting out in my yard for years. One time a teacher asked if he could have one for a class project, so I gave it to him. People pull over to gawk all the time. My neighbors tell their friends how to get to their houses by saying "Head down eastgate and turn left at the bowling balls."
Me: Where do they all come from?
Gary: I go to a bowling alley where they discard old balls every two weeks. They're used to me coming in now.
Me: How often do you go bowling?
Gary: I have never been bowling in my life.
And there are EIGHTY-ONE IN HIS YARD. Who owns that many bowling balls and doesn't bowl?
Mission-centricness:
When I was twenty, I went out with a twenty-nine year old man who wasn't doing anything with his life. He had gone on a mission at age twenty, finished it at age twenty-two, and then moved to Utah, supposedly to go to UVU. But when I met him, he had taken exactly zero classes from UVU and had spent the last seven years working unfulfilling jobs at Walmart and similar places. He had no savings, no college, no hobbies beyond video games, no political or social issue passions, and had traveled nowhere other than his mission. Yet he thought he was dateable because he was a returned missionary. During our date, I asked him about his college plans, and he said he wanted to get a Ph D from Cornell or Itahaca-because those colleges were in his mission.
Yeah, buddy, they're not going to admit you just because you served there. His Facebook profile was a mission photo, too.
I can't entirely blame boys for this mission-centric approach to marriage and dating. It's the mothers and Young Women's leaders harping on it. We teach our women to only marry boys who serve missions, and then we tell boys rejected from missionary service that it's okay to not go. It's an irreconcilable discrepancy.
Your tip to avoid mission-centricness this week is to not describe a boy you're dating in terms of his past mission, or to describe someone you're setting up in those terms.
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