Sincerely Sister Smith

Dear Loved Ones, This week marked my final zone conference. Usually I hate these because they drill us on obedience and never get into something as menial as the gospel or teaching lessons.  But this time, we held it outdoors at Far West with about sixty-two other missionaries. My companion and I (all two of us) can't teach one person indoors or outdoors, but is a truth, universally acknowledged, that people outdoors sitting four inches apart have different germs than people do indoors. Far West never attracts so much attention as Liberty or Independence or Adam-ondi-Ahman. Taken at face value, it's just another place the church was headquartered, like Kirtland or Nauvoo, and unlike those two cities, it wasn't really taken over by anyone else after the Saints left. I once heard it said, "The most remarkable thing about Far West is that there's nothing there." Five thousand of us lived here at one point, and now there's nothing. Nothing but the cor...

Dear Loved Ones, Honestly, this week was hard. I left the house very little. Kansas City officially reopened on the 15th, but missionaries are still under lockdown and my companion still has a bad ankle. Some days we can go down to the parking lot to pick up a dropped-off meal or run an errand, but some days I wake up knowing I won't leave the house all day. We have a balcony, though, and I can watch cardinals and dumpster raccoons from there. That's my Netflix. Is the non-missionary version of quarantine all that bad if you can still see all your friends? I feel like I usually spend large portions of my summers at home self-entertaining with my family and the Internet. My one big outing this week was me getting to milk a goat! I called in another set of sisters 40 minutes away to exchange with us and make it happen. The goat owners were very gracious. They have eight kids and were more than capable of doing their own farm chores, but I told them I wanted to and the held...

Dear Loved Ones, When I was in elementary school, I loved playing the computer game Oregon Trail. Not the really pixelated version from back when computers were young. Version 5.0 has these fancy animated cut scenes where you watch a family of pioneer kids make their way out to Oregon to meet their dad, surviving rattlesnakes and rapids along the way. In one scene, the oldest brother asks their trail guide, "Jim, do you think they'll ever build a railroad here?" Of course they will! It was totally obvious to me, sitting at my high tech computer in 2007, that railroads out west could be a thing. The cut scenes were set in the 1850s, so I knew they'd see the railroad in their lifetime. And yet they talk about it like it's some far-flung possibility. Don't they know that the future is long? Don't they know that the world isn't going to end that soon and there's plenty of time for,railroads, and not only railroads but cars and planes and spaceship...

Dear Loved Ones, I'm out of jail—but still in jail. I moved from Liberty back to Grain Valley, and I hope quarantine will start letting up in about two weeks. I just want to teach my favorite restoration branch family in person once more before I go. I care about little else. At this stage in the game, I've realized that most missionary work is busywork and the only hours that really matter are the ones I've spend comforting someone going through a crisis or teaching someone who is going to progress. And now, I'm going to speak openly about something I've been holding close to my chest for the past year. I'm going to be honest about my mission experience and address topics I've skated around before. I hope I will explain a lot of the way I’ve written during all of my mission. Being a two-transfer missionary was hard. I let my companions get away with treating me ways other missionaries probably wouldn't allow themselves to be treated because I w...