Open Letter to Reassignment Missionaries and Their Loved Ones

Dear Missionary,

My last three months of my mission were unconventional. I didn't go to church for thirteen weeks. I lost a companion to international callbacks one week into the transfer and had only a few hours' notice to pack up all my stuff and move to a different zone. I filled in at another area while also running my own area over videochat for five weeks. My last transfer, they shuffled missionaries around every week. You zoom into district council and there's a whole new companionship with missionaries from around the world. Now I'm home, watching my foreign-called little brother wait for his online MTC, a reassignment to who knows where, and eventually, a mission in Colombia.

But my first three months were unusual, too. I served mainly in the Missouri Independence Mission but started off in the Idaho Boise Mission as part of the now-defunct two-transfer missionary program. I started my mission with no idea where I'd end up. I got a second mission call letter while in the field and had to hurry and buy appropriate clothes for a humid Missouri summer one P-day because I had only sixteen days between my call opening and the MTC.

I sympathized and connected with the missionaries I watched pour in from around the world. I know what it's like to be the odd man out. Here's a heads-up for what you'll experience as you go back into the field.

You will be emotionally stronger than everyone around you

I spent twelve weeks in quarantine before arriving home. That's a quarter of a year and one-sixth of a sister mission. My emotions were vary frayed after a while. And I'm one of the lucky ones. Whenever I had a hard day, I'd take one of my numbered countdown popsicle sticks and break them in half. Only x many days until I was out of jail. But other missionaries I knew had to endure with no end in sight. You've been able to recharge surrounded by friends and family and freedom and Netflix. That has left you bored and raring to go, yes, but it's also been easy. Your soon-to-be-companion will be coming off a long stretch of isolation with little work, pressure from mission leaders to make work out of nothing, and may have been paired with a bad companion for all this inside time. I knew one sister who was trained in quarantine and doesn't know any other world. During our six hour outdoor zone conference, she told me, "This is the most I've been outside my whole mission." Your next companion may be coming off a situation like that. Or they may be in the field longer than they'd planned. I have a Peruvian friend who was supposed to finish her mission at the end of April, but she's still in the US. Right before our quarantine started, we got some reassignment missionaries from Mongolia. They'd been quarantined two months before evacuation. As of this writing in July, they've now been quarantined four additional months, spend one-third or one-fourth of their missions indoors. Whatever struggles they've had to endure, be patient with them.

You will probably be physically stronger than many around you

I was trained in a bike area in Idaho. When our bikes were broken, or when my companion had post-concussion syndrome or a tailbone injury, we walked. Then I came out to Missouri and we drove around in 2019 Toyota Ravs and other nice cars with remote start keys so you could blast the air conditioner before you got in to relax after tracting. We had bikes in our balcony closet that had been unused for over six months. One week, I arranged to bike when we shared a car with another set so we wouldn't have to trouble members for rides. My companion had been out for six transfers and had never been without a car for more than an evening. It was the height of a humid midwest summer. She'd stick her tongue out like a puppy and pant. I was happy as a clam just to be out moving again, even when the feels like was 111 F. But while I was having a blast, she was in absolute agony because her mission had never prepared her for what many missions consider a normal workday.

They may think you are disobedient

Morality doesn't vary from place to place or time to time. So if your new mission president has some rule your old one didn't live by, it's not morality. But try telling that to anybody. My two missions had very different ideas of time management that both made us inefficient. In Idaho, we couldn't be home past 10 am. I once got out of the shower at 10:06 and found my companion standing outside the front door, bike ready, while stood there dripping and freezing in a towel. It was winter. We did companionship study outdoors in January or walked or biked all the way to the church. My first day in Missouri, I was dressed and standing by the door at 9:59. My companion was lounging around on the couch still and hadn't brushed her hair. I thought she was a slacker, and then learned the whole mission was, and then learned my old mission president had been a slave driver all this time. Rules you thought were ironclad were actually just invented, and new, invented rules may as well be ironclad. The handbook tells us to return to our living quarters at 9 pm. In Idaho, that meant to be home by 9:00, so you could finish up contacting at 8:15, spend a half hour biking home, and be back at 8:45. In my new mission, you couldn't stop knocking even at 8:59. Many a time we were yelled at for tracting three hours after sunset in the winter. In my more ghetto-ish area, we'd hear gunshots in the dark. Members didn't want us over that late. We'd beg them to shelter us for the last hour of the night under the guise of sharing a message, and they'd just ask us if we'd like a ride home.

It won't ever be your first love, and that's okay.

I heard reassignment elders start off stories with "on my mission" instead "back in Colombia" or "in my last mission". As if they were RMs. When I moved from Idaho to Missouri, a member in my home ward wrote me a letter telling me to think of it as if I'd just been transferred to a new area. But all reassignment missionaries seem to have an instinctive, unanimous agreement that they're not on their mission anymore.
x

You will find something to love here. Big midwest sunsets or cicadas or fireflies. And the people, the people, the people. No missionary I've ever met, when I ask them for their favorite part of their mission, says anything other than, "The people." But it's okay if half of your heart is still in Brazil so long as you don't love your new mission half-heartedly.

The whole social media thing isn't exactly off the ground yet

Yeah, we're working on it. One problem with social media is harassment. Another is every missionary in the world trying to find online. I got excited once when a young woman in a facebook group said she wanted someone to pray with her over videochat, but when I went to add her as a friend, I saw she was another missionary. But the great roadblock is that the missionary business model had always been based on locality. You're assigned to an area. Now they're grafting this non-local strategy on top of it. You can find someone online in Nigeria, teach them a while, and hand them off, and that's great. Go do it! But...the mission world is still clinging to the idea of areas. The awkward little compromise is to create facebook pages with titles like "Representatives of Jesus Christ in (city name)" and hope someone follows it. These pages have not-that-much following because they didn't exist until quarantine hit. Missionaries were authorized by the Church to use Internet in their proselyting way back in 2012, but mission presidents didn't actually allow us to do it until March 2020.

There is a culture of fear built around technology. We're not allowed to so much as use Gospel Library while your companion is in the bathroom and can't see your screen. My mission president threatened to send me home for getting onto facebook without praying first. I used a friend to help me run this mission blog where I could share my emails with a wider following and kept it kind of a secret because I didn't want other missionaries to have a knowledge or a huffy opinion about what I was writing.

The gerontocracy of the mission world has always feared young whipper-snappers on their cellular telephones. They instilled that fear in us and taught us to be restrictive rather than effective, so we're not effective. Until the rules are stamped out, the filters uninstalled, and the Safeguards for Using Technology rulebook, which we were forced to read daily in companionship study, is consigned to the archives of Gospel Library, most of us won't actually be technology missionaries.

Quarantine rules are more ritualistic than protective

Missionaries in Missouri are currently allowed to do outdoor service. I don't think they're currently allowed to do outdoor lessons. For a time, I was able to do that and enjoyed a measure of both success and purpose. The idea, I guess, is that people will sit farther apart outdoors than they do indoors. The exact opposite is true. Most living room setups will allow you to sit six feet away from people and chairs don't move. But if you're on somebody's lawn, sitting spaces aren't clearly defined and people move around so much more. And service, service, oh dear service. Service is passing people paintbrushes and placing chicken eggs into a bare hand and milking a goat together (goats are not six feet long) and uprooting a willow sapling (saplings are not six feet wide). Service was glorious. It got me outside and made me feel useful. It also raised the silent question of why I couldn't teach lessons inside someone's house if I could serve with that level of physicality.

Rules aren't actually there to keep us safe. They're there to grant the illusion of safety. Our mission leaders can't be faulted much for it because they're scrambling to figure out what to do with us. I often thought of that scene in Hidden Figures where the mathematician turns in her calculations at the end of her first day, only for her boss to tell her so many scientific advancements have been made over the course of one workday and her math is no longer valid. The very framework we work inside changes too fast for anybody to keep up with it.

You may get unexpected opportunities

You are assigned to this mission for a reason. Perhaps you'll be training a Visa waiter who needs to learn your language. Perhaps there's a random person from your last mission culture who needs your experience. Not just your language, but your experience. I taught a woman from China for a while. She didn't have any religious background at all and Christianity was a hard concept for her to wrap her mind around. I always wished I had someone who'd served in Asia and knew how to help people understand God when they had no concept of him.

It's gonna be a melting pot

My last zoom call with my district featured testimonies in four different languages other than English. There's fun to be had here. You may serve in Nebraska but be surrounded by companions who speak Tagalog, cook Japanese, and tell you crazy stories about tracting in Sierra Leone.

Someone sacrificed their only mission for you to have a second mission

Remember that. My brother got pulled out of Chicago at 21 months and he loved his mission. My first quarantine companion wept when they pulled her back to Mexico at less than eleven months. As we packed up her stuff, she kept saying that she'd never serve with her favorite hermanas, never go to her dream area, and never go on the trip departing missionaries in Missouri take to Adam-ondi-Ahman.

But you will, if you replace her. You're taking somebody's dreams. If, after a few weeks, you're not happy there, just go home. Don't stay in a place half-heartedly when you replaced someone who served with their whole heart and there are literally thousands of people praying for a spot to open up. If you're not happy there, answer someone's prayer.

Resources are spread thin. Work is spread thin, too.

People always asked us, "Where are they going to put them all?" as if finding housing for all the new missionaries was the biggest hurdle. One of my converts even offered to lay blankets on her apartment floor if needed. Housing is oh so very available because we lost almost all of our senior missionaries and they left apartments behind. Cars are less available. Be prepared to cover large areas on foot sometimes.

The bigger problem is finding enough work for everyone. Teaching pools naturally rise and fall over time. But for the past four months, we've suffered the natural sloughing off without being able to replenish them. We didn't have enough appointments for ourselves, let alone for others, and now they're pulling in new companionships. One ward in my district had two sets of elders and one set of sisters. A sister I know who'd served there previously told me she and her companion wanted sisters to be pulled out. There wasn't ward support for two sets. Let alone three.

We're still expected to keep a seventy hour work week, but only around five hours or less were spent teaching people if we're lucky. The only activities we could do to fill up our time were:

1. Doing Come Follow Me with active members

2. Calling active members and asking them to do Come Follow Me

I called and texted through our ward roster so many times. Once you've called everybody, there's nothing else to do but wait and call again. After more than two months of that, ward members would ask, "Still?" Their world was reopening and they couldn't understand why we were still limited to zoom sessions. I counted myself lucky that I at least had a whole ward to myself and wasn't sharing with two other sets.

You'll need to be strong

I can't overestimate how worn-down everyone is. My little brother has a foreign-called friend being "trained" in Colorado by two elders who just want to sit around and play card games. When I heard that, I was jealous that he got to live with two people instead of one and that they were willing to play card games. Lots of missionaries no longer have the level of motivation necessary to entertain themselves. Most missionaries sit paralyzed.

There seem to be three types of quarantine missionaries: those who do nothing, those who mess around and have fun, and those who magnify their calling. The only people who do for that are those who go for it.

In my first few days of quarantine, I treated it like a vacation. I expected the world to be shut down for 14 days, and when everyone knew they had no symptoms, missionaries would go about business as usual. So I bought a watercolor set and painted a ballerina. While I was painting, the hardest-working sister I knew called. I asked her what she'd done with herself and she told me, "We went on a walk with a lady who's not active." I was floored and asked her if we were allowed to go on walks with people. She said she hadn't asked and just went for it.

Similarly, I knew elders who decided they were okay to do outdoor service before people

Other sisters I knew didn't dare pick up takeout without permission from young mission leaders.

You won't often be effective. It'll be hard to keep happy. But whether you're coming back out on reassignment or waiting for a border to open so you can get into your originally called location, you represent badly needed lifeblood at a time when everyone's motivation is floundering. Become a game changer. Whip your companions into shape when they're despondent. Whip them kindly, but whip them. Soften uptight missionaries when it comes to your new mission's non-handbook rules. Find creative ways to serve at a time when your repertoire is limited.

And above all, be gentle on yourself. My favorite BYU devotional features the story of an African man who spoke to the church's first representative to visit West Africa, back before black men could hold the priesthood. The church sent him to Africa not to open the floodgates for missionary work, but to investigate the thousands of "African converts without baptism," people who'd begun reading the Book of Mormon and preaching the gospel on their own, to see whether they were sincere of thought conversion would be a handy way to get money from the church. One old man, who'd walked a great ways despite fighting sickness to meet in a mud hut with this church representative and would need to walk a great ways home. He told him, "I am sincere or I would not be here."

Having to wait in Idaho, where I didn't want to be, in a status other than that of a normally-called missionary, wore me down. I discovered this devotional my first or second transfer in Missouri and it resonated with me. Whenever I worried my mission was at risk of ending early, I reminded myself, "I am sincere or I would not be here."

You have a special kind of stamina that pushed you to the top. You could've opted to stay home. But you wanted to go out. When the days get hard ahead, remind yourself: you are sincere. That's why you're here.

Sincerely,

Sister Smith