I was in Mozambique. I felt safe.
Category: Missionary
The Ninety-Nine and the One
It isn’t easy to be inconvenienced, especially when we are asked to tolerate the views or the actions of the other, and love them too! It would be easier to ignore them, cast them out, keep things easy and pure. But that isn’t the plan.
Asking the Right Question
The news yesterday was that President Obama will hold a Passover Seder in the White House tonight, the first time a Seder has been held in the White House. So, who is going to ask him to hold Family Home Evening some Monday night?
One Last Book Before I Go
So your mission call finally arrived (see here, here, or here) and you suddenly realize that it starts in 44 days but you don’t know that much about Mormonism or what it is you are supposed to teach for two long years. You are suddenly serious about “missionary prep.” What book should you read?
Collateral Damage: Missionaries and Prop 8
An anti-Prop 8 organization has released a new commercial drawing Mormon missionaries into the fight over Proposition 8. To say the ad is inflammatory is putting it lightly.
Missions and the Art of Togetherness
One unique aspect of the missionary experience is the opportunity to focus everything you do, day and night, directly on the goal of serving God. It can be kind of scary to set that as your project, because it is a tall order. Serving God for one day is hard enough; you run out of ideas. Serving God for two years takes a lot of creativity and thought.
Missions, art, and surveillance
One unique aspect of the missionary experience, quite distinct from life before and after, is the feeling that someone is always watching you. It’s probably the one aspect of my mission that I could have done without, although I wouldn’t say that it was entirely unproductive.
iTunes Gospel
So my colleagues have caught on to my secret plan to convert them all.
Church halts sending North American missionaries to Russia
Last week BYU Newsnet posted and then pulled offline an article announcing that North American missionaries were no longer being called to serve in Russia. The move left many wondering about the state of the missionary program in Russia with some tempered hope that perhaps the Newsnet article had jumped the gun on a situation that was being resolved. Unfortunately, however, the news now official. The Deseret News has confirmed that the Church is no longer sending North American missionaries to Russia “due to new, tougher visa laws.” North American missionaries currently in-country will stay, but those newly called missionaries and those currently in the MTC have both been reassigned. The Church clearly hopes to resolve this situation, but the reassignment of these missionaries suggests to me that it isn’t expecting a solution anytime soon.
Called to leave
My grandmother, mother, and I all served missions, so I was delighted when my firstborn announced her intention to serve, submitted her papers, received her call. Little did I know.
Joseph Smith, Again for the First Time
Sometimes I have suffered from convert envy.
Watching conference
Stake conference in the mission field. Still the mission field, for although we are a stake, there is no stake center, only a chapel in some of the main cities, and rented rowhouses elsewhere. The stake covers some 10,000 square miles. Therefore we gather in this huge, sparsely lit movie theatre—theatre number 14 in a massive cinema complex close to the highway.