Not All Who Wonder...

The look on her face nearly broke my heart. Probably because I felt like I understood her. On one couch was a sister missionary overwhelmed with expectations she now believed were unfulfilled. In a moment of stress, she had vocalized suicidal thoughts to her trainer. The mission had decided to send her home with an official escort. She didn’t have a choice. Even if she didn’t mean what she said. On the opposite couch was me. A sister who hadn’t vocalized those thoughts, but they had come and gone in a similar vein. But keeping them to myself, I was allowed to stay. The difference between us, however, seemed infinitesimal.      Living in the same area as the Mission President, my companion and I volunteered to take the sister out for her last few days in the field. I felt like she needed to talk, and I wanted to let her. After we worked for much of the day, we went home and I asked her questions and let her tell me everything. That’s when I learned that her r...

Quando eu era mais jovem, o meu pai sempre afirmava que deveríamos levar tudo o que um membro do Quórum dos Setenta dissesse "com um grão de sal" –  quero dizer, a gente deve ouvir os seus discoursos cautelosamente, com orac ã o e um pouco de ceticismo .  Apliquei isso com muita liberdade em minha vida (talvez demais). Eu lembro um momento específico da minha missão. Um membro dos Setenta veio a visitar. Ele queria celebrar a idéia do batismo, realizando uma espécie de festa batismal no quintal do Presidente da Estaca - um bilionário que construiu sua casa mais ou menos para modelar o Templo da Guatemala. Nas semanas seguintes, todos os missionários foram incentivados a convidar (e a forçar, se for possível) seus pesquisadores a serem batizados na data muito específica escolhida pelo membro do Setenta e o Presidente da Estaca, para que pudéssemos convidar muitas pessoas frequentar o evento - o que me pareceu um “espetáculo de batismos.” Se eu estivesse escrevendo um ar...

“Hold up your light that it may shine unto the world. Behold I am the light that ye should hold up – that which ye have seen me do.” I’ve never thought much about why. Honestly, prior to serving a mission, I never thought much about the  what  either. What was going on inside my mind. Terms like anxiety, depression, mental illness, obsessive compulsive disorder and the like felt like taboo topics growing up. Those people have problems. Get yourself together. Choose to be happy. Let go of stuff that bothers you. Get over it. And learn to control your thoughts. Not bad advice. Frankly, it’s good advice to actively take control of your mind and body and walk the path of emotional, physical, and spiritual stability and health. Until you realize that, for some people, they just can’t. One of my first times recognizing a panic attack remains critically imprinted on my memory. Waking up in a cold sweat. An impending sense of doom. My heart racing. The feeling that ...

While I was growing up, my Dad always asserted that we should take everything a member of the Quorum of the Seventy said “with a grain of salt.” I have applied that perhaps too liberally in my life. I particularly remember one moment from my mission. A member of the Seventy came to visit and decided that he wanted to celebrate the idea of baptism by having a sort of celebratory baptismal party in the backyard of the Stake President - a billionaire who had built his home to model the Guatemala Temple.  For the next few weeks, all the missionaries were encouraged to push their investigators to be baptized on the very specific date chosen by the Seventy and Stake President so that we could invite tons of people to what sounded to me like a “spectacle of baptisms.” If I had been writing a newspaper article, that’s what I would have entitled it.   However, I personally believed that pressuring my investigators to do anything involving covenants was a terrible idea....