You can’t leave home again
At the end of my junior year of high school, I caught a glimpse of my graduating student body president one last time. We had some common acquaintances, but no common interests. He played football and led the student government; I ran track and was one of a couple dozen Mormon students at my high school. I distinctly remember thinking to myself, “There’s one guy I’m never going to see again.â€
Two years later, when I had been in Germany as a missionary for all of three months, I met that former student body president at a train station. He was my first junior companion. I stayed in that city, my second mission area, for five months, some of the best months of my life up to that point, and then I was transferred.
My new companion in the next city irritated the heck out of me for a month. The next month, I irritated the heck out of him. Our third month, one of the very best months of my mission, we had a phenomenal time together and did great work and learned a tremendous amount from each other.
A couple months ago, I went to visit him. We had both returned to Germany at about the same time, and we finally got a chance to visit him during a school vacation. Last month, he brought his family to visit us. For my kids, meeting other American Mormons who attend German schools is like discovering family members you never knew you had.
We invited the missionaries in our ward over to dinner this week. We hadn’t had them over yet, so we had to ask all the usual questions. The missionaries wanted to know if I had served a mission in Germany, so of course I told them about it. One of them asked me if I had perhaps known his step brother, who had been in my mission around the same time. Before I could stop myself, I said, “Him? Yes, I know him. He was the mission secretary who refused to refund the massive electricity bill that we had to pay to our landlord every month in my fourth city, even though no other missionaries in any other apartment had to do that. We complained that we were running out of money, but he just brushed us off. Tell him I want I want my 57 Deutschmark back!â€
After a moment of stunned silence, I though over the situation a bit. “Uh, I guess if he was in the mission office, he would know something about me. Actually, he might know a whole lot about me. Could you pretend that I didn’t just say that? Maybe you could not mention meeting me at all?â€
One of the difficult things about returning from a mission is realizing that a lot of wonderful and horrible and incredibly formative experiences were based on a specific configuration of people that can never be re-created. But it’s a mistake to think that you’re leaving it all behind you when you leave, at least not in all the ways you expect. The church is a small world, and the past is not always content to be just a memory. Sometimes it has ways of making you talk.
58q, 1.713s
Ha. Your post reminded me of this month’s word fugitive in The Atlantic: ““The unfortunate telling of a story that one realizes too late is ill-suited to the occasionâ€
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/word-fugitives
What!? Not everyone has experienced of a tableful of people staring open-jawed at you before all quickly looking away? You haven’t lived until you’ve said something that gets this reaction.
…has experienced a… [sigh]
(staring, open-jawed)
I really enjoyed this post, Jonathan. Thank you.
Nice object lesson, Researcher.
Is it possible that a missionary gets to know his (or her) fellow missionaries better in a low-baptizing mission like Germany? In Austria, we spent a massive amount of time finding, and precious little time teaching investigators. As a result, most of the stories from my mission involve fellow missionaries, as opposed to investigators or converts. It was fellow missionaries with whom I spent so much time tracting, street-contacting, and street preaching (and hiking mountains on p-day of course). In contrast, missionaries from high-baptizing missions seem to have endless stories and experiences to share about converts. I have to qualify this because we did teach and baptize some people, but I got the impression from my friend serving in The Philippines at the same time that his mission was just a whirlwind of teaching.
My third to last companion did not like me at all. I didn’t really like him either. About five years after my mission my girlfriend at the time invited me and one of her friends from the BYU who was passing through to dinner. In the course of the usual questions, the friend exclaimed “Oh, I’m really good friends with someone who served in Austria too!”
“Really,” I replied. “Who?”
“Elder X!”
“Hmm, I see. So what is it you are doing in Chicago these days?”
My third companion told me directly that I was his worst companion. We crossed paths twice post mission and awkward conversation ensued. It is a small world.
On the other hand, some relationships are better outside of (or after) the specialized intensity and hierarchy of the missionary world. Early in my mission, I was a junior companion to one of the APs. I’m a relationship person; he wanted to get things done that often didn’t involve me. He was Very Important; I wasn’t. I thought he was a self-important lout; he thought I was an immature jerk. I would have been quite happy never to see him again.
Post-mission, I occasionally ran into him at BYU. To my mild surprise, he actually seemed interested in talking and developing a superficial relationship of more equality. Now I have modestly good feelings about him, although last contact was 30 years ago.
Thanks for this post. I enjoyed reading.
Enjoyed the post, Jonathan.
Would you mind telling how your SBP was converted? Or did I misunderstand and he was always a member?