Week 11: Opening My Mission Call
After my mission president finally got back to Boise, he handed me a FedEx packet with "extremely urgent" written on the side. It certainly was. I tore through the cardboard and held it to my chest, sobbing. I waited and wanted and worked for this so long.
As I was holding it, he asked, "Can I see that, Sister Smith?"
"No."
"Please?"
I handed it back but kept a close eye on it as he held it to the side of his head and made some joke to the secretary about some guessing-game people used to play with calls back in the day. Then he helped me pull up my parents and brothers on his iPad and it was finally time to open it.
Finally.
So many times I've fantasized about opening my mission call. In the beginning, I thought I'd open it in the lobby of Helaman Halls, the BYU freshman dorms. Then I thought about doing it in the basement of the Joseph Smith Building. There's this metal lined closet-type area just off the stairwell where you can scream and not be heard. I was enrolled in a mission prep class that met in the JSB the semester I got barred from serving, and sometimes on my way to class, I'd duck down there to cry. Or I thought I'd do it on the third floor of the Jesse Knight Building, where a grim-faced bishop told me, with no trace of sympathy, that I wasn't getting a call. Or I'd march over to the Taylor building and slap it down on the desk of the LDS Family Services secretary who called the Riverton LDSFS office and put in a bad word for me when I snapped at her after being kept on hold for roughly six hours. Doing that, she got me barred for an extra year, and I then lived two doors down from the Taylor building for most of 2018. I used an inconvenient path to campus to avoid even passing in front of the Taylor building every day to class. Usually I needed headphones. I only successfully passed in front of that building twice-once with a large group and once to go speak with my friend Jake, the only other person I knew who'd been barred by LDSFS like me. There's a lot of buildings on campus that have bad memories for me and I wanted to cleanse one of them by opening my call there.
Instead, I sat down in a little blue chair in the Idaho Boise mission office lobby with my back to the windows, Sister Larsen watching from a nearby couch. My mission president sat beside me with his wife and the mission office staff looking on.
I slid it out of the envelope and read the same beginning words I've heard at so many call openings. I tried to hide the location from myself until I read to that point, but it didn't work. My eyes jumped down to the next line, saw Independence, and gasped.
Before I came here, my trainer, Sister Holland, had another two-transfer missionary. Her name was Sister Blair. She was called to Independence, but never went.
These last two months, I've been living in her apartment, sleeping in her bed, teaching the people she taught, and working out the math of when my call would come based on when she got hers.
The specter of Sister Blair has hovered above me all this time. Especially when she called Sister Holland and said she had decided to leave the MTC because "I've already served." Especially when she showed up to Taylor's baptism.
Now I'm taking her mission.
I prayed to go to Missouri (among other places, like London, Nauvoo, and Hawaii) because she put that in my mind. And now I am. I also requested a visitors' center on my mission papers (the Independence and Liberty Jail sites are there). That might have influenced things, but I also wholeheartedly believe I was called there by God. A lot of missions are great, but Missouri is literally Zion. I am going to prepare Zion for the Second Coming.
Being barred from a mission for three years hurts a little less now because I'm now three years closer to the Second Coming.
I stayed awake until well past 1:00 am that night, mind reeling, and as the week went on I still kept myself up with the excitement, even when I fell into bed exhausted from not sleeping the night before. I keep drawing the outline of Missouri in my mind, three flat sides and a squiggly river, and going into our study room just to look at my mission map and reread the first two lines of my call.
Now that it's here, I feel like I knew it all along. I've been reading about the British Saints and fantasizing about serving there, like Wilford Woodruff converting my 4x great-grandfather. There's a visitors center in London. I studied abroad in London and love it there. One time while I was fantasizing, the thought came to me that I'm called to see to the church's future, not the church's past. What's the most important place in the church's future? Missouri. And we talked about Liberty Jail in church just this Sunday.
I'm so excited to be a visitors center missionary between proselytizing! There are two visitors' centers, one in Independence and one at Liberty. I hope I get to serve in both.
Next Wednesday, I'll catch a flight down to Utah and go to the MTC. Yes, it's very stupid that I have to go there after being a missionary without it for three months. Getting a two-transfer call is the church mission department's way of saying they don't value you, either personally or financially. They wouldn't foot the bill for training me earlier because they weren't giving me the benefit of a doubt that I'd stay on a mission. They didn't pay for my transportation up to Boise, either, and it's Boise rather than some far-flung place so my parents would be close at hand if I ran home with my tail tucked between my legs. I also don't have a preaching license. It's been a humiliating and degrading experience that was only made worthwhile by the desperate hope that I could prove myself capable of a real mission.
My friend Cameron said it best. "Congratulations on serving out a ridiculous probation and moving on to the mission you wanted to have from the start. Well done."
Cameron was the first person to email me back on that announcement email. Fun fact, the reason that email was only two words long is I wrote it in the back of a moving car using my companion's hotspot during the last five minutes of the day that I was allowed to send emails.
Thank you, Cameron, and everyone else who sent celebratory replies. It means so much to me that you're all cheering me on now when I had three years of so many people in the church beating me down whenever I told them I wanted to serve.
Thank you.
I went on an exchange this week and claimed Schenectady for a hometown for the second time (for those of you who are new to my email list, some people belittle me when they find out I'm from Utah, so I have a faux hometown in Schenectady, New York). I can never do that any place I actually have to stick around. I expect to serve in at least one of the visitors' centers and I'll meet new people everyday, so I'll probably claim it a lot to amuse myself. When I claimed it on Saturday, the lady looked at me funny for a second and I thought I'd been caught, but then she repeated it back to me and I realized she was just baffled at the name.
This is going to be a fun habit. It will break down if I ever meet anyone from there, though.
Weekly tip to avoid mission-centricness feat. my former roommates:
My friend and ex-roommate Emily had a world history class where the professor kicked off the semester by reading bad student evaluations of himself. "I hated this professor and this class because I served in Peru but we only talked about the Roman empire and Genghis Khan and World War II. Whine whine whine." He then looked out over the class and said, "No one cares about the history of Peru."
Students who write evaluations like that are mission-centric to the point of dangerous ignorance. Having been a missionary in a foreign country doesn't make you all that globally conscious. It just acquaints you with one other culture. I once talked to a professor who oversees study abroads and she told me it was hard to get male students to study abroad because they serve missions and call it good. Both of my study abroads, the London one and the stateside church history one, had way more girls than guys.
Missions can't acquaint you with a lot of major world cultures, like China and the Middle East, where missionaries don't go.
My roommate Rochelle had a similar experience to Emily's. Rochelle took a social science class where her classmates had a lot of sympathy and cultural understanding for the peoples of Latin America, where they'd served, but lacked that for places like Syria. It's all well and good to live in Peru and love the people there, but there are a lot of other people out there in the world.
Back in 2015, after the terrorist attacks on France, I got sick of the only two things I ever heard about Islam being "these Muslims are terrorists" and "Remember, not all Muslims are terrorists." I wanted to know what normal Muslims were like, so I went to the library, search "Muslim", and found a novel about Muslims in France. It's called I Love I Hate I Miss My Sister. I don't think I'm an expert on Islam at all because I read that one book, but I learned a few things from it. I mentioned this to Emily (who has lived, served, and studied abroad in multiple Muslim countries) and she told me she was impressed with me for being willing to drag my butt to the library and get a book. I laughed and pointed out the west wall of our kitchen and said, "The library is five minutes that way. It wasn't hard."
We did a missionary Q and A with the Young Women this week and I told them a great way to prepare for a mission is to go to the library and read up on world religions. I wish I would have known more about Sikhism and Hinduism before my mission, because I've had to teach people of those faiths.
Sigh. I've got a long way to go in learning about the world.
When you serve in a place, you adopt it, and loving it is no longer a matter of loving something foreign, but loving you and yours. Your tip to avoid mission-centricness this week is to take interest in cultures you have never lived in.
As I was holding it, he asked, "Can I see that, Sister Smith?"
"No."
"Please?"
I handed it back but kept a close eye on it as he held it to the side of his head and made some joke to the secretary about some guessing-game people used to play with calls back in the day. Then he helped me pull up my parents and brothers on his iPad and it was finally time to open it.
Finally.
So many times I've fantasized about opening my mission call. In the beginning, I thought I'd open it in the lobby of Helaman Halls, the BYU freshman dorms. Then I thought about doing it in the basement of the Joseph Smith Building. There's this metal lined closet-type area just off the stairwell where you can scream and not be heard. I was enrolled in a mission prep class that met in the JSB the semester I got barred from serving, and sometimes on my way to class, I'd duck down there to cry. Or I thought I'd do it on the third floor of the Jesse Knight Building, where a grim-faced bishop told me, with no trace of sympathy, that I wasn't getting a call. Or I'd march over to the Taylor building and slap it down on the desk of the LDS Family Services secretary who called the Riverton LDSFS office and put in a bad word for me when I snapped at her after being kept on hold for roughly six hours. Doing that, she got me barred for an extra year, and I then lived two doors down from the Taylor building for most of 2018. I used an inconvenient path to campus to avoid even passing in front of the Taylor building every day to class. Usually I needed headphones. I only successfully passed in front of that building twice-once with a large group and once to go speak with my friend Jake, the only other person I knew who'd been barred by LDSFS like me. There's a lot of buildings on campus that have bad memories for me and I wanted to cleanse one of them by opening my call there.
Instead, I sat down in a little blue chair in the Idaho Boise mission office lobby with my back to the windows, Sister Larsen watching from a nearby couch. My mission president sat beside me with his wife and the mission office staff looking on.
I slid it out of the envelope and read the same beginning words I've heard at so many call openings. I tried to hide the location from myself until I read to that point, but it didn't work. My eyes jumped down to the next line, saw Independence, and gasped.
Before I came here, my trainer, Sister Holland, had another two-transfer missionary. Her name was Sister Blair. She was called to Independence, but never went.
These last two months, I've been living in her apartment, sleeping in her bed, teaching the people she taught, and working out the math of when my call would come based on when she got hers.
The specter of Sister Blair has hovered above me all this time. Especially when she called Sister Holland and said she had decided to leave the MTC because "I've already served." Especially when she showed up to Taylor's baptism.
Now I'm taking her mission.
I prayed to go to Missouri (among other places, like London, Nauvoo, and Hawaii) because she put that in my mind. And now I am. I also requested a visitors' center on my mission papers (the Independence and Liberty Jail sites are there). That might have influenced things, but I also wholeheartedly believe I was called there by God. A lot of missions are great, but Missouri is literally Zion. I am going to prepare Zion for the Second Coming.
Being barred from a mission for three years hurts a little less now because I'm now three years closer to the Second Coming.
I stayed awake until well past 1:00 am that night, mind reeling, and as the week went on I still kept myself up with the excitement, even when I fell into bed exhausted from not sleeping the night before. I keep drawing the outline of Missouri in my mind, three flat sides and a squiggly river, and going into our study room just to look at my mission map and reread the first two lines of my call.
Now that it's here, I feel like I knew it all along. I've been reading about the British Saints and fantasizing about serving there, like Wilford Woodruff converting my 4x great-grandfather. There's a visitors center in London. I studied abroad in London and love it there. One time while I was fantasizing, the thought came to me that I'm called to see to the church's future, not the church's past. What's the most important place in the church's future? Missouri. And we talked about Liberty Jail in church just this Sunday.
I'm so excited to be a visitors center missionary between proselytizing! There are two visitors' centers, one in Independence and one at Liberty. I hope I get to serve in both.
Next Wednesday, I'll catch a flight down to Utah and go to the MTC. Yes, it's very stupid that I have to go there after being a missionary without it for three months. Getting a two-transfer call is the church mission department's way of saying they don't value you, either personally or financially. They wouldn't foot the bill for training me earlier because they weren't giving me the benefit of a doubt that I'd stay on a mission. They didn't pay for my transportation up to Boise, either, and it's Boise rather than some far-flung place so my parents would be close at hand if I ran home with my tail tucked between my legs. I also don't have a preaching license. It's been a humiliating and degrading experience that was only made worthwhile by the desperate hope that I could prove myself capable of a real mission.
My friend Cameron said it best. "Congratulations on serving out a ridiculous probation and moving on to the mission you wanted to have from the start. Well done."
Cameron was the first person to email me back on that announcement email. Fun fact, the reason that email was only two words long is I wrote it in the back of a moving car using my companion's hotspot during the last five minutes of the day that I was allowed to send emails.
Thank you, Cameron, and everyone else who sent celebratory replies. It means so much to me that you're all cheering me on now when I had three years of so many people in the church beating me down whenever I told them I wanted to serve.
Thank you.
I went on an exchange this week and claimed Schenectady for a hometown for the second time (for those of you who are new to my email list, some people belittle me when they find out I'm from Utah, so I have a faux hometown in Schenectady, New York). I can never do that any place I actually have to stick around. I expect to serve in at least one of the visitors' centers and I'll meet new people everyday, so I'll probably claim it a lot to amuse myself. When I claimed it on Saturday, the lady looked at me funny for a second and I thought I'd been caught, but then she repeated it back to me and I realized she was just baffled at the name.
This is going to be a fun habit. It will break down if I ever meet anyone from there, though.
Weekly tip to avoid mission-centricness feat. my former roommates:
My friend and ex-roommate Emily had a world history class where the professor kicked off the semester by reading bad student evaluations of himself. "I hated this professor and this class because I served in Peru but we only talked about the Roman empire and Genghis Khan and World War II. Whine whine whine." He then looked out over the class and said, "No one cares about the history of Peru."
Students who write evaluations like that are mission-centric to the point of dangerous ignorance. Having been a missionary in a foreign country doesn't make you all that globally conscious. It just acquaints you with one other culture. I once talked to a professor who oversees study abroads and she told me it was hard to get male students to study abroad because they serve missions and call it good. Both of my study abroads, the London one and the stateside church history one, had way more girls than guys.
Missions can't acquaint you with a lot of major world cultures, like China and the Middle East, where missionaries don't go.
My roommate Rochelle had a similar experience to Emily's. Rochelle took a social science class where her classmates had a lot of sympathy and cultural understanding for the peoples of Latin America, where they'd served, but lacked that for places like Syria. It's all well and good to live in Peru and love the people there, but there are a lot of other people out there in the world.
Back in 2015, after the terrorist attacks on France, I got sick of the only two things I ever heard about Islam being "these Muslims are terrorists" and "Remember, not all Muslims are terrorists." I wanted to know what normal Muslims were like, so I went to the library, search "Muslim", and found a novel about Muslims in France. It's called I Love I Hate I Miss My Sister. I don't think I'm an expert on Islam at all because I read that one book, but I learned a few things from it. I mentioned this to Emily (who has lived, served, and studied abroad in multiple Muslim countries) and she told me she was impressed with me for being willing to drag my butt to the library and get a book. I laughed and pointed out the west wall of our kitchen and said, "The library is five minutes that way. It wasn't hard."
We did a missionary Q and A with the Young Women this week and I told them a great way to prepare for a mission is to go to the library and read up on world religions. I wish I would have known more about Sikhism and Hinduism before my mission, because I've had to teach people of those faiths.
Sigh. I've got a long way to go in learning about the world.
When you serve in a place, you adopt it, and loving it is no longer a matter of loving something foreign, but loving you and yours. Your tip to avoid mission-centricness this week is to take interest in cultures you have never lived in.
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