Remembering

My mother sent me a letter on my mission in which she wrote, "You have the ability to glean a lot of wisdom from everyday experiences." I've often believed this to be one of the greatest compliments I've ever been paid, and a fortunate byproduct of my unfortunate tendency to overthink everything. In my mission journal and my letters home, my hands would ache and time would run out long before I was finished telling what I had observed, and how it had changed me. 

This month in youth Sunday School, the kids are talking about ordinances and covenants. The lesson outlines aren't as clearly delineated from one another as they seemed to be last month, and there is a lot of redundancy built in. The result is that I've read many conference talks this month on the sacrament. The recurring theme I have noticed over and over is the idea of "remembering." I was pondering this word a lot on Sunday. During my lesson, the Spirit was very strong, and the kids were really getting it. I don't know that they were a lot more forthcoming than usual, but there was a definite difference. They were more attentive, brows were more furrowed, and there were even a few glistening eyes. Then, boom, without it being according to plan, there was an account from my mission I felt impressed to share. It was a little thing really, seemingly unimportant, but somehow it was exactly the right thing at the right moment. It was a thing that hadn't been part of my preparation or even conscious thought for some years.

But it was a thing that helped my precious young class to see that their gospel preparation and knowledge is serious . . . and those years between baptism and the temple are vital. The moment was sublime and reminded me of every good reason we come to Church. I felt humbled and grateful that the Lord had put me in a place where I might make a difference.

And I understood something I've never quite seen before. 

Though it doesn't appear on any list, remembering, in its many and varied form, is itself a gift of the Spirit. Remembrance takes so many forms and meanings, each of them vital to gospel living. 

Remembering past blessings makes us grateful and humble.

Remembering is how we keep our covenants as we take the sacrament.

Remembering the Savior gives us the integrity to keep our covenants when we are away from Church.

Remembering our own weaknesses can keep us from judging others.

Remembering our ancestors helps us honor our religion and our liberty.

Remembering preserves our spiritual and familial traditions. 

My simple, unheralded event from my mission, came back to my memory in the very moment that my class needed to hear the words. If this is not the Spirit working, then I don't know what is. When I teach my class this week, I am going to ask them to pray with all the energy of their hearts that the Spirit will bless them with remembrance, so that it will be a shield and a protection to them against a world where everything changes and drifts into decay. 

In the words of Teryl Givens:

"I believe remembering can be the highest form of devotion. To remember is to rescue the sacred from the vacuum of oblivion. To remember Christ’s sacrifice every Sunday at the sacrament table, is to say “no” to the ravages of time; to refuse to allow his supernal sacrifice to be just another datum in the catalogue of what is past. To remember past blessings is to give continuing recognition of the gift, and re-confirm the relationship to the Giver as one that persists in the here and now. Few-very few-are entirely bereft of at least one solace giving-memory. A childhood prayer answered, a testimony borne long ago, a fleeting moment of perfect peace. And for those few who despairingly insist they have never heard so much as a whisper, then know this: We don’t need to look for a burning bush, when all we need is to be still and remember that we have known the goodness of love, the rightness of virtue, the nobility of kindness and faithfulness. And ask if we see in such beauties the random effects of Darwinian products, or can we not perceive in them the handwriting of God on our hearts?"

That almost sounds like poetry to me. 

Works Without Faith Is Dead

No, you didn't read the post title incorrectly. This was actually said to me many years ago, and a  discussion over at Times and Seasons this morning has brought if forcefully back to me today.

Some context.

I had been a missionary for six months, but I had not seen anyone get baptized yet. Nor had anyone been baptized that I had taught. I had met lots of remarkable people, been in lots of powerful teaching situations and even extended invitations to be baptized. I felt like I was growing personally and that my experience was valuable, but in a culture that (sometimes unfortunately) favors counting converts, I was beginning to feel like a bit of a failure. Even as my reputation for hard work and gifted teaching grew, I questioned my purpose. 

Overlaid with these feelings were other things. I was training a remarkably faithful companion and worried that I was failing her. It was hot and our area was very hilly. We rode bikes daily and I never stopped sweating. My lovely companion's English was not proficient enough to converse easily (and I never learned more than "Called to Serve" in Japanese), and I would some times go hours on end without speaking to anyone. We tracted up to 8 hours a day. I was so stressed on every level that hadn't menstruated in seven months. I felt deep, depressing sorrow for the unwillingness of people to change or even acknowledge the existence of God.

In the midst of all this we held yet another Zone Development Meeting. My feelings about these types of meetings were mixed. Occasionally I would feel the Spirit in a really great discourse, but too often they were merely pep talks for unmotivated missionaries and usually carried an unhealthy obsession with numbers. Elder Wilson, our boyish and smirky ZL spoke from James about how faith without works was dead.

I felt . . . 

Angry.

I was working. I was working so hard that my feet and back ached all the time. I was working so hard that college seemed like a distant vacation. I was desperate and depressed and didn't know how to do anything but work. My homesickness came back in spades as my mind often wandered to the budding romance I'd been involved in the year previously.

I had been told so many times that hard work was the key to success in missionary work, and yet there I was, working as hard as I knew how to work and having no outward sign of what counted for success in missionary work. I tuned out the talk, not listening for any message it, of the ZL might have to teach. No doubt my mind drifted to new places we might still have to tract, or streets we could re-tract or members we might bother about their friends.

At the close of the meeting, the ZL asked if he and his companion could come work in our area the following day. This is kind of a weird mission practice that will probably fade away as more sisters have opportunity for leadership positions. The way this worked in our mission is that leaders would come and visit for the day. They studied with us in the morning and then we would tract together, but nobody was ever quite sure how this was meant to work. This particular leader had us all walk together on one side of the street but three of us would go to the door at a time, to be less intimidating than four of us, I suppose. I really hated it; it made me feel like a Jehovah's Witness or something. Anyway, Elder Wilson and his companion came the next day, a thing I never looked forward to. (Probably because the first time he came he asked why we didn't make them pancakes like the other sisters always used to. I told him that we were too busy doing missionary work to worry about whether or not he'd had breakfast.)

While we were at one of our weird polygamy (one elder, two sisters) door knocks, Elder Wilson told me that he knew the ZDM the day before had been worthless to me. He said that he felt stupid standing up there telling me to work harder when I knew how to work harder than any elder he'd ever met. Then he said this, "But Sister, works without faith is also dead. So I have to ask you. How is your faith?"

I burst into tears.

After I had reinforced to him every stereotype he held about sister missionaries I calmed down enough to tell him that I wasn't even sure what the question meant. That I didn't really even know what faith was. To me, faith meant working and working and working. 

He told me that I had done enough.

I told him that we must not have, because why weren't we seeing more blessings?

He then explained something to me that I have never forgotten. Or at least the essence of it; no doubt the lesson he taught me that day has been colored by my own experience over the years. He told me that by always believing I needed to do more and more, I was putting all the responsibility for conversion squarely on my own shoulders. I needed instead to get on my knees and tell the Lord that we had done all He had asked and now we expected the blessings.

His phrase "expect the blessings," sort of terrified me. I was raised with a deep hatred of any form of entitlement and to my 21 year old self, this "expecting the blessings' is exactly what that looked like. But something about his earnestness, and his insight into my problem, deeply impressed me, and so I tried it.

I got on my knees that night and with many more tears told the Lord I had done all I could and that we expected Him to bless us. 

In the following weeks, everything changed. It wasn't just that there were some baptisms, though there were, by I changed too. I felt more deep and genuine love for the people. I felt excited to get out of bed each morning. I worked as hard as ever, but that weighing weariness wasn't ever-present. I turned more of my sorrow for the sins of the world over to Christ. That spring I sang The Spirit of God with the Saints as we gathered one Sunday. The third verse where it says, "That we through our faith may begin to inherit/the visions and blessings and glories of God" was impossible for me to sing through the deep emotions that filled very part of me. I had caught the barest vision of what faith was. 

You see, I had begun to understand that when my works were performed with the wrong motivation, I didn't allow the Lord to bless me. I had been motivated by some very good things--a heavy sense of responsibility to the Lord for my blessings, a desire to keep my covenants and do my duty, a genuine desire to bring the gospel to others, cultural obligations, etc. etc. But I somehow had it all wrong. The Lord wants to bless us and to give us that peace that passeth all understanding, but He wants us to love Him and to stop trying so hard to do everything ourselves. I still believe that faith VERSUS works is a false dichotomy; and I said as much at Times and Seasons today, but what motivates our work is very important.

Plantboy has been reminding me of this again lately. I am fearful as Jedi Knight prepares for middle school in a few months. I am afraid that we live in the wrong ward . . . or the wrong neighborhood. That we are going to the wrong schools. Etc. Etc. But Plantboy talks instead about having faith and says that we are doing everything we can to keep our covenants, to follow our callings, to show the compassion for others the Lords wants so much, and to truly love the Lord. He looked me in the eye the other night and was blunt, "The Lord doesn't want the boys to fail any more than we do. We must expect Him to bless us."  He is right. I must keep my covenants because I love the Lord and then I must count on Him to take care of the details.

Sunset

I find myself terribly discontent when I visit "home." Utah, that is. I'm not sure why. I can never decide if it is that I still miss this place that really is home to me in many ways, or if I wish to move back here to see family more often so that we don't feel like such outsiders when we come. Or is it that the houses are bigger, the hair bleachier and the women prettier? Maybe the discontent stems less from a desire to come to "Zion" and more from the overwhelming feeling of being unsuccessful, at least by a certain standard. After church today, Plantboy, one of the best-looking men I've ever met, said, "I don't think we are good-looking enough to live in Utah."

Whatever it is, this vacation has not been revitalizing in the least. I have loved seeing so much family, but we've been non-stop in the car for three days and really aren't done yet. The longer we stay away from family, however, the stronger the sense of being an outsider fills me. Yet, at the same time, I cannot shake the solid truth that this community in which my parents have been a part for 40 years helped to form exactly the person I have become.

The mission for which I departed 15 years ago today is largely responsible too.

I think the mission might be part of the conflict. For twenty-one years I lived in the same community, surrounded by people who did the same. Even at college I was close to my extended family. Generation after generation with little alteration from the ones before. I suppose that I expected to do the same. Settle close to parents. Visit on Sundays. Have my own children grow up around their cousins doing the things that kids in a certain social strata are expected to do. Dance lessons. Sports. Church. I suppose. Though I think even from a young age I felt vaguely dissatisfied and restless with the cliche.

Enter Australia.

Exit a woman no longer content with the ordinary.

In the next few years it will be important for us to make some decisions because Jedi Knight is getting older, and if Utah has taught me anything this time around, it is that putting down some roots is important. Will we stay put, accepting the economic downturn and the spiritual knowledge given to Plantboy just a few weeks before taking his job in Eugene that the Church in Oregon needed us? Will we trust the Lord enough that our unique little boys will be able to make it in schools where there are the merest handful of LDS kids? Am I willing to sacrifice the kind of childhood I had for one of greater opposition that might make them powerful men? Or will we move closer to family for an idyllic support system that might only be in my head? Will we start over again, economically speaking, in our forties, and be strong enough not to care that we live in a small house that is decidedly in the valley and not on the hill? Do we move where there are more members of the church so that we can slip into blissful anonymity because couples like us abound? Do we stay put because we have a much greater capacity to serve where we are?

I feel so weak right now, and not at all up to the task of navigating my dear little mannies through the next phase we are now entering. But I have to be. There is no one else.

Tonight I was driving straight west from my brother's house to get back to my parents' house when I saw the most gorgeous sunset I've seen for years. My emotions were full as I looked at the scene. My heart was touched at the impression of the Spirit reminding me that God loves me immensely, but that most of my own human accomplishments will be weak and frail compared to what God can do. I felt enormously loved and properly humbled at the same time.

O God, Thou hast always shown us the way forward now. Please see fit to do so again. And if it is the direction I begin to think it will be, then please, O Lord, grant us the strength to hold our family together and to sacrifice cheerfully whatever Thou asks.

The Essence of a Mission

I read two interesting articles today.

The first is this one from NPR. The tacky title notwithstanding, it is actually quite interesting and informative. I deeply appreciated the acknowledgment that Glenn Beck doesn't speak for most mainstream Latter-day Saints. For the most part, the tone and research in the article is good. I think that American reporters are starting to feel more comfortable with the presence of Mormons in public life, and the reality that our belief system in some way must be dealt with.

The comment-ers on this type of story are funny/fascinating/frustrating. Three camps seem to come out on every Mormon-story that runs in a national forum. The first group is completely anti-religion, railing that any person who claims religious-preference hovers between deluded and insane. These people would erase all evidence of religion from public life. (See Communist Russia for such a happy state of affairs.) In an effort to emphasize just how far on the crazy spectrum Mormons are, these people love to pull out difficult and questionable details from events that are over a 100 years old and present them as proof that we cannot be trusted to make good decisions.

The second camp are those Christians (generally of the Evangelical and/or Baptist variety) who feel like it is their duty to further "inform" and readers about the specific details that only their ministers seem to know. I think they also hope to bring a few Mormons into their version of the light along the way. Interestingly, they employ the same techniques as the people in the first group, though their venom is disguised in zealousness.

No less zealous is the third general group: Mormons themselves. The ones who choose to comment are nearly always extremely defensive, and they seek mostly to correct the other comment-ers rather than address topics that were actually in the article. Mormon intellectuals are strangely absent. It isn't that they don't exist, it just seems that they keep more to themselves in that nebulous online Mormon-world dubbed "The Bloggernacle." These blogs range from informative and faithful, to full of contentious former Mormons who just can't quite break from the Church. LDS people have always had difficulty balancing our public persona with easy exclusivity.

Whose idea were these public forums anyway? With no moderator, the discussion is rarely useful or informative, and only the angriest (the ALL CAPS people) and least-informed (the people for whom English grammar seems to be a total enigma) among us. But that is entirely beside the point.

The second article, linked by a single, thoughtful comment-er, was to Bloomberg Newsweek and also spoke about the Mormon Missionary experience and what it can do for people, professionally. The article draws a correlation between the many successful Mormon businessmen (disproportionately high to the less than 2% of the US population we comprise) and the missionary experience. The article is lengthy and says much about the unique leadership experiences we have while growing up and the ease with which LDS people adapt to a corporate hierarchy, because of the Church's top-down structure. Women are nearly entirely overlooked in the article. I bet Whitney might have helped them with that.

And while the writers of each article clearly made an effort to get the facts, and to write as respectfully as they could about things that are, quite frankly, incredibly difficult for "outsiders" to understand, I think they totally missed the point of the mission experience. Totally. It is true that one of the goals of the missionary program is to create future Church leaders, but that process is about changing hearts, not creating corporate clones. There is no mention of understanding and receiving revelation, witnessing miracles, feeling the Spirit, growing up, gaining empathy, intense hours of gospel study . . . the things that truly turn the sincere missionary into a new person. For every successful CEO RM, there are thousands who just re-enter normal life, newly committed, more sensitive, and with a broader picture of the world beyond the one in which they have always known. These anonymous tens of thousands, and the energized converts they find, are the backbone of the Church.

Boy, did these two commentaries miss the mark.

I wrote an essay a couple of weeks ago for a friend. She sent me a subscription to a literary magazine published each quarter called "Granta." It is British, and truthfully pretty out there. Last quarter's issue was called "Alien" and each essay was told by an outsider looking in. My own essay was about my adjustment to Australia, and I'm quite pleased with the result. It is too lengthy to post here (and Blogger can't accommodate my snarky footnotes), but I'm happy to send anyone a copy who wants one. Just send me an e-mail.

I Don't Care What You Think. Except When I Do.

My dearest friend in high school had a disarming way of saying exactly what was on her mind. She didn't care a whit for what other people thought about her utter lack of subtlety. Those who loved her understood how she was and overlooked any perceived offense, those who didn't know or love her didn't merit any notice on her radar.

How I envied her.

For a while I even fancied that I was the same. Saying precisely what was on my mind was my modus operandi for ages 17 through um . . . about the time I became a missionary. It was odd really because Aussies are known for shooting straight from the hip--their brutal honesty was shocking beyond belief sometimes. (Ohmygosh! Did you notice that huge zit on your nose???!!?? Um, yeah, thanks, I did strangely enough.) I think my care about how other perceived me stemmed a lot from the fact that I was no longer just speaking for myself. I wore a black name tag that professed to the world that I represented a lot of interests: my surname made me a part of a family, the name of the Church made me an official spokesperson, but perhaps most importantly were the words JESUS CHRIST in all caps letters, overshadowing everything else on the tag. People might form opinions about Him based on their interaction with me.

And yet, Christ himself wasn't afraid of offending when real bluntness called for it.

My post-mission days never saw me completely revert to the person I was before (thank goodness for that), but I sometimes still wonder who the "real" me is--the person who blurted out whatever was on her mind, too often mistaking bitter sarcasm for wit? Or the person I was on my mission who would smile sweetly through all kinds of shocking revelations people found themselves to willing to give?

As seems to be the case with nearly everything in my life, the truth is probably some where in the middle. I know this will sound odd to some of you, as my writings here don't often shirk from controversy. (I am probably the same in person, too.) However, when the argument strays into the personal or the tone takes that perceptible drop in civility, I find my heart beating faster and my hands clammy. A slightly nauseous feeling sits in my stomach and I'm suddenly consumed with guilt for having hurt someone's feelings. Even potentially. In "real" life, I tend to keep my opinions a little closer to the chest, not wanting to wreck the potential for friendships because I was too blunt or too outspoken too soon.

Recently I read a blog, following a link from a trusted page to an interesting name, and found myself confronted with some pretty in-your-face political ideology, much of it at odds with my own thoughts. It was clear that many of the person's comment-ers and followers were like- minded, and though I might have said a good many things (my brain was so full of things to say that I could hardly form a coherent sentence), I refrained. I knew it would be useless, first of all. I also knew that what might make me feel better for a moment would probably not in the long run. I also knew I wouldn't be able to keep myself from checking back on the blog no doubt to find myself vilified and grilled. And for what?

My peace of mind would be, at least momentarily, deeply shaken. In addition, I would have stirred somebody else up to even greater anger than they already carried.

At the same time, just as with my friend from high school, I held a sort of grudging admiration for the writer of the blog. She clearly didn't give a damn who disagreed with her or if the whole world knew it.

Though the blog was anonymous. Interesting. So maybe she does care.

And, as it turns out, so do I. I care if people like me. I am concerned when I offend somebody, particularly a family member. If I am sarcastic in blog of Facebook comment, I obsess a bit about whether or not the person picked up on my tone. I care about whether or not somebody's perception of me affects their perception of the LDS Church, or Christians or my family or my husband or my children.

No doubt most of you have read that allegorical book "You Are Special" about the sweet little puppet who is made fun of by the others of his kind--their labels and criticisms sticking to him like glue. That is, these things stick to him until he meets his loving Maker in whose opinion he learns better to trust. I love that story. I love the idea that God's opinion should matter more to us than others' opinions.

But I'm just not there yet.

Please, chime in, do you care what others think of you? And I mean, PLEASE chime in: my whole point is that I do care what you think. Or don't chime in. Your silence will teach me to look to other sources for validation.

Sacrifice Brings Blessings: Part 1

I enjoyed a brief stint of "popularity" for a few months in 1996. Those quotations marks should indicate exactly what kind of popularity it was. And, it must be admitted, the kind of popularity that I had spent all of middle school and high school trying to taste. I had always been kind of a hanger-on to that "it" group. I think some part of me always wanted to be the "it" girl.

I've mentioned before that I went to college with an unhealthy (read: toxic) level of cynicism. Spring time seemed to exacerbate the feeling as college kids who met in the fall, cuddled on couches indoors all winter, now burst forth from their apartments holding hands and wearing engagement rings. It was like watching a Discovery documentary titled, "The Gag-inducing Mating Habits of LDS College Students. I envied their seemingly easy happiness and wondered how it could be that I hadn't really been on a date in like two years. Summer came and the first round of friends got married, and then back at school in the fall more and more friends started pairing off. Their bliss was my horror movie.

My sister-in-law unexpectedly asked me if I wanted to intern for her uncle at the state legislature that winter. I hesitated about 30 seconds and said yes. (This is why I loved the old-school quarter system: a throwaway quarter didn't matter the way a semester did, and if you hustled you could still graduate in a reasonable amount of time.)

That winter I fell in love. No, no, not in the way that would have earned me a spot in the documentary, but with politics and the drama of the political process. But even more than finding a hobby that has stayed fascinating to me, I realized that the world was full of people who were working hard to make a difference. The two senators I worked for were very different men, but both made enormous personal sacrifices to work in the legislature each winter for a pittance because they really believed in what they were doing. For all the negativity there is about politicians, the ones I knew personally were men of integrity and purpose.

I decided I was tired of just standing on the sidelines and watching life happen. After spending all those weeks immersed in a group of movers and shakers, I was ready to get involved in my own life. When the legislative session ended, I had two weeks of down time in which to write a paper and put my plan into action.

On a tip from my dad, I walked into the Alumni Office and asked about joining student alumni. How lucky was I that they were in the middle of a meeting! I was escorted in, feeling a bit sheepish, but then I realized that the handful of kids in the room was ALL of SAA. The organization had been mostly dead for a decade and a new staff member was trying to revitalize it by re-introducing a huge spring festival that had fallen by the wayside. I was gratefully received and put to work almost immediately. A few weeks later when the letter came to join a student honor society that was active on campus, I threw an application in there as well. Before that school year was out, I'd been appointed SAA secretary for the following year (our festival was a huge hit) and elected as an officer in the honor society. I signed up to volunteer on the Arts and Lectures Committee so I could get into all the events for free and meet new people. A few months later, I started a job in one of the "cool" offices on campus (right, chrisw?), and was asked to serve on the Student Advocate Advisory Board.*

My junior year was a lot of fun. I was busy all the time, and had little time to feel lonely or pensive. There wasn't time to brood about being lonely, and soon I had so many friends that I didn't feel lonely either. I even got a boyfriend. (You've heard of this guy: I sometimes refer to him as "the Bullet;" as in "I dodged THAT bullet" or the "Mistake.") I cut a foot off my hair.

Another spring approached and my internal mood was as bright as the outdoors. I had said with varying levels of commitment in the previous year that I would serve a mission when I turned 21, and as my birthday loomed near, I still felt good about that decision. Then, the president of my honor society, who was also Academic VP for our student council, approached me about running as his replacement. The rumor was that only one guy was going to run for it. "A real doofus," apparently. Though qualified, he was rather unlikeable. With the connections I'd made in the past year, I was associated with people from nearly every major student group on campus--Institute, fraternities, sororities, student council, clubs. Besides that, my unique major put me in regular and familiar contact with people from three different colleges. It was time. If I wanted to really be a mover and shaker, that was the time.

But I put in the mission paperwork anyway. As I did so, I wondered why all of these wonderful things that I had always wanted were put in my life precisely then. I think part of my initial decision to be a missionary was motivated by wanting to get away from some things I just couldn't deal with. Suddenly, besides being a great spiritual adventure and a selfless act, a mission seemed like a huge sacrifice. It occurred to me, somewhat belatedly, that perhaps such sacrifice was the reason all of these things had come into my life at that time.

I went anyway.

When I came home, nearly all of my friends had graduated. My roommate was my grandmother in a city ten miles from campus. The university was switching to semesters and I had to scramble, beg, cajole and rearrange to get the many classes I needed in order to graduate without losing a whole year. My checking account nearly always had less than $50 in it. I worked a variety of jobs, each only giving me five or ten hours each week. The only thing that WAS waiting for me was The Mistake, but even he didn't stick around for long--just long enough to shatter the tenuous hold I had on reality for nearly six months after my return. I decided that spring that they needed some place that was the OPPOSITE of the Mission Training Center. Like a Mission Detox Center.

Might have been happy in that other life? The one I might have realized if I had stayed home? Certainly.

But I have never been sorry. Influencing even hundreds of people for a minute pales in comparison to influencing a single person for . . . well. . . ever. As for the changes that took place inside myself? It is impossible to even describe. I think of all those long, hot days (or long, cold days) and the lessons I learned from the isolation from all other people but my companion, the determination I found in myself to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and the realization I came to that happiness isn't based on some tangible achievement.

In the missionary discussions in use through the nineties (and maybe eighties??), the fifth discussion was about sacrifice. One of the sections was titled, "Sacrifice Brings Blessings." During my 17 months in New South Wales, I learned this lesson with such force that I thought I would never unlearn it. (For that misconception, see Sacrifice Brings Blessings: Part 2. As yet unwritten.) I thought I had given up a lot, but I had merely given up something good for something so much greater. I had given up notice for knowledge; a hundred acquaintances for a handful of friends; my agenda for the Lord's.

Hardly a day goes by that some lesson learned from my months Down Under is not brought back to my mind. Those most difficult and wonderful months were a foundation for the rest of my life. In a few days I will have opportunity to sit down with a handful of the remarkable women I served with and around during my Australia years. It has been well over a decade now since we were missionaries. No doubt, the swapped stories will wane (or become the stuff of legend!), as they have each time we've met over the years, but they will be replaced by new stories of faith and motherhood and the lives we have now. These eternal friendships are among my greatest blessings.

Sacrifice? What sacrifice?


* Mostly what we did on SAAB was team-building activities. There was a very eventful afternoon of laser tag and pizza. Perhaps the most memorable, though, was playing broom hockey against the administration in the Spectrum. My aggressive side came out that day. (read: violent and dangerous) I hit Val Christensen in the leg hard enough to drop him--when he retired a year later he was called as a General Authority in the LDS Church where he served as a counselor in the general Sunday School Presidency. Last year he was called as the President of the Rexburg, Idaho Temple. Dropped him like a rock.

Kreepy Kent And That One Time I Was Stalked

On Sunday I am speaking in church. My preparation has had me thinking about my time as a missionary in Australia. And while most of my memories from those months are amazing, there are others that, at the time, were downright scary. In retrospect, however, these memories are just plain funny. As my last several posts have been all issue-y, I decided it was time for one that was not.

A bit of background on LDS missionaries for those who may not know--women generally serve missions in their early 20's (no younger than 21); missionaries live a fairly strict set of rules, both for safety and to help them focus on the task at hand; female missionaries are called "sister" in front of your last name, but we aren't nuns and celibacy (thank goodness) is a condition with a time limit.

I'm not sure how Kent's obsession with the sister missionaries started, nor can I remember exactly why he started studying the Church anyway. This disclaimer might help explain why some details are a bit fuzzy.

In my memory, Kent looks like Will Farrell. From the Saturday Night Live Cowbell Skit. I could never really decide what his personality was like. Perhaps the word "multiple" would be most appropriate here.

Kent was studying with the elders (the boy missionaries) which was totally appropriate, but I think it was the sisters he had met first. Anyway, after some time working with the elders, he complained that they weren't sincere enough, nor patient enough. He would only continue studying the Church if he met with the sisters, so we taught him after our church meetings one day. I was immediately creeped out and had serious doubts about how interested he was in what we were teaching. He seemed mostly content to sidetrack our discussions, share his own agenda and use a lot of tired arguments to convince us of the futility of how we had chosen to spend our lives. And he stared. A lot.

My misgivings were strong enough that after just one meeting, we told him that we weren't really comfortable teaching him and if he was still interested in learning about the Church, the elders would do just fine, thank you very much.

This is about the time that the creepiness appeared. He agreed to go back to the elders, perhaps a little too readily, and then a few days later, through them, he passed on a referral to us. Sweet guy, he'd even gone to the pains to schedule an appointment with them. Because this person, "Goldie," he referred us to lived on the opposite side of the train tracks from us, she was actually in an area where some different sisters worked. Not wanting to sic someone of Kent's acquaintance onto the other sisters (one of whom was probably the prettiest woman I've ever met), we decided to go see Goldie first and if it was all on the up-and-up we would let the other sisters know.

We followed the address, knocked on the door, and guess what?

Yep. Kent answered the door. It was his mother's house. No, she was not at home; no, she wasn't interested in learning more. Kent was quite proud of himself for having found a way to circumvent those "silly boys" so that we could still teach him. Nobody had to know. And yes, by the way, he told us with a sly gleam in his freaky eyes, his nickname was "Goldie."

I know, I was thinking exactly the same thing, what kind of man has the nickname Goldie unless he is a James Bond villian or a mob boss?

We left.

Kent continued coming to church, trying to catch us unawares; which he frequently did. For a big, chubby guy he sure had some mad ninja skills. His favorite thing to do was present us with frangipani flowers, as some children often did. These lovely flowers (often called "plumeria" where they actually grow in the states) fit perfectly in the clip of our name tags and stayed fresh all day. Their smell is divine and it was kind of an Aussie-sister-missionary-thing. Refusal was awkward because then we just looked rude. Accepting them was, obviously, even worse.


Some weeks after the first "referral" he sent another to us. This time, it was actually in our area, information we probably let slip to Kent as he asked for details about where we worked, no doubt to get details about where we lived. Again, Kent had set the appointment time. We conveniently asked the neighboring elders to come and work with us that day, and decided to knock on doors on the street where Kent's appointment was scheduled. We explained the situation to the elders, who thought our spy-work was all great fun and they took the side of the street that would lead them to the appointment-house, though a day early.

No, this was not another address for Kent this time. It was, however, the address of Kent's Baptist minister who had more anti-Mormon literature on his shelf than he had books about all other subjects combined. He gave the elders an earful and then loaded them up with about 85 pamphlets apiece. "You kept them???" I said to the Elders when we met them for lunch.

Our district leader just smiled as he dumped them in the trash, "At least he can't give them to anyone else."

Needless to say, we did not keep our appointment with Kent and his minister. We did, however, have to see Kent at church again and listen to him rant about how we had violated his trust by sending the elders ahead. (Right . . . . because he hadn't ever violated our trust . . . ) We also got a package a few days later. From Kent. Or, I should say, I got a package. That's right, he stopped pretending to be wanting to study with the sisters for the sake of the church and moved straight ahead to his full intentions.

Before opening the package, I was already pretty freaked out. You see, in Australia, you have really tiny post boxes (especially in an apartment), and if a package comes that is too big to fit in the box, then you get a card telling you to come to the post office at your earliest convenience to pick it up. Yet, here was this enormous package on our doorstep. And inside the package was . . . wait for it . . .

A dress.

A teal green, off the shoulder, full skirted, tight-bodiced, formal dress, circa 1987.

That is when the screaming started.

As the package showed up on the doorstep, we assumed that Kent knew where we lived and had lovingly dropped it off himself. We called the Elders, who, bless their boy-hearts, came over immediately and checked out the apartment, only to find two windows in the house that had not been secured and could easily be opened from outside. They helped us tack up sheets on the windows and then sat with us that evening. It was decided that they would frequently check in with us over the next couple of days, and that on Sunday, we would talk to the bishop to get some advice.

On Sunday, we met with Kent, the elders, and the bishopbric. Bishop Purcell was a huge Maori man with soft brown eyes and a heart of gold; one of his counselors was a Tongan who looked like he could have bench-pressed Bishop Purcell. I've never been so grateful in my life to have two Polynesians at my back.

Trying to impress upon Kent the inappropriateness of the gift, he explained our rules to Kent who became very belligerent about him not having to follow our rules, and that he had tried to anyway. He insisted that he had sent the package to our general mission address in Sydney and that he had no idea where we lived. All eyes turned to me. Could this be true--that the package hadn't been addressed in Kent's hand to our apartment at all? I suddenly felt very stupid and over-reactionary. Here we were in this room holding a meeting that would basically bar Kent from ever attending church there again, and it might have been a big misunderstanding. I admitted that it might be entirely possible that the package had been sent through our mission office, but I was also quick to point out that it wasn't appropriate for him to be corresponding with me at all nor for him to send me something that was such an affront to my sense of of fashion.

Then emerged the tender-Kent personality. He became very apologetic and sincere, but something about his manner was raising red flags all over in me. I could see that all of the men in the room were starting to think that while Kent might be a little bit over the top, he was nothing compared to the near-hysterical sister missionary in their midst. And then dear Kent made his fatal mistake.

He took a step nearer to me and called me Princess.

I suddenly felt vicious and took a step closer in return summoning all of the anger in my massive 5'2" frame, all 115 pounds of me (there is more now) poised to attack, no doubt looking like a cat whose hair suddenly stands on end and begins spitting, "Don't you DARE call me that!" I shouted, right in the bishop's office. His completely inappropriate and freaky endearment finally swayed the argument in my direction. My companion held me back in my desire to scratch Kent's eyes out of his hairy face and the bishop said very calmly, "You are welcome to leave the premises of your own volition, or we can escort you."

Ken was at least six feet tall, but he was soft and slow. He cowered in the face of my two Lamanitish protectors and agreed to leave, though he spouted out curses on each of us in turn and the Church in general as he walked down the street toward the bus stop. The bishop and his cohort followed him to the edge of the property, just to be safe.

When my claws retracted, I felt sufficiently embarrassed (hysterics not being my typical modus operandi), but also deeply relieved.

I did not see my charming suitor again, but it didn't stop him from writing to me once in each of the areas I lived after that place. The letters were each sent through the mission office, as was probably the package that broke the camel's back. I never wrote back, even to acknowledge receipt of these letters that read more like manifestos. His first one or two expressed some disgusting, tender expressions that my companions and I would have a great laugh over. The last few of these were rants, more of the variety he expressed when leaving the church that day.

In fact, a letter from Kent was one of the last I received as a missionary. Scheduled to leave the country in just a few days, mail had gotten irregular at best (but then, was it ever anything else?) and I was surprised to receive any missive at all until I noticed the sender's tiny, cramped handwriting in the upper left corner. It had been a long month, my companion and I were both nearly finished with our service, we weren't working with anybody very seriously, it was hot, we were working in a ward (and city) where the main requirement for membership was that you have kangaroos loose in the paddock. (Aussie term meaning, "crazy as a loon.") Our main missionary work in four weeks had consisted of knocking on hundreds of doors for ten hours each day. I was tired; I thought Kent's letter would be worth a laugh.

My companion knew the story and we settled in to the ratty, old couch to have cold cereal for dinner and entertainment. I opened the letter and read the first line aloud in which (the exact words fail me) Kent told me that I was going to hell for my lack of charity, my general misunderstanding of God and my cruel nature. Tears pricked my eyes and I ripped the letter in shreds, feeling that anger inside me again. "I don't have to read this!" I told my surprised companion. "I've been a damn good missionary!" If the "damn" tells you otherwise, well, just note that I didn't say I'd been a perfect missionary. And it was Australia--they have a very loose standard of what constitutes a swear word there.

If my re-telling of this convinces you that Kent was right, and that I lack charity, well, maybe you have a point. Still, I have to write my own story in the way that pleases me best and honestly reflects my feelings. As long as I'm feeling deeply unmerciful to one who caused me to watch my back for two months in Adamstown, Australia in 1997, why don't you share your own stalker stories? Here if they are brief-ish, and on your own blog if it is in the details you find your laughter or catharsis.

In the Interest of Furthering the Discussion

You really never know what you're going to get when you post, do you?

My thoughts on the previous post were running more along the lines of humor a la ward librarian, and instead this deeply introspective discussion has mostly revolved around the aside I almost didn't include. I was going to add the following remarks as comment #15 or whatever, but they became too lengthy and I felt like some clarification was in order before I mortally offend any reader who comes this way.

What I think is fascinating in this discussion is the overall theme that many different life paths still fall in the realm of "righteous" and that each is unique to the individual on that path. And yet, for all that we've come to many of the same conclusions, each of you here is so different! There are single women, married women with and without children in various numbers, returned missionaries, women who were married before age 20 . . . . heck, there might even be a ward librarian or two. Oh, and men. There are a few brave enough to wade into the middle of the sea of estrogen from time to time.

With my aside, I didn't mean to imply that women should wait until they are 21 to either get married OR go on a mission. I think what I was trying to share is that we sometimes unwittingly reinforce certain stereotypes among our young women. Even with my head rather firmly on my shoulders when I went away to college (I can say that--there are very few here who knew me then. Brooke, Mike and Rachel, you can all just stay quiet if you disagree.), I still was pretty anxious about the fact that I could count on one hand the number of dates I'd been on. As I saw the girls in my ward snatch up the "few really good guys," I was totally convinced that I would never get married. I WAS ONLY 19. For all my practicality and ambition and even some profound experience with personal revelation, I was nearly certain that I was going to be single always.

This fear of being alone prevented me from taking my guy-relationships for what they were worth--wonderful, life-long friendships. If there had been dating or attraction there, many of those relationships would be lost to me now. Another skewed idea that grew out of this fear was that I started to think that if ANY guy ever wanted to marry me, regardless of his religious situation, it would be better to be married than to be alone. (Again, no offense meant, righteous women marry non-members all the time; I'm just indicating that before I'd even had a chance to taste life I was selling myself short.) In addition, my fear caused me to spend a lot of time and energy on a man who ultimately cost me a lot of self-esteem.

In my post-mission, post-first-fiance months, I had a very difficult time just dating for fun. I was just a few months from graduation, and terrified of leaving college as a single. At that time, my grad school ambition was not immediate and the prospect of high school teaching didn't seem all that conducive to finding someone to marry. Most of my friends from my pre-mi days had moved on to lives and marriages of their own. Again, I was convinced that I'd NEVER be married. I was only 23. But again, for all the wonderful lessons I had learned in the alone part of my journey, I was still prey to my upbringing and the stereotypes read in novels and heard in so many young women's lessons.

Now, here is the personal revelation part, voiced so importantly by many of you. Chrisw was teaching school in another city. There was an opening at her jr. high for a science teacher. She told her principal about me and he, trusting Chrisw's judgment implicitly (how could you not?) said that he'd be willing to offer me a teacher internship position. What this meant is that I would bail on my fall student teaching, not have to find a mid-year contract full time job, and instead teach for partial salary the entire year at Chrisw's school. Not a bad proposition. Chrisw and I talked about becoming roommates (which, okay, would have been completely awesome), and she was saving her yen to backpack through China the next year (which, okay, would have been completely awesome).

I prayed and told the Lord this was my intention. I felt like hanging around USU another semester was the equivalence of waiting for the axe to fall on my marriage dream and that by moving in with Chrisw at least I'd be throwing myself whole-heartedly in to my life as a single. (Remember: only 23.) The next morning, I completely forgot everything I had to do in order to make the internship happen. And I kept forgetting. Also, things I remembered to do weren't smooth sailing, and bailing on my renter's contract was going to be expensive. I'd only had such stupor of thought once before--when I was 18 and chose to reject my acceptance to nursing school in spite of no clear alternative. So the next day I prayed again and told the Lord I'd decided to stay.

The peace was palpable.

I met Plantboy the next week at a job I would have left by that point if I had taken the internship.

But I think the Lord knew I might screw it up. By a strange "coincidence" he was also assigned to be my sister's home teacher at his apartment complex several wards away from where I lived. We might have met anyway.

So yes, absolutely, young people, men and women, need to be taught about receiving personal revelation. But maybe we also need to back off the primary use of examples that reinforce stereotypes that, albeit inadvertently, encourage early steady dating and poor choices of companions. I'm sure you all had a friend or roommate for whom getting married was so much more essential than marrying the right person that the result was disastrous. (I think this is what Mike's paraphrasing of the 70 was essentially about.)

If my previous post made anyone feel like I was critical of your life choices either concerning number of children, or marriage, or your spouse of the color of your kitchen, please understand that was not my intention at all. My intention was to encourage us all to create a place where our young people feel comfortable exploring a variety of choices and ambitions, and to remind them that their worth comes from them being children of God and not from their marital or dating status.

When my boys go out into the world to find their wives, I hope they find women who will be true partners to them in every sense of the word--women who have prepared themselves to stand equally yoked as partners in the gospel and truly understand that happily ever after means enduring joyfully long after the novelty of their first romance wears off. The age and life-experience of my daughters-in-law to be matters a whole lot less to me than their commitment to their covenants and to finding the Lord's will in their lives.

And I hope these remarkable young women find the same in my sons.

Unsolicited Advice: My Favorite!

I have enormous respect for anyone who embarks on this parenting thing, particularly if those someones seem to be churning out well-adjusted and happy little persons. My respect increases exponentially depending on how many children they have, or on the difficulties presented with said children. My own lot is probably pretty average, mother-hood wise. "Just" three, fairly well-behaved and moldable kidlets. A lifestyle that, while frugal, is certainly not bare bones. The parts of mothering that seem harder to me is the sheer physicality of my little men, the feelings of loneliness at being the only woman in my house, while simultaneously never getting to just be ALONE. My friends are mostly virtual instead of literal, an apparent inability to decisively put my career life behind me, living far away from my mother and space. Always space. (Insert your own prayer of gratitude here if you have a laundry room.)

Do these not seem like trials to you? That's okay. They are my things to deal with. And as none of them are really things that I can change (except maybe making time to be a little bit friendlier), I guess what I am learning now is patience and cheerful endurance. Scratch that--what I'm supposed to be learning is patience and cheerful endurance.

After getting rid of a lot of my baby clothes a few weeks ago, we rearranged parts of our house and decided that a yard sale was in order. Once I started getting rid of stuff, I just couldn't quit. Out went the crib, mattress changing table and bedding. The double jogging stroller? Gone. The garage sale didn't yield all the desired results so the Goodwill got approximately 57 pounds of boy shoes and clothing size 18 months and smaller. Once I dig out the breast pump it will go on Craig's List too.

And yet, I don't exactly feel like I'm making an announcement. It felt good to clean house. I don't regret sending all of that stuff out into the world to help ease the passage for other little ones and their parents, but I don't necessarily think it means I'm done with children. Plantboy and finally had that really good talk that we have needed to have and just kept putting off. The jury is still out about more children, or at least some things we are keeping just between us, but let's just say we are in a good place right now. A very good place.

Which is why my experience yesterday is especially frustrating.

I walked into the library with Jedi Knight. He will be eight in just a couple of months and he is really starting to look like a big boy. And my youngest, just a babe in arms when we moved here is definitely into the little boy phase. A sister working in the library, whom I've tried with very little success to befriend the last couple of years said, "Your boys are getting so big!"

I smiled and rubbed JK's hair with more energy than I felt; it had been a very long morning. She then exclaimed, "Time to have another!"

I made some kind of strangled, non-committal sound through my clenched and smiling teeth, hoping that no other well-meaning soul standing around us would jump on her bandwagon. She pressed, "Now, none of that! It's just time to not think about whether or not it makes sense and jump in!"

More strangled gurgling, a quick grab of the scriptures I'd come to get, and I was out the door. Here it is, 24 hours later and I'm wondering what I should have said. Or at least what I wanted to say.

"Thank you! For two years I've had this on my mind, and THAT is my answer!!!"

"I must have missed in the last conference talk where the number of children you bear is between you, your spouse, the Lord, and the ward librarian!"

"You are exactly right: faith DOES mean that we are exempt from looking at anything logically."

"I'm already completely neurotic, I'm sure that throwing a baby into the mix will calm me right down."

"What a great idea! When the baby has to sleep in MY bed because there would be no where else for him and my husband divorces me over it, then I'll just come and move in with you. After all, your unmarried daughters and their children seem to really enjoy having you babysit for them five days a week."

Breathing. Just keep breathing.

Maybe this was on my mind when the young women in our ward had (another) lesson on dating this week. Our teacher, thankfully, found a great, recent talk on the subject and focused her remarks on becoming friends.* As I was the only leader in the room who was actually married in the temple or raised with LDS dating standards, the advisor asked me to make some remarks at the end. I told them that I thought it was sometimes confusing to be a young LDS woman. The historical and LDS novels the girls read and love mostly follow the same pattern--girls fall in love at 16 or 17 and are married by 18 or 19 and the book ends right there. Our young women get a romanticized vision of the future in which they meet their RM at BYU by Christmas of their freshman year; a May wedding is followed nine months later by the first in a string of perfect children. There is no thinking about what happens for the sixty or seventy years following the blessed event.

I told the girls that I thought it was so easy to get preoccupied by dating and finding "the one" that we forget to find ourselves. I told them that if they wanted a man who was unselfish, generous, kind and charitable, they would do nothing to prevent the young men they knew from going on missions. I told them that the ultimatum so many girls use on their boyfriends--I won't marry you unless you go on a mission thing--is completely ridiculous, because once they had let their relationship get to that point they were already far too inappropriately serious. I told them that learning to stand on their own was the key to any future happiness whether they were single or married. I told them that I hoped every one of them would someday know the joy of a temple marriage to a righteous companion, but that they needed to remember that their worth was not wrapped up in whether or not they were married, and certainly not dependent on their dating status.

Talk about your unsolicited advice. Please, add your own to the mix--either what YOU would have said to the sister, you know, in your head or what you want to say to my young women as they approach dating. Or not dating.

* I really enjoyed Sister Tanner's talk, but in sharing the experience about her daughter, she seemed to discourage mission and graduate school. While in young Miss Tanner's case, this was obviously the right choice, I get tired of a mission being painted in juxtaposition to marriage. I would love to hear one of these talks about a young woman who decided NOT to marry the guy and went on a mission instead, only to realize that he would have been a disastrous choice, and only her mission could have shown her that. (Do you remember that hokey scene in God's army where that sister is talking to the greenie elder on the beach? Besides the fact that they are breaking about 10 mission rules, that is my favorite scene in a very fine film. She tells him about how the guy "waiting for her" had gotten married a few months before, but that it was okay, because sacrificing him was worth it to know the truth of the Gospel the way he knew it. Exactly.) Marriage and mission are not mutually exclusive. And if a woman doesn't get married, then she will have mission (among other wonderful) experiences to help enrich her life. There is a sister in the RS general presidency right now who is a convert and an RM from South America. Her "atypical" life experience is such a valuable example for women of all ages.

On Which She Ruminated About Things Green and Lucky

When I had been on my mission all of three months, a third of the sisters in our mission left and 8-10 new sisters were scheduled to come in the space of two months. When everything shook down, it turned out that several of us, basically green ourselves, were going to be training new missionaries. I assumed that they would at least keep me in an area I was familiar with, but no.

I was given a Japanese companion fresh from the MTC in New Zealand who spoke little more than conversational American English. She brought one heavy suitcase and wore a pair of heels. Her name tag had somehow gotten buried in the suitcase, and I didn't understand what she had told me her name was, so we took a ninety-minute train ride involving two transfers across Sydney with all of our luggage and a tense car ride with a preachy zone leader to our new flat before I even knew her name. (That journey was very interesting all around--I'm thoroughly convinced that we met at least one of the three Nephites that day, but I will save that story for the Urban Legends blogspot I'll get around to starting one day.)

Our first day, I woke up to the sound of the rain pounding the basement apartment where we lived. The damp was pervasive even in the house. Five months later I would realize just how pervasive--the clothes I had stored under my bed had mold growing in them. We pulled out the map. The sisters before us had marked a few streets where they had tracted, but there was little to go on, and there was no scale on the map so distances were hard to judge. I had almost no clue what I was doing, having never seen a convert baptism; I figured that my convert-comp probably knew more about missionary work than I did, but she still looked at me with such trust that it just about paralyzed me. I only knew how to be obedient, so I tried to listen to the Spirit but then practically threw a dart to choose a street.

At 10:30 that morning, despite the terrible realization that I'd left my umbrella in my previous area and that my companion didn't have a jacket of any kind, we set out, on foot, to a street that was probably three miles away and across a freeway. It took several weeks, but as we became familiar with the area, we learned that we had probably picked the steepest street in our area to tract that rainy morning. The paver (and even cobblestoned!) driveways were uneven, slick, and rivaled the black diamond ski-slopes I had always carefully avoided during civilian life.

We kept going up and up and up the street. Sister Japan could do little more than introduce the two of us and my last name had two L's in it. I imagine we were quite a sight. Which is to say that we were probably a bit ridiculous. Halfway up the street I looked at my comp. She was BEAMING. I cannot think of another time in my life when I have seen such joy radiate from the face of an adult.

Incredulous, soaked and feeling like a disastrous failure, I said, "Sister Japan, are you happy?"

She smiled even broader and said, "Oh! I am so happy! Today is the first day of my mission!"

I would later learn that she was the only member in her family. That her parents had insisted she finish university before serving. That she had nearly every penny of her mission paid for before even submitting her papers. That she was nearly 25 years old.

In the three months we served together I received a crash course in faith, optimism, endurance, patience and focus. It turned out that my greenie was the real trainer. It was probably the most righteous three months of my whole life.

And we were blessed above all measure.

I spent nearly half of my field mission service training new missionaries. This allowed time for a lot of extra study. I enjoyed this extra study so much that I convinced a couple of more willing comps to get up early with me even when we weren't training. Missionaries are fond of bearing companion-a-monies and will often get emotional about what they learned from one another. "Sister So-And-So taught me about charity." "Sister Thingy taught me about prayer." You get the drill. When it came to me it was always, "Sister STM taught me how to work." I was never quite sure how I felt about that. My new comps would invariably tell me after about three weeks how terrified they had been to serve with me for the task-master reputation I had unwittingly earned. They would say, "I'm so surprised that that you are nice, too!" I was never quite sure how I felt about that, either.

My point is, that for all the things I did wrong on my mission, my level of diligence was not something I ever regretted. My last companion was a fantastic sister I had often served near on my mission, but never with. I got a surprise transfer with her for the last 3 1/2 weeks of my mission. The weather was beastly hot that December, but we got a reprieve to be up and out of the city and serve in the beautiful Blue Mountains. With both of us so close to going home, we decided to get serious about the exercise we had always intended to do. We woke up each morning and ran down the hill toward the national park, scaring the sulfur-crested cockatoos and galas from the same trees each morning, watching the sun rise over the Three Sisters. It was almost like vacation; oh, except for the 10+ hour tracting days because we had no one to teach.

We traveled into the city for my last zone conference and our cheeky district leader thought he'd make an example of us. He called on various elders and sisters to teach principles from the discussion--without any aid except the scriptures. There had been a big push in the mission for us to memorize the discussions. (This was before the "bar was raised" and missionaries were trusted to create their own discussions.) So Elder Teenager asked my companion and I to teach the sixth principle of the sixth discussion. To many of you this will not mean much, but to us it was a fairly big deal. I'd only TAUGHT the sixth discussion a handful of times during my whole mission.

After we finished teaching, and feeling extreme gratitude for having just reviewed that lesson the day before, a sister who came to the mission the same day I did said the following to me, "You are really lucky that you have the discussions memorized."

Lucky? Lucky!

I knew her reputation as well as I knew any sister's in our mission--there were only 25 of us: bad news travels fast. Was her reputation deserved? I have no idea. But I wanted to shout at her and tell her that "luck" had nothing to do with it.

Was I blessed? You bet--blessed with time to study because of all the training I was asked to do, blessed with a first rate education from age 4 to 21, blessed with parents who taught me to work hard, blessed with a mind that does what I want it to, blessed with a love to read and learn . . .

But lucky?

Was it luck that set the alarm at 5:30 all those mornings? Was it luck that we followed the schedule and rules in the handbook? Was it luck that kept me awake over the scriptures each morning? Was it luck that copied passages of scripture to be memorized during the horrifically long and often boring tracting hours?

I don't think so.

We use the word "luck" a lot. You are so lucky. Good luck. Today is your lucky day. That was a lucky break. Third time lucky. Thank your lucky stars. I'm just having a string of bad luck.

But what does it mean? Is there really any such thing as luck? A very scientific Internet search yielded the following etymology for the word "luck."

It probably means a chance occurrence or a random blessing in Latin, Hebrew or Greek.

There is much room for complaint here: the word "probably" and then the invoking of three different languages is frustrating to any real study, but it is illustrative. First of all, it tells us that the idea of luck is probably very old, dating back to a time when ignorant people either could not understand the reasons behind natural occurrences or confused superstition with faith. And I like the two definitions. "chance occurrence or random blessing."

The first is much like coincidence, but the second is something much more. It implies that the giver of blessings, God himself, is arbitrary. But the Doctrine and Covenants (130:20-21) teaches that all blessings are predicated on obedience to some law. The word "all" leaves no room for "random."

Sister Japan would not, for two minutes, have given herself an ounce of credit for being on a mission. She was so faithful and humble that she would have turned any such praise right back to the Giver of all good gifts. But I like to think that she had worked hard enough that her own eyebrows would have furrowed if someone had called her merely "lucky." Because it gets so shmoopy, I try not to do (at least very often) a Seriously So Blessed post, but really, what else can so much joy in my life be called?

So, you've got to ask yourself one question, "Do I feel lucky?"

A Shout Out to All You Sister RMs

For over ten years now I have had an idea in my head. I go through phases where I am more or less serious. But now, I'm really serious. Really.

I had a companion who suggested to me some years ago that I write a book about being a sister missionary. Because, she reasoned, our experience is just different because what we bring to it is so different than what the elders bring. I have given in a lot of thought and half-heartedly collected stories over the years. I think the slump has passed, however, and I'm hoping to spend a lot of time on this project this year.

What I am hoping to produce will be something more than a self-help manual and more than chicken soup for the sister missionary's soul. I think I want to create something more like a collective memoir.

My publishing track record is dismal, so there is little fear of my profiteering from your stories. :) When the result is in, if no publisher will pick it up, then I will possibly self-publish and send all contributors a copy.

Potential topics I'm seeking anecdotes for:

joy in the work
companions
obedience
hard work
faith
Holy Ghost
Joseph Smith
Priesthood
temple
charity
missionary's mantle
conversion

I've even set up an email account: sister.missionary@hotmail.com for stories or queries to be sent to. My real email address contains my name, so that is the reason for the alternative. So, here is your chance to tell YOUR story. If you did not serve a mission, but you have a sister or friend or female relative that did, please encourage a contribution. I think our voices need to be heard.

Looking for Love

I really need to post pictures from our 3rd birthday Diego party extravaganza, but maybe tomorrow.

Instead, a funny story and two great videos.

Scallywag Plankwalker has, for some odd reason, been interested in finding a wife (he sometimes calls her "mother") lately. The Poopy Pirate was given a puzzle-map of the United States for his birthday and Scallywag is fascinated by it. He is constantly asking to put it together and wants me to tell him the names of the states. The other night he was running his finger around the map and said to Plantboy, "Yep, somewhere around here I'm going to travel to find my little lady."

"Little lady, huh?"

"Yep, a little lady to get married to."

Today, as he looked at the map (as well as a world map we found on-line) he said, "I'm going to go to Brazil to find my little lady. Then, we will move back to Oregon. After our first baby we'll go to Texas. Then, after our second baby we'll got to West Virginia. After our third baby then we'll move to Canada. After all that, we'll get on a boat and go to Hawaii."

"To live?"

"No. For our first vacation." After all that, he's going to need one.

A nomad in training.

Here are the videos. I subbed RS in church on Friday. I pretty much had to fight the ugly cry during the entire lesson. The topic was on missionary work and it just happens to be ten years ago this week that I came home from the Great South Land. Besides feeling really old, teaching this lesson just reminded me for the umpteenth time how much I loved those people and how much serving a mission blessed my life. I showed the link in the lesson because President Kimball said that righteous members were "the best advertisement for the Church."

This link is to the story explaining the origin of the ad campaign. I've also linked the summary of the comencement given by Elder Ballard at BYU-Hawaii last week is reported on; his remarks go along so beautifully with his conference talk.

As I watch these commercials and it is like the Church has grown up. I'm not sure if can really explain that? It is like the Church is getting ready for another great round of converts or something. I hope I can do my part; I pray daily that I'll raise my sons to do theirs.

Unless We Become New Creatures . . . .

I don't normally blog on Sunday, but truthfully I've been really down this week and I think this will make me feel better. No, I'm not going to vent or soapbox, but seeing as how it is Sunday, I think I'll share a few thoughts here. Maybe the idea that my words are somewhere making a Monday a little more purposeful for somebody will lift my own spirits.

There is so much anger in the world--people fighting one another over things that are both silly and things that are serious. There are sick people out there, people who are mentally, spiritually or physical ill, or some combination of all three. Sometimes I feel like I am trying to row a wooden raft up a raging stream of difficulty. I struggle and struggle and the shore never seems any closer. This will undoubtedly sound familiar to some of you. And I so admire my many friends who seem to push against the rock with such cheerful attitudes!

I'm sure most of you have heard one of President Benson's most oft-quoted remarks about how the world would take the people out of the slums, but that Christ could take the slums out of the people, who then take themselves out of the slums. He also said that while men can work and fight to change human behavior, only Christ can change human nature.

I've been thinking much the last few days about the nature and power of the atonement. I have been thinking about what it means to be born again by degrees. What it means to accept Christ's sacrifice in exchange for a little more of ourselves each day. It is a hard and painful process. There are days it seems too hard. This week it seems too hard. But then, a couple of days ago, I was reading a very noisy blog that I haven't read before. The tone was combative and political and hardline. Most of the comments on the blog echoed her sentiments. I was most disturbed when I realized that this was a group of LDS people having this mean-spirited discussion.

And then I remembered a thing that happened to me many years ago, probably almost exactly ten years ago this month. A thing which I have carried in my heart these many years. A thing worth sharing when I think there is no way to combat the rising, evil tide threatening to engulf the things I hold dear . . .

I was street contacting people in one of the busiest walk-malls in Sydney. Missionaries were out there daily. This was not my typical area, we were there for the day because of a zone conference. The meetings would not begin until afternoon and we needed to work. My trainer took me out to this busy street and I thought I would wet my pants when she told me what we were going to do. Tracting was hard enough, but at least we were in a quiet country town with houses spaced some distance apart and contacts that hadn't been spoken to by Mormon missionaries every day for the past decade.

And the hecklers . . . .

Okay, it was HARD. One of the hardest things I'd ever done in my life up to that point. The only miraculous thing that happened that day was something that probably benefitted only me. I was getting eaten alive trying to contact walkers, so I began approaching people who were sitting. I approached one particularly swarthy looking man and began speaking to him. When he heard my American accent, I thought he would spit on my shoes.

He was from Iraq. He had gone into exile in Australia not long after the first Gulf War. I knew very little about that part of the world at the time, but I understood enough to know he blamed the Americans for the unraveling of his country. Saddam was bad, but the US led UN sanctions were strangling his people. He railed and railed.

I swallowed hard. I could have walked away, but I felt brave and I knew the Lord was with me. In perhaps my first, powerful missionary moment I began talking to him about the gospel. I told him that I knew he hated me and my country, but that I was in Australia representing only the Savior. My country didn't matter. What mattered was that I had come with a message of love and peace.

We spoke for several minutes. He became noticeably calmer and was even willing to engage in conversation. Suddenly he exclaimed that he felt good, he felt peace. He said, "Something tells me that if I came out here every day and just spoke to you, I could always feel this good, but you will go away and it will be gone." His anger immediately gave way to despair. His hopelessness was palpable and I could see a glimpse of his true inner self in a way that nearly broke my heart.

No! I insisted, it was the Holy Ghost that was testifying to him that I was teaching him truth. I told him that he could have that feeling any time he wanted and encouraged him to stop the missionaries or to attend our local building. My trainer came looking for me just minutes later, saying it was time to go. As I was only going to be there one day, follow-up would have been virtually impossible. I am quite sure that this seed I tried so desperately to plant fell by the wayside where it wasn't nourished properly.

But what this experience did for me . . . .

Well, that is the real crux of my message tonight. I knew, in that brief few minutes I spent talking to him, that Christ's love can heal any ill. I knew that any human heart, no matter how jaded, hard or bitter, is capable of feeling the Spirit if the moment is right. I knew that the atonement could transcend any real or imagined cultural and political barrier to heal hearts. If enough hearts are healed then nations can be too.

I know that my sphere of influence is not large, but if enough people decide to be a force for good, then the evil doesn't have a chance. I know that it is easy to look at current situations in our world and say, "It is inevitable. Nothing can change these circumstances," or my favorite, "It is all prophesied anyway, what can I do to change the outcome?" Maybe that is true. Maybe war and contention is inevitable. Maybe we can't do anything to ulitmately change the decisions of kings, rulers, tyrants and presidents.

But we can pray.

We can pray every day that the hearts of evil men will be softened and that good people will be heard.
We can pray for our enemies as well as our soldiers.
We can pray that cooler heads will prevail and peace will be seen as the first option, not the soft option.
We can pray for the orphaned Iraqi and Afghani children to find solace and comfort.
We can pray that men and women of all religious persuasions will discern between true inspiration and false tradition.
We can pray for those who don't know to pray for themselves and speak for those who don't have a voice.

CS Lewis was once asked why he was praying so earnestly for his wife's recovery from cancer. Did he really think he could change the will of God? His reply was that he didn't pray to change God, he prayed to change himself. Maybe this is what we need. Prayers of pleading for soft hearts and busy hands and kind words.

In the next Spencer Kimball lesson there is a great quote about what a glorious thing it is to be a righteous woman, particularly during the winding up stages of this last, great dispensation. I carried this quote as a bookmark with me for many years. In the lesson, in two or three different places, he likens our sisterhood with the men's priesthood.

Dear Sisters! There is power in our prayers and in our love for one another. Let us, in some small way this week, each look beyond our immediate concerns and families, to find a way to bless somebody in desperate need of Christ's love. Even if we just take time to pray for violated women in refugee camps in Africa, for hungry children in Bahgdad, or ignorant girls in Afghanistan . . . . let us not forget that we are all children of God.

We have been blessed with so much. As we pray for the Lord to change hearts, lets allow him to work that change in our hearts too.

Dedicated From Their Youth

Ever since I read Suzanne's remarkable mini-essay about Mary in ontherun's blog, I have been thinking a lot about the mother of Jesus. Sunday in church, Mary was much brought up again as we discussed the enunciation and her visit to her cousin Elisabeth. A thing jumped out to me that never really has before.

The teacher commented that it must have been very overwhelming to Mary and Elisabeth to have a glimpse of who their children would become. She rhetorically said, "What would that be like to know that you would dedicate your son to God before he was even born?" Interesting question.

While I was a missionary, the course of study one year was the Old Testament. After we had studied the boy-prophet Samuel, my mother sent me a letter describing his parents and how they had willingly given him to the temple (and thereby God) so that he could basically be raised to be a priest. And while his parents, for the blessing of having a child in their old age, were glad to do this, my mom said, "I have often wondered how Samuel felt about it." Indeed.

These words came back to me as I pondered the rhetorical question posed by the Sunday School teacher yesterday. I think any mother in Israel can relate, at some level, to Mary and Elisabeth and to Samuel's mother. Although the scope may be different, and we may not see in such detail the mission God has prepared for these spirits we raise, haven't we indeed dedicated our children to the Lord?

We pray daily with them and for many the first song they recognize and respond to is, "I Am a Child of God." How often to we go to a blessing to hear father admonish sons to be worthy priesthood holders, serve missions and be married in the temple? Daughters we implore to be sweet and kind and motherly and temple worthy. Pictures of temple and the Savior dot the walls of our homes and our kids bedroom. Plantboy and I have started a "mission fund" for each of our boys and will do the same with the one who is coming. I could go on and on . . . I will spare you; this blog is already lengthy, but you get the idea.

What is is like to dedicate your child to the Lord? It is the hardest and most wonderful work any mother can do. Yesterday in church I saw my tiny two year old bow his head and squeeze his little arms together in his button up shirt and untied shoes and nearly cried for how cute and innocent he is. I prayed with all the feeling in my mother-heart that he would somehow withstand the difficulties that will surely come his way, that he will be strong enough to face every buffeting of Satan, that he will know who he is with such fervor that nothing will shake his testimony. I prayed that I would remember his cuteness and sweetness even when he goes through his really ugly stages and that he would emerge on the other side as a man of God.

Yes, indeed, I have dedicated my children to the Lord. I cannot comprehend the missions and blessings the Lord has in store for them, but how can they fail to be great if they will but follow his admonitions? How can any of us fail to be great?

I will close with an excerpt Nelson Mandela's first inaugural speech, "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the World. . . we were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us."

A righteous generation of young men and women dedicated to the True God of Heaven--what could be more glorious than that? May we teach them so well who they are and of the strength within themselves that, like Samuel, when the Lord calls, they will answer, "Here Am I!"