Week 70: Redeem Me Again
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 was afraid any wrong move would result in me being sent home. And then, on March 11, 2019, I finally had my call, and it was to Zion. I felt gloriously happy. I would lie awake in bed pictures the outline of the state of Missouri in in my head. After that came the MTC, which mostly felt like a two week vacation in the middle of my mission. Everyone in my class loved me and looked up to me because I had already served. One of my teachers even pulled me aside on the first day and said, "You've already been in the field, and you've been in the field a lot more recently than I have, could you help me lead a class discussion?"
Oh, it was glorious. One of the only dark spots was an interview with my branch president, a former mission president himself. I told him my feelings about the MTC and he, in return, told me he disliked two-transfer missionaries. Both those who had done two transfers under him before going elsewhere and those who came to him after having been trained under a different mission president.
But I brushed that off. The MTC was the first time since February of 2016, when I was first barred from serving, that I felt safe. It was much like the early saints gathering to Jackson County in the 1830s who rejoiced in having a safe place to gather after the more minor oppositions in Ohio and New York. It was a time of "Finally."
On April 10th, I landed in Missouri and sat through an orientation led by my new mission president. I thought he was funny. I thought he was safe. I thought I could impress him with my work ethic and zeal, pent up for three and a half years now, and everything would be okay.
He laid out some fussy rules in that orientation, like insisting that our weekly emails to him be written in an acrostic that spelled out the word miracle. M is for me. You have to write about yourself first, that's part of his format. Right after explaining this format to us, he told us, sneeringly, of a missionary who'd written an email where the first paragraph was all about herself and 18 sentences started with the word "I."
But I brushed that off.
I was paired with my new companion, sent off to my area, and oh, it was idyllic. Early spring is beautiful in Missouri. The redbuds were in bloom, tracting felt like reaping a harvest, and I believed in miracles. I thought every door we knocked on where people seemed faintly interested in us coming back was going to turn into something.
And then my mom sent me a Nashville Tribute Band CD. It had a song on it called Still Small Voice with Alex Boye. I'll attach the audio file at the bottom of this so you can listen to it for yourself. I played it in the car and my companion skipped it, insisting that it was "too rocky." When I defended the song, which is about the Holy Ghost, that escalated into a ferocious fight.
She told our mission president I needed to be dealt with. After a zone conference, he pulled me into a private room and asked, "Have you fully repented of everything?"
I told him that no, I had not been guilty of any special sin before my mission, and yes, I felt that I had repented of everything in my life.
He then surmised that I had unresolved trauma, and needed to go to therapy. For the crime of defending an Alex Boye song.
In the years leading up to my mission, I sometimes said that I would rather get in a car crash rather than go up against LDS Family Services again. Having been in a car crash now, that's still the case. I feared nothing more than them. In college, I lived near the LDS Family Services building for over a year and had to pass it about six times a day. I'd cross the street at a point that took me out of my way to avoid getting close to it and wouldn't pass it at all without headphones to help me through it. Sometimes I prayed for strength to help me pass it okay.
I knew, that with my track record, going to therapy could be a slippery slope that sent me home. And even if it didn't, I didn't want to live in terror again. I came on a mission to heal the pain of being barred from serving a mission. The poet Rupi Kaur said you can't seek healing "at the feet of those who broke you." The fear of being hurt there again, both before and during my mission, polluted every good moment. When I studied abroad in London, the happiest time of my life, I carried a little blue notebook with me on the train to write out scripts for what I'd say when I got that next interview.
So I was absolutely terrified when he tried to send me there now. I begged my way out of it and he granted that, but the next month with that companion was terrifying. She would go days at a time without speaking to me unless she was praying aloud or telling me to sync our schedule app. In front of others, she was laughy and jokey, but she stopped the second we were alone again. She dominated in lessons, at door approaches, to the point where my voice felt hoarse from disuse.
I lost the motivation to eat. One morning, I threw up in the toilet, told my companion, and a few hours later, she asked, "Are you still playing sick?"
That's the only time in my life I've ever been stressed to the point of physical nausea.
But finally, that miserable month came to an end. My companion got transferred, I got a new one, and a few days into that new companionship, I found Fia. Fia is absolutely the light of my mission. I'm messaging her now while I draft this. I lost myself in the work and everything was okay again. And after leaving Fia's area, I came to Independence.
THAT was fun! I had three great companions in a row. I learned the visitors' center tour and saw their story intertwined with my own. When I talked about the idealistic saints gathering to Jackson County, unaware that they'd soon be in jeopardy, I secretly borrowed wording from my journals about my own joy in coming to Zion, unawares of what would happen next. I still lived in paranoia, but I was happier there.
One of my Independence companions told me a lot of things I didn't know about our mission. She told me a companion of hers had been severely depressed and self-harming. When she turned to our mission president and wrote him an email crying out for help, his response to her was, "You used the word I eighteen times in the first paragraph."
I think that was the same sister he referenced during my orientation meeting.
But she also had good news. She told me that it's actually hard for our mission president to send people home now. The area presidency got mad at him for trying to out people for petty reasons. She told me that one sister I know who held hands with a boy in the YSA, an elder we both knew who had been messaging girls, and an elder I've never met who had gone cliff-jumping were all denied ejection for the mission. She told me that if they were safe in all their extremity, I was, too.
And that opened the gates to probably the greatest period of joy on my mission.
Until I got in a car crash. And left Independence. And got a new companion who had an exaggerated idea of what it meant to be obedient. We already have a rigid and stringent mission culture and she followed all the not-a-rule rules to a T.
Our mission president decided it was ghastly for us to think about going home, so he told us that we're not allowed to tell people how long we've been out. My companion was going home, and she didn't tell our ward leadership until two days before as we were sitting in a meeting.
None of these extra rules make us more efficient. None of them make us better teachers. I sometimes feel like this mission cares very little about teaching. One of my Independence companions and I counted how many references to Christ we heard to zone conference and how many to obedience. Obedience, 22. Christ, 7.
All that stringency, my homesickness for Independence, and the post-crash stress weighed on me and I vented in an email to three Independence friends, two of them former companions, venting about my current companion, mission stringency, and general frustration. Among other things, I complained that she wouldn't get on Facebook without praying first and pouted (like actually got sad and stuck out her lip) when I told her I didn't.
Two of the three people I wrote to replied expressing sympathy. One never replied. And that email ended up in my mission president's inbox.
On Valentine's Day night, he called me up and yelled at me over the phone. A married man prioritized this on Valentine's Day. He told me that I'd been participating in secret combinations, that my phone would be disabled, not just for Facebook but for other basic purposes, like using google maps, and "you have to go see LDS Family Services" and that "You'll be on the next flight to Salt lake City" if I wasn't careful.
She was hurt that I had said unkind things about her over email. I felt ashamed. There have been very few times in my adult life that I felt strong guilt, and that was one of them.
That was a turning point for me. I'm done playing the victim and I know I'm accountable for my own actions and how I treat people. What I said was wrong. I made up with my companion and made sure I was okay.
But I still had to worry about the threats hanging over my head. I had my only big breakdown since he threatened to send me to therapy for Alex Boye. I was up until 1 am crying that night, ate very little, and my body felt so hard and stiff for the next few weeks. I did whatever I needed to stay safe. One time I was trying to clean out a shower while doing service for someone. It was the kind with a sliding door, so you have to close it to clean it, and I needed to clean the inside. So I stepped inside, slid the door, and my companion said, "Sister? Can I get in there with you?"
I was baffled. I don't think a shower is a separate room, and you can see through blurry glass pretty well. But I gritted my teeth and did what she wanted because I knew I needed to toe the line.
Lucille Ball went to a prestigious action school as a young woman that had churned out greats like Bette Davis. surely it was a good place of learning. But that wasn't her experience. She was relentlessly bullied by other girls there, and later said of her education, "The only thing I learned there was how to be afraid."
I've learned other things on my mission. I've learned to appreciate Zion and the Plan of Salvation. I've studied the new testament more. I've seen destructive family lives up close and grown more grateful for my own. Church history has a place in my heart. But I spent a solid seven months, from the Alex Boye incident to the day my companion told me I couldn't be send home, living in fear. I've said oh so many frantic prayers that I wouldn't get in trouble for some petty thing. Even in the shower, as I'm falling asleep, and in lessons, I feel like my mind is more on obedience than on anything else. I've alternated between being too hard on myself and wondering if there was something morally wrong about my attitude (even when I hadn't actually done anything disobedient) and living with pent-up anger at the rigidity that surrounded me and seeped inside me until it hardened like lead in my veins.
And then I had a pointed, personal threat that I’d be sent home.
A few weeks after that, I had to go to a one on one interview with my mission president. I was terrified of anything he might view as a transgression in me, like having memes on my phone. I turned the flashlight on my phone on to run down the battery in case he went through it, even though he'd never gone through my phone before.
And I needed to pray. My soul was sick and weary of saying the same old prayers. I've needed to stay committed to my mission for four and a half years. Three years of waiting, being barred twice and petitioning to finally be allowed to go, three months as a two-transfer missionary, expecting to be sent home if I angered anybody, that seven month stretch of fear until I learned that missionaries can't actually be outed that easily, and now this. I was so sick of saying the same old words. I needed something new, but I was in the same old situation.
No matter how hard I try to toe the line, pander to church leaders and live in fear of whatever companion or roommate I live with, I just couldn't win. And it was solidly my own fault this time. I had no one else to blame. So the words that came out in the days leading up to the interview were, "Redeem me again."
Help me. Don't send me to LDS Family Services. Don't send me home. Please let me leave my mission without a bitter taste in my mouth. Please give me something other than a Lucille Ball education. I'd fought so hard and long and i just couldn't anymore. I needed his mercy and grace.
And I got it.
That interview, he softly reprimanded me for letting Satan into our companionship (yes, really) but didn't check my phone, didn't speak of LDSFS, and didn't say he would send me home.
I fact-checked the threat with one friend who was an AP in a different mission and one friend who was the granddaughter of a mission president. They both said that he couldn't actually out me like he claimed, my Independence companion was right all along. It was all a power play. They said I was safe.
And now I finally am. 38 days to go. I am left standing, against all odds, when half the missionaries in the world have been sent home.
I've had a good run. I'm working on a list of 100 happy things that have happened during my mission and I'm up to 77. It's Been long, three times longer than most people need to hold out this kind of commitment, and I can see through the glittering masquerade of mission-centricness. But I’m finally at the end of it and I have a little time left at the finale to do some good.
One of the goals I made, all the way back during that meeting last April when I heard about acrostic miracle letters, was to grow closer to Heavenly Father and Christ. And I have.
Relationships are built on trust. In hose three years, I prayed fervently for God to get me on a mission and really believed that he would-until I got barred for the second time in August of 2017. After that, my trust was pretty fragile. But he has redeemed me again.
He got me past LDSFS and into Idaho.
He took me out of Idaho and into Missouri.
He got me through dicey situations in Missouri where I stepped out of line and faced threats. Getting in a car crash or being under lockdown during a pandemic didn't hold a candle to fearing church leaders above me. When I get home in 38 days, I'll be able to say I've finally reached a place where I feel safe. The church is no longer a place of pain for me like it was before. Sometimes, I get flashbacks, but it's not like in college, where I really struggled to carry on. I've seen how God will redeem me again. And again. And again.
It hasn't all been good. I've learned how to be afraid and paranoia is a deeply ingrained part of my personality now. Even in my good patches, I stressed about raising my head too high and being punished. But during my stupid moments, when I got myself into trouble, he got me out.
If nothing else, my mission has been the arena where I learned to trust in the Lord. Just like I look back on my mom's days in Iran to know I'll be okay during the corona shutdown, whatever trials come next, I'll look back on my mission hours and know he can redeem me again.
Thank you, friends, for standing by me all his time.
Sincerely,
Sister Smith
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 was afraid any wrong move would result in me being sent home. And then, on March 11, 2019, I finally had my call, and it was to Zion. I felt gloriously happy. I would lie awake in bed pictures the outline of the state of Missouri in in my head. After that came the MTC, which mostly felt like a two week vacation in the middle of my mission. Everyone in my class loved me and looked up to me because I had already served. One of my teachers even pulled me aside on the first day and said, "You've already been in the field, and you've been in the field a lot more recently than I have, could you help me lead a class discussion?"
Oh, it was glorious. One of the only dark spots was an interview with my branch president, a former mission president himself. I told him my feelings about the MTC and he, in return, told me he disliked two-transfer missionaries. Both those who had done two transfers under him before going elsewhere and those who came to him after having been trained under a different mission president.
But I brushed that off. The MTC was the first time since February of 2016, when I was first barred from serving, that I felt safe. It was much like the early saints gathering to Jackson County in the 1830s who rejoiced in having a safe place to gather after the more minor oppositions in Ohio and New York. It was a time of "Finally."
On April 10th, I landed in Missouri and sat through an orientation led by my new mission president. I thought he was funny. I thought he was safe. I thought I could impress him with my work ethic and zeal, pent up for three and a half years now, and everything would be okay.
He laid out some fussy rules in that orientation, like insisting that our weekly emails to him be written in an acrostic that spelled out the word miracle. M is for me. You have to write about yourself first, that's part of his format. Right after explaining this format to us, he told us, sneeringly, of a missionary who'd written an email where the first paragraph was all about herself and 18 sentences started with the word "I."
But I brushed that off.
I was paired with my new companion, sent off to my area, and oh, it was idyllic. Early spring is beautiful in Missouri. The redbuds were in bloom, tracting felt like reaping a harvest, and I believed in miracles. I thought every door we knocked on where people seemed faintly interested in us coming back was going to turn into something.
And then my mom sent me a Nashville Tribute Band CD. It had a song on it called Still Small Voice with Alex Boye. I'll attach the audio file at the bottom of this so you can listen to it for yourself. I played it in the car and my companion skipped it, insisting that it was "too rocky." When I defended the song, which is about the Holy Ghost, that escalated into a ferocious fight.
She told our mission president I needed to be dealt with. After a zone conference, he pulled me into a private room and asked, "Have you fully repented of everything?"
I told him that no, I had not been guilty of any special sin before my mission, and yes, I felt that I had repented of everything in my life.
He then surmised that I had unresolved trauma, and needed to go to therapy. For the crime of defending an Alex Boye song.
In the years leading up to my mission, I sometimes said that I would rather get in a car crash rather than go up against LDS Family Services again. Having been in a car crash now, that's still the case. I feared nothing more than them. In college, I lived near the LDS Family Services building for over a year and had to pass it about six times a day. I'd cross the street at a point that took me out of my way to avoid getting close to it and wouldn't pass it at all without headphones to help me through it. Sometimes I prayed for strength to help me pass it okay.
I knew, that with my track record, going to therapy could be a slippery slope that sent me home. And even if it didn't, I didn't want to live in terror again. I came on a mission to heal the pain of being barred from serving a mission. The poet Rupi Kaur said you can't seek healing "at the feet of those who broke you." The fear of being hurt there again, both before and during my mission, polluted every good moment. When I studied abroad in London, the happiest time of my life, I carried a little blue notebook with me on the train to write out scripts for what I'd say when I got that next interview.
So I was absolutely terrified when he tried to send me there now. I begged my way out of it and he granted that, but the next month with that companion was terrifying. She would go days at a time without speaking to me unless she was praying aloud or telling me to sync our schedule app. In front of others, she was laughy and jokey, but she stopped the second we were alone again. She dominated in lessons, at door approaches, to the point where my voice felt hoarse from disuse.
I lost the motivation to eat. One morning, I threw up in the toilet, told my companion, and a few hours later, she asked, "Are you still playing sick?"
That's the only time in my life I've ever been stressed to the point of physical nausea.
But finally, that miserable month came to an end. My companion got transferred, I got a new one, and a few days into that new companionship, I found Fia. Fia is absolutely the light of my mission. I'm messaging her now while I draft this. I lost myself in the work and everything was okay again. And after leaving Fia's area, I came to Independence.
THAT was fun! I had three great companions in a row. I learned the visitors' center tour and saw their story intertwined with my own. When I talked about the idealistic saints gathering to Jackson County, unaware that they'd soon be in jeopardy, I secretly borrowed wording from my journals about my own joy in coming to Zion, unawares of what would happen next. I still lived in paranoia, but I was happier there.
One of my Independence companions told me a lot of things I didn't know about our mission. She told me a companion of hers had been severely depressed and self-harming. When she turned to our mission president and wrote him an email crying out for help, his response to her was, "You used the word I eighteen times in the first paragraph."
I think that was the same sister he referenced during my orientation meeting.
But she also had good news. She told me that it's actually hard for our mission president to send people home now. The area presidency got mad at him for trying to out people for petty reasons. She told me that one sister I know who held hands with a boy in the YSA, an elder we both knew who had been messaging girls, and an elder I've never met who had gone cliff-jumping were all denied ejection for the mission. She told me that if they were safe in all their extremity, I was, too.
And that opened the gates to probably the greatest period of joy on my mission.
Until I got in a car crash. And left Independence. And got a new companion who had an exaggerated idea of what it meant to be obedient. We already have a rigid and stringent mission culture and she followed all the not-a-rule rules to a T.
Our mission president decided it was ghastly for us to think about going home, so he told us that we're not allowed to tell people how long we've been out. My companion was going home, and she didn't tell our ward leadership until two days before as we were sitting in a meeting.
None of these extra rules make us more efficient. None of them make us better teachers. I sometimes feel like this mission cares very little about teaching. One of my Independence companions and I counted how many references to Christ we heard to zone conference and how many to obedience. Obedience, 22. Christ, 7.
All that stringency, my homesickness for Independence, and the post-crash stress weighed on me and I vented in an email to three Independence friends, two of them former companions, venting about my current companion, mission stringency, and general frustration. Among other things, I complained that she wouldn't get on Facebook without praying first and pouted (like actually got sad and stuck out her lip) when I told her I didn't.
Two of the three people I wrote to replied expressing sympathy. One never replied. And that email ended up in my mission president's inbox.
On Valentine's Day night, he called me up and yelled at me over the phone. A married man prioritized this on Valentine's Day. He told me that I'd been participating in secret combinations, that my phone would be disabled, not just for Facebook but for other basic purposes, like using google maps, and "you have to go see LDS Family Services" and that "You'll be on the next flight to Salt lake City" if I wasn't careful.
She was hurt that I had said unkind things about her over email. I felt ashamed. There have been very few times in my adult life that I felt strong guilt, and that was one of them.
That was a turning point for me. I'm done playing the victim and I know I'm accountable for my own actions and how I treat people. What I said was wrong. I made up with my companion and made sure I was okay.
But I still had to worry about the threats hanging over my head. I had my only big breakdown since he threatened to send me to therapy for Alex Boye. I was up until 1 am crying that night, ate very little, and my body felt so hard and stiff for the next few weeks. I did whatever I needed to stay safe. One time I was trying to clean out a shower while doing service for someone. It was the kind with a sliding door, so you have to close it to clean it, and I needed to clean the inside. So I stepped inside, slid the door, and my companion said, "Sister? Can I get in there with you?"
I was baffled. I don't think a shower is a separate room, and you can see through blurry glass pretty well. But I gritted my teeth and did what she wanted because I knew I needed to toe the line.
Lucille Ball went to a prestigious action school as a young woman that had churned out greats like Bette Davis. surely it was a good place of learning. But that wasn't her experience. She was relentlessly bullied by other girls there, and later said of her education, "The only thing I learned there was how to be afraid."
I've learned other things on my mission. I've learned to appreciate Zion and the Plan of Salvation. I've studied the new testament more. I've seen destructive family lives up close and grown more grateful for my own. Church history has a place in my heart. But I spent a solid seven months, from the Alex Boye incident to the day my companion told me I couldn't be send home, living in fear. I've said oh so many frantic prayers that I wouldn't get in trouble for some petty thing. Even in the shower, as I'm falling asleep, and in lessons, I feel like my mind is more on obedience than on anything else. I've alternated between being too hard on myself and wondering if there was something morally wrong about my attitude (even when I hadn't actually done anything disobedient) and living with pent-up anger at the rigidity that surrounded me and seeped inside me until it hardened like lead in my veins.
And then I had a pointed, personal threat that I’d be sent home.
A few weeks after that, I had to go to a one on one interview with my mission president. I was terrified of anything he might view as a transgression in me, like having memes on my phone. I turned the flashlight on my phone on to run down the battery in case he went through it, even though he'd never gone through my phone before.
And I needed to pray. My soul was sick and weary of saying the same old prayers. I've needed to stay committed to my mission for four and a half years. Three years of waiting, being barred twice and petitioning to finally be allowed to go, three months as a two-transfer missionary, expecting to be sent home if I angered anybody, that seven month stretch of fear until I learned that missionaries can't actually be outed that easily, and now this. I was so sick of saying the same old words. I needed something new, but I was in the same old situation.
No matter how hard I try to toe the line, pander to church leaders and live in fear of whatever companion or roommate I live with, I just couldn't win. And it was solidly my own fault this time. I had no one else to blame. So the words that came out in the days leading up to the interview were, "Redeem me again."
Help me. Don't send me to LDS Family Services. Don't send me home. Please let me leave my mission without a bitter taste in my mouth. Please give me something other than a Lucille Ball education. I'd fought so hard and long and i just couldn't anymore. I needed his mercy and grace.
And I got it.
That interview, he softly reprimanded me for letting Satan into our companionship (yes, really) but didn't check my phone, didn't speak of LDSFS, and didn't say he would send me home.
I fact-checked the threat with one friend who was an AP in a different mission and one friend who was the granddaughter of a mission president. They both said that he couldn't actually out me like he claimed, my Independence companion was right all along. It was all a power play. They said I was safe.
And now I finally am. 38 days to go. I am left standing, against all odds, when half the missionaries in the world have been sent home.
I've had a good run. I'm working on a list of 100 happy things that have happened during my mission and I'm up to 77. It's Been long, three times longer than most people need to hold out this kind of commitment, and I can see through the glittering masquerade of mission-centricness. But I’m finally at the end of it and I have a little time left at the finale to do some good.
One of the goals I made, all the way back during that meeting last April when I heard about acrostic miracle letters, was to grow closer to Heavenly Father and Christ. And I have.
Relationships are built on trust. In hose three years, I prayed fervently for God to get me on a mission and really believed that he would-until I got barred for the second time in August of 2017. After that, my trust was pretty fragile. But he has redeemed me again.
He got me past LDSFS and into Idaho.
He took me out of Idaho and into Missouri.
He got me through dicey situations in Missouri where I stepped out of line and faced threats. Getting in a car crash or being under lockdown during a pandemic didn't hold a candle to fearing church leaders above me. When I get home in 38 days, I'll be able to say I've finally reached a place where I feel safe. The church is no longer a place of pain for me like it was before. Sometimes, I get flashbacks, but it's not like in college, where I really struggled to carry on. I've seen how God will redeem me again. And again. And again.
It hasn't all been good. I've learned how to be afraid and paranoia is a deeply ingrained part of my personality now. Even in my good patches, I stressed about raising my head too high and being punished. But during my stupid moments, when I got myself into trouble, he got me out.
If nothing else, my mission has been the arena where I learned to trust in the Lord. Just like I look back on my mom's days in Iran to know I'll be okay during the corona shutdown, whatever trials come next, I'll look back on my mission hours and know he can redeem me again.
Thank you, friends, for standing by me all his time.
Sincerely,
Sister Smith
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