Border Dispute

I can honestly say that the list of people whom I've wanted to strangle with a Canadian flag is short.

Elder W, however, quickly made the cut. He kept a giant maple leaf flag over his bed, which I eyed with murderous intent every time he made some sort of claim about Canadian superiority. It wasn't that I hated Canada. Elder W was fond of telling people he met that it was Canadians who burned down the White House during the War of 1812 (which, I suppose, is technically correct, though the arsonists were in fact British lackeys who happened to live in Canada, a land collectively lacking the balls to follow the example of its southern neighbor and declare independence). 

When Elder W got wind that anyone had a problem with him, he would lament that people disliked him because he was from Canada. I contend that people hated Canada solely because of him. In fact, I believe that if Canada is ever embroiled in a major war, it will be because someone came away from a disagreement with him.

I suspect now that I really never had a problem with Canada before this and I have no legitimate beef with them today. I think the land of maple and beavers became a scapegoat for me after repeated disagreements with one of its citizens.

The Next Crazy Guy

Haines will forever remain enshrined in my memory as the repository for the majority of the crazy people I met on my mission. Yes, I met a lot of people of varying sanity over the course of the mission, but many of those simply held differing viewpoints from my own and therefore do not automatically earn a high place on the crazy scale, no matter how far out their views may be. However, I'm certain that in Haines I met a significant number of certifiable nutjobs.

Elder W and I were referred by the local ward to a less-active member, a Mormon who rarely or never came to church. In some other faiths, infrequent attendance is tolerated without too much of a problem, but we like to think our message's importance is such that lost sheep need to be tended to with the utmost care and sensitivity.

I hope you won't find me too hypocritical, then, when I describe this particular less-active member with something less than sensitivity. Our encounter with him was just too funny.

No sooner had we entered his home and talked with him for a few minutes than this good man, whom I remember as Brother Smith, informed us that he is of the tribe of Elijah. This may seem crazy to those not of our faith, but to us it is especially inexplicable. We believe that everyone in the Church is descended (through blood or by adoption) from one of the twelve tribes of Israel, each of which has a specific role to play in the restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As you may recall from your reading of the Bible (or at least your last viewing of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat), Elijah is not among the twelve tribes. Perhaps sensing our skepticism, he offered to produce his patriarchal blessing (a customized blessing every member of the Church can receive that declares, among many other things, your personal Israelite lineage) to prove it.

Unfortunately, Brother Smith remembered, the Devil had stolen his patriarchal blessing a week earlier, along with jacking up his phone bill and killing his dog. While I do not doubt that the Devil has the power to do these things, I think the Prince of Darkness has better things occupying his evil time. Elder W and I were about to wrap up our conversation and report back to the bishop when Brother Smith changed his story; actually, he said, he was a descendant of Jesus Christ.

The claims made in The Da Vinci Code aside, we doubted his story. We gave him a polite farewell and departed. The life of a missionary is rarely dull.

Meeting Mother Eve

Note to Carol: I realize that many of my blog posts are more of general recollections than stories. This is going to change soon. My family is coming down this weekend for general conference, and my mom is going to bring my mission journals, which should help me to recreate specific scenes better and show instead of telling. 

Bloomfield had its share of drunken Indians, but it wasn't until I came south that I met anyone who claimed to be in the earthly reincarnation of Mother Eve.

Elder W and I rode along Central, the primary thoroughfare that still boasted gaudy remnants of the days when it was a thriving segment of the storied Route 66. Bowling allies with chipped signs, diners with enough grease on the menus to lubricate the all the cars that passed in a day, and strip clubs that catered to all sorts of erotic preferences passed as Elder W and I biked along Central in search of lost souls.

We didn't have to search long. Elder W's strategy was to squeal to a halt on his bike, accosting pedestrians with sudden declarations of our message. Though I lacked his experience, I still though this approach had the tendency to alarm people, especially when we pulled up one either side of our target, blocking the escape routes. I liked to wait until people noticed the two white guys biking in suits with their right pant legs pulled up to avoid getting caught in the gear shifts, then answer their questions and steer the conversation into gospel waters.

Today, the first person who took evident notice of us was a woman wearing black and white robes, carrying a staff in the shape of a serpent. Even if she hadn't called out to us, her appearance was more that enough to merit our attentions, so we stopped our bikes to talk.

"Hey, how are you?" Elder W said.

"Just walkin' along," she told us.

"Good! Have you ever seen us around? Missionaries, biking up and down the street?"

"Oh, I seen y'all," she said, thumping her staff. "Y'all are missionaries."

"Yeah," I started to say.

"Do you want to hear our message about Jesus Christ?" Elder W asked.

"Oh, I know all 'bout Jesus," said the woman. "I'm Mother Eve. I walk the earth to call people to repentance. I am the Mother of God."

It occurred to me that ecclesiastical help might not be the kind of help she needed in her life, but we remained polite. "That's a nice staff," I said.

"Oh, I been walkin' with it for years," she said. "You boys ready for repentance? I gonna help usher in the Lord."

That was about the time that Elder W decided there might be other souls out there who were a little more prepared to hear our message. We bade her farewell and mounted our bikes in search of the next willing listener.

Elder W

With Elder Jones, the homesickness and inadequacy had never really disappeared. It had merely been fossilized. It was still there, abandoned like a deformed puppy, whimpering in the corner. When I was yanked — figuratively, for the most part — from my trainer, I was once again in a new world. The deformed puppy crept from his hiding place and started wailing.  

Elder Jonas Wodjcidek met me at the mission office. His more irritating quirks had yet to manifest themselves, so I moved into our new apartment without incident. Elder W kept to himself, which also allowed me to stare at the wall, trying to delay the full realization of my utter loneliness, for another few hours in peace.

I soon got to know Elder W. He was from Alberta, Canada, a fact that seemed to crop up every time he introduced himself. Spending time with him, one would quickly be indoctrinated to the fact that everything in Canada, from the Slurpees to the couches, was several degrees superior to its American counterpart. 

"Up in Canada, the Taco Bells are much better. They put magic beans in the tacos, grown from the excrement of the Great Moose Spirit, guarded by sacred beavers and plucked by beautiful maidens in Mountie uniforms," he would say. Actually, the details of his ethnocentric boasts have been lost to time, but I hope I've conveyed the general flavor.

Adieu, Bloomfield!

Transfer news came one Saturday night as Elder Jones was teaching me how to solve a Rubik's cube. Among the skills he was imparting — which, in addition to door approaches and basic missionary talents, also included a few more worldly things — was the ability to solve the puzzle in under three minutes. Elder Jones often honed this skill on the toilet with the door open, sometimes carrying on conversations with me as he engaged in the other tasks at hand. Today, thankfully, I occupied his full attention, and I had finished the top when the zone leaders — the missionaries who occupied the leadership tier above district leader — called with our new assignments.

Elder Jones was to go to Gallup, on the borders of the reservation, with one of the new elders who had come from the MTC with me. I, on the other hand, was to depart for Haines, a ward in central Albuquerque known as the "War Zone." My companion was Elder Wodjcidek, whom I'd met briefly during our exciting jaunt a few weeks earlier to Albuquerque to get my personal regions violated.

When the time came to depart, all the fortitude I'd built up over the last three months leaked out my eyes, despite my best efforts to keep a stoic face. Elder Jones gave me a manly hug as his nearly newborn child prepared to once again venture into the unknown world alone and friendless.

Oh, THAT Elder

Sometimes missionaries received certain labels. When there were two or more elders with the same last name, those elders had to be careful because a nickname was surely on the way. For example, there were four Elder Joneses in my mission: Driggs Jones (my trainer), Fat Jones, Pretty-Boy Jones, and NASCAR Jones. Other elders didn't get nicknames but were followed around by stigmas the rest of their missions. One elder would always be known as the guy who burned his apartment down. Another was renowned for his desire of missionary leadership positions. One elder would go down in mission lore as the only one in recent memory to willfully spend his entire mission as a junior companion.

What was I? I suppose I was fortunate enough to avoid any specific notoriety, but for a while I was known as the elder who got bucked off a camel. (You're going to have to wait a little longer for that story. Sorry.) I think my stutter also merited a mention whenever someone was trying to figure out who Elder Kunz was. But, oddly enough, somehow it got out that I was a rabid Star Wars fan.

I still don't know how people knew, but somehow people caught on and decided I would be the perfect recipient for the random Star Wars memorabilia they found around the apartment. Before my first two transfers were over, I had a Star Wars cereal box, a "Darth Tater" Mr. Potato Head, and an impressive assortment of Pez dispensers. (By the end of my mission, my growing Star Wars collection would include a high-end lightsaber replica and would rival my tie collection for the biggest contributor to my exceeding the airline luggage weight limit.)

Still, by the end of my mission, I was pleased when Sister Koyle told me I was known in the mission for having a great combination of work ethic and a sense of fun. I breathed a sigh of relief. I think that appellation had narrowly edged out my Star Wars collection as my lasting legacy.

Asymmetry

Every mission is fraught with weird medical challenges. Some missionaries avoid the inherent threats with impunity, while a few have difficulty flushing tropical tapeworms out of their systems long after they come home from Brazil.

I was fortunate to serve in the United States, where tapeworms are mostly restricted to sewers and the federal government. This did not mean, however, that my mission was bereft of any odd medical excitement.

One morning while getting out of the shower, I looked in the mirror and noticed that a portion of my anatomy that is meant to be more or less symmetrical was now leaning toward the less symmetrical. Alarmed, I called my companion and told him in general terms what the problem was. Elder Jones insisted that he see the afflicted area, and with some reluctance I showed him. Elder Jones chose that moment to mention a missionary he’d known in the MTC who had been sent home with cancer to this very same anatomical region, so I grew unnerved.

We called the mission president’s wife, Sister Koyle, who handled medical matters.

"Hey, uh, Sister Koyle?"

"Yes, Elder Kunz," she said in that sweet grandmotherly voice that suggested I had caught her in the middle of baking cookies.

"Hey," I said, trying not to sound as awkward and alarmed as I felt. "Um, I was looking in the mirror this morning and I saw that ..."

To her credit, Sister Koyle acted as though she always received desperate calls from distressed missionaries informing her of mysterious ailments to their most sacred parts. (Maybe she did get those calls all the time.) She directed us to a hospital in Albuquerque, stressing that we didn’t know anything yet and it could be totally innocent. (That was easy for her to say, I reflected as Elder Jones and I took the impromptu two-hour trip to Albuquerque that morning.)

At the hospital, a rather attractive nurse called me in to check me for the suspected malady, which only compounded the awkwardness already inherent from the nature of my medical complaints and the intimacy required to fully scrutinize the area in question. More than once I had to think intently about pterodactyls in order to avoid blushing too hard.

As we waited for the results, I told Elder Jones of my intimate encounter with the nurse. He couldn’t stop himself from laughing. The levity was good to alleviate the stress that came from wondering whether I would soon be subjected to chemotherapy.

We soon discovered that the asymmetry I had discovered that morning had no malignant cause. Instead, I had harmless varicose veins down there, which felt strange but had no negative effects. I was told to get the problem corrected when I returned home, but that it wouldn’t affect my missionary service in the slightest.

Post

As a new missionary, I relied on letters from home almost as much as I relied on microwave pizzas. My family wrote every week, which I appreciated, but the letters that made me keep a vigilant eye on the mailbox were the ones from girls.

At this point on my mission, my letter-writing female fan club at home had an membership of about ten. I got letters from Amy, Danielle, M'Lisa, Heidi, Alex, Jessi, Jessica, Kristen, Anna, and a few others whose names escape me. Some of these would lose interest in me after a few months or even weeks; a few would stay strong in their letter-writing resolve until the very end. One in particular, whom I'll call Delilah, wrote me faithfully and I awaited her semi-weekly letters with a significant degree of eagerness.

Elder Jones was halfway through his mission. According to the scientifically validated Principle of Enduring Female Correspondence, the number of girls writing a missionary is inversely proportional to the number of months he's been out. Therefore, he had only one girl, though she wrote often.

On this particular day, both of us were yearning for the comfort of feminine appreciation when we heard the telltale clanking of the mail truck leaving our parking lot. Without a word, both of us dropped our scriptures and planners and sprinted for the mail key on the wall. Elder Jones reached it first and continued to the mail box without acknowledging his victory thus far. I caught up to him as he was opening our mailbox, only to see that the only people who had felt the need to write us that day were a few companies offering us exclusive vacations if we filled out their surveys and qualified for a free credit card loans.

Introduction

Note: I realized it's about time I wrote the introduction.

If you’re from a country with a certain degree of religious freedom, chances are you’ve been relaxing on a summer afternoon, sipping something cold and refreshing and reading the news, when suddenly your tranquility is disrupted by a knock on the door. On the doorstep, you find a pair of clean-cut young men in matching white shirts and black nametags, grinning like escapees from a rerun of The Brady Bunch. They probably invited you to hear a message about families, the Book of Mormon, or Jesus Christ. They may have given you a small card with an offer for a free DVD and pictures of inexplicably smiling, ethnically diverse people. They may have offered service or invited you to attend church services. However their approach, these young men — or possibly young women — were Mormon missionaries.

Who are they? Where did they come from? Is there a factory somewhere that churns out neatly shaved young men, stamping the black nametags and affixing conservative ties on an efficient assembly line? Are these young missionaries dismantled upon their return, their mechanical parts reused for the next generation of door-knockers? Or are they hatched en masse in vast subterranean colonies, fed on a steady diet of milk and honey until they’re mature enough to send in pairs around the world?

The truth, I regret to say, is far less interesting. A year or two ago, those young people at your door were ordinary youths, graduating from high school or braving college while exploring the realms of dating or taking endless aptitude tests to defog obscured career paths. At some point, whether because of family pressure or personal conviction, they elected to fill out their paperwork and prepare to serve a mission.

I served a mission. At this point in my life, it remains one of the best things I ever did. I have a few regrets, but for the most part I’m happy with my service and pleased with the growth I accomplished during those two years.

Today, with Mormons running for president and Mormon values tested, embraced, or challenged across the issues, with Mormon culture represented with varying degrees of accuracy in the media, I still feel some missionary spirit. That’s where this book comes from: I want to share my experiences as a missionary and thereby cast some light upon the Mormon lifestyle and belief system. My intent is to be as candid as possible, portraying Mormon missionaries as real human beings with functioning respiratory, cardiopulmonary, and neural systems, who possess an often underestimated ability to think for themselves and to preach what they truly believe.

Let me emphasize that this is not an official Church publication. As a missionary, I was an official representative of the Church and, I believe, Jesus Christ, but now I’m just a normal guy with his beliefs and values. That said, the general idea of this work to strengthen the faith of fellow members and illuminate members of other faiths and creeds.

I’ve changed a few names. This is done to protect privacy, to respect sensitive situations, and to keep embarrassment from those missionary companions whom I wanted to brutally murder. Some people kept their names, however, those who I feel would only benefit from having their names in print.

And so, a long time ago in a place not far away, I got my mission call ...

The First Door

There I stood, on the threshold of my first door, my first door approach, and possibly my first heart attack. Elder Jones gave an encouraging — if unhelpful — nod and clapped me on the back.

I knocked.

After a few moments, a man in his sixties cracked open the door, a cigarette clenched in his teeth.

"Hello," I said. I punctuated every syllable with violent shaking and stammering. "W-we're ... M-Mormon ... missionaries. Have ... you ever ... m-met with ... m-missionaries before?"

The man didn't answer, perhaps because he was trying to figure out how to deal with the young man apparently having a seizure on his doorstep. Satisfied with my part in this approach, I glanced at Elder Jones. He gave me a look like the one skydiving instructors must give before they pry people's rigid fingers away from handles and shove the people out of planes. Unsuccessful at my attempt to pass the rest of the approach to my trainer, I continued.

"We're ... sharing a message ... a-about the B-Book of Mormon ... and how it can help your life," I continued. "I kn-know ... that this message is t-rue and I know th-that it can help you. C-can we come in?"

The man with the cigarette smiled. Maybe it was genuine interest. Maybe it was pity. Maybe it was just a desire to administer rudimentary medical attention, but he nodded and opened the door wider.

"Come in," he said.

Brave New World

Given my level of terror, my trainer thought it best to hold off on doing serious missionary work until the following day. That night, we visited the Beever family. Brother Beever was the ward mission leader, a calling meant to provide a liaison between the full-time missionaries and the ward members. He was stalwart and motivated guy whose like I saw only a few other times throughout my mission. As we sat down to plates of barbecue chicken, the family welcomed the new missionary.

The following morning, my first full day as a missionary in the field dawned with sobering starkness. This was real. This new life, both the good parts and the bad, would compose the entirety of my existence for the foreseeable future. I felt much like I might after awakening the morning after a nuclear holocaust to find a brave new world where grotesque radiation-afflicted mutants forage for survival across a blasted landscape. After arising at 6:30 and engaging in a half hour of cursory exercise, Elder Jones and I retreated to our respective bathrooms to shower and freshen up for the day. We hadn’t had the chance to plan the previous day as we were supposed to, so we devoted part of our hour-long companionship study to scheduling our day. Elder Jones would introduce me to a few of the regulars, those people investigating the Church with weekly appointments. Before that, however, we would drive to an area on the outskirts of town where Elder Jones and his last companion had left off tracting.

Tracting implies that we go around handing out tracts, but in missionary culture it had taken on a more specific meaning. For us, it consists almost entirely of going from door to door, trying to get as much of our message in before people’s tolerance for religious weirdos is exhausted and they decide to reacquaint us with their closed door. If we’re lucky, people would let us explain who we were, what we and to share, and how that message could benefit them. If we’re very lucky, they’ll invite us in for more.

The area Elder Jones had chosen was evenly split between manufactured homes and trailer houses. The manufactured homes often boasted flamingos, kokopelli statues (a native American cultural icon), or other lawn ornaments displaying varying degrees of kitsch. The trailer houses were usually adamant keeps in the midst of bulwarks of chain link with prowling dogs offering warning growls through the fence to passersby.

Elder Jones took the first few doors, but didn’t have much success in keeping people’s attention or more than a few seconds. He decided I wasn’t learning much by watching him narrowly avoid getting his nose clipped by slamming doors and told me to take the next door.

“Want to give it a try?” he asked.

“No,” I said with complete honesty, but I was, after all, the junior companion.

My heart was hammering like the drumbeat that precedes the hanging of a pirate as I ascended the steps toward the door.

Humble Home

About an hour later, Elder Jones introduced me to our apartment. It was decorated in what I like to call “budget bachelor pad chic,” furnished with stuff the thrift stores were anxious to get rid of. A giant picture of a ship in hues of brown, orange, and black hung over the couch, which wrapped around a coffee table. The couch had enough holes to suggest the presence of a thriving rodent colony within its depths, and the coffee table looked as though a swarm of termites had nibbled on it only to find that it wasn’t up to their culinary standards. The most obvious feature of the front room, however, was the three-foot black spot on the carpet. Elder Jones explained that some missionaries had once tried to clean their bikes on the carpet, but that didn’t seem to explain the sheer size of the stain. My first thought was that some evil spirit entity had attempted to come through the floor but had been halted by the smell of missionary cooking, leaving behind its ectoplasmic residue on the carpet.

Missionary companionships are to share a bedroom, probably to ensure one of them doesn’t sneak out at night to engage in various illicit activities. One of the two bedrooms had been therefore converted to an office, in which a pair of mismatched desks sat. I chose this room to unpack because of its relative spaciousness. I was pleased to learn that each of us got our own bathroom, though Elder Jones had claimed the larger one, which included a walk-in closet, for himself.

I familiarized with the dwelling in which I would live for the next few months. Yes, the furniture was chipped and threadbare, but at least it was clean.

Elder Jones

The following day, we drove early to the transfer site at the mission headquarters, a suite of offices adjacent to several other Latter-day Saint facilities in downtown Albuquerque. There were already dozens of missionaries swarming around, greeting old friends loudly and displaying camaraderie of which I wasn’t yet a part. I got off the van and stood there, feeling a little like some sort of orphan in a Dickens novel, the kind who gets shipped to a factory in the smog-choked heart of London without a friend in the world.

Elder Andrew Jones, the senior missionary assigned as my companion to train me, would meet me in Farmington, an hour or two to the north. The other missionaries getting transferred up there and I piled into a fifteen-passenger van. We then began the odyssey northward.

A few hours later, we rumbled into the parking lot of the Farmington stake center, the meetinghouse that was the headquarters for the Farmington stake. The missionaries already assembled were a jovial lot; as we disembarked, they greeted old friends with raucous inside jokes or clapped their buddies on the back after months of separation.

Somewhere in the haze of that day I remember meeting my trainer. Elder Jones happened to be from the same ward in Driggs, Idaho, as my paternal grandparents. This gave us a little to take about, or at least a little toward convincing Elder Jones that I was capable of human speech. Between my natural stutter and an inability to formulate coherent sentences born out of the day’s stress, I’m glad I had my nametag on to at least let the other missionaries know my name.

Elder Jones' grin faltered a little as he watched his new greenie stumble through sentences, but the grin quickly returned, along with an arm around the shoulder.

"This is gonna be good," he said. "I feel good about this."

I wished I shared his optimism.

Land of Enchantment

Alas, my frustration with my speech wasn't something that could be resolved with immediacy. So it was that I joined the other elders in my district for a 5 a.m. flight from Provo to Albuquerque with trepidation stewing in my brain.

New Mexico’s official nickname is the “Land of Enchantment.” As the clouds dispersed and my first view of the nation’s forty-seventh state became clear from the window seat of the airplane, I seriously wondered whether that nickname had been drawn from a hat or merely dreamed up by a particularly imaginative public relations committee. I saw brown everywhere. If New Mexico’s landscape appeared in coloring book, I theorized, only the crayon labeled “Puke brown” would have sufficed to give an accurate representation.

My frustration was still broiling as we stepped off the plane and were greeted at the bottom of the escalator by President and Sister Koyle and the assistants to the president. They all were smiling at us, which was good because any less cordial greeting may have incited uncontrolled sobbing on my part.

President Brent H. Koyle had previously served as an area authority, a Church position overseeing a large number of local congregations. His salt-and-pepper hair was parted with more severity than the Red Sea and while he was at heart a loving and caring shepherd with a deep commitment to the success of the hundred and fifty or so missionaries in his fold, it wouldn’t take long for me to discover how fearsome he could be when angry. It wasn’t that he had a temper; it was just that he had mastered the ability to channel his righteous anger through the air. When you had broken the rules or otherwise given him cause for indignation, you could almost feel the electricity crackling from his form, lifting your hair on end and sending small animals darting for cover. When you were working your hardest and trying your best to be obedient, he was a black-haired, beardless Dumbledore; when you screwed up, you could almost hear Darth Vader’s Imperial March heralding the arrival of the mission president and his holy judgment.

Sister Pam Koyle was always smiling. She was the mom for the missionaries and took care of all the medical emergencies that cropped up. She greeted you cheerfully on the phone as you reported that some weird black pus was coming out of your blisters at the end of the day and lovingly referred you to the proper medical authorities.

Thorn in the Flesh

Th —

I h—

C —

If I wrote how I sometimes sound, this would be a chore to read.

Kids used to ask me what caused my stutter. With the straightest face I could muster, I told them the stress of potty-training had left me permanently damaged. Other times I simply replied that I had been abducted by aliens, whose mysterious tinkerings with my body had left a few vocal cords in need of a good recalibration.

My school years had passed with my stutter as constant irritation but nothing debilitating. I bore my cross with murmurs but never turned aside from my course. There wasn't anything I could do, after all. My personal Calvary lay ahead still, and since I was incapable of tossing my burden aside, there was nothing for it but to press on.

The MTC presented a new hurdle in the path. Every new missionary experiences varying degrees of uncertainty, and every new elder brings his own tailor-made challenges into the mission field, but for me, my preexisting burdens and my new anxieties and general feelings of inadequacies compounded exponentially. The task before me seemed too great. How could I do what I knew I needed to do when I faced limitations I felt were so debilitating? Why would the Lord put such a task on my shoulders when a burden He had given me was preventing me from doing it properly?

TO BE CONTINUED ...

Acronyms

This new world included a rigorous regimen. We woke up at 6:30, showered and dressed, exercised for an hour, and were in class again by 9. We had training in various forms until lunch, which was spent in the MTC cafeteria, then more learning, then dinner, then more classes, then bed. Some of the instruction came in the form of programs with various acronyms.

In the TRC -- Teaching Referral Center? Terrifying Referral Class? Totally Rigorous Calling? I really can’t remember -- missionaries man the phones to accept call from people responding to pass-along cards for free Church videos. The missionaries also make outbound calls to people who’ve been recommended by friends as possibly interested in being taught the gospel. There was one elder in my district, Elder Reichert, whom we called “Elder Love” for his easy way with people. While the rest of us were struggling to explain to disgruntled Southern Baptists why their names had ended up on our calling list, Elder Reichert was having deep, soul-searching quality time with some grandmotherly black woman who called him “honey” and apparently wanted to adopt him. We never figured out how he did it.

The TEC -- I’m pretty sure this was Teaching Evaluation Center -- we taught volunteers who posed as investigators the missionary lessons, then got our skills critiqued by teachers who observed our sessions from lofty video rooms on high. There were other acronyms floating around -- MDT, LGM -- with their own roles in our spiritual development.

I’d heard varying opinions on the quality of the food in the MTC cafeteria, but I’ve never eaten good food so consistently since. The menu was varied and usually quite tasty, with luxurious arrays of cereal in the morning, changing tableaus of fries, potatoes, and spaghetti and lunch, and pleasant surprises for dinner. I remember once they ordered endless amounts of Pizza Hut. (It was that night, my mouth stuffed with the ambrosial pepperoni and cheese, that I confirmed to myself that the Church was true.) There was also all the Sprite and Fanta you could safely digest.

Fearful Delirium

I would never be able to fully recollect the events of the first day in the MTC. The entire day was enshrouded in a haze of fear and uncertainty. The new missionaries, only moments ago severed from our families, traveled through labyrinthine halls, getting room assignments, meal cards, immunization forms, and other necessities for our MTC stay. Everybody was nervous, though some were more so than others and some attempted to disguise their nervousness with obnoxious false confidence. I overheard one new missionary telling another that he had just come from the Air Force Academy, so this whole mission thing was going to be a walk in the park. That experience ranks among the top ten times where I’ve wanted to punch someone in the face.

Somehow I found my way to my room, where I found my companion waiting. Elder Smith came from a town fifteen miles south of my hometown in Idaho. He was studying music. We chatted a little before the full truth of where we were sank in: our families were gone for two years, we didn’t know a soul, and we had been thrust into a world that, frankly, made me want to pee my pants.

That night, after unpacking, we joined the rest of our district — a small group of missionaries speaking the same mission language — for instruction. Our teachers, recently returned missionaries, introduced themselves. I don’t remember a word either of them said, except maybe their names. They may have explained some MTC rules — there was no leaving the MTC, since the Church was now in charge of our welfare. High fences guarded the MTC complex. There was no be no post accepted from anyone except through proper channels, for fear of bombs or something. While I was there, some girl tried to toss her boyfriend a package over the fence as he was playing volleyball on recreation time. I can’t remember exactly what happened, but I’ve always imagined white-shirted MTC commandos swooping from helicopters to retrieve the contraband. I know, at least, that the missionary wasn’t able to get the present until it went through the Postal Service.

I’ll admit that as I lay in my bunkbed that night, I cried a little. What had I gotten myself into?

On My Own

The day my family dropped me off at the MTC, I had an image of what the final farewell was going to be like. After checking in at the front desk, my family would watch in stoic silence as I strode alone down a corridor toward a tall door, my shadow lengthening behind me. Perhaps I would look back, then turn with my jaw set and disappear through the door. To add the proper mood, the “Force theme” from Star Wars would play, the music when Luke Skywalker gazes into the twin suns of Tatooine.

That’s not exactly how it turned out. First, where I got the idea that I would be alone baffles me. There were somewhere upwards of 30 billion missionaries clamoring to unload luggage. 30 billion may be an approximate figure, but you get the point. In the midst of the tumult, a kindly lady handed each of us a black nametag. The tag had a temporary orange dot on it, apparently to let others know that we were new, as if the vacant stares and trembling lower lips weren’t already clear indications.

After the check-in, the missionaries and their families were herded into a large room where we all were treated to a cheery film telling us how great we were for choosing to go on missions. My little sister cried and my mom was semi-functioning, damp human wreckage. My dad and brothers remained stolid, probably because my brothers got to fight over my bedroom once they got home. Once the movie was over, missionaries went through one door and their families vanished through the door from whence they had come.

I’ve heard that they’ve changed the procedure since I was there. Families no longer get last-minute bonding while watching the inspirational propaganda video.  The families unceremoniously drop their missionaries off in the parking lot, give brief hugs, and let their young stumble off into the world on unsteady legs.

Opening the Ark

Most missionaries want to be sent somewhere exotic. They want to write home about the bizarre food they had to eat, perhaps including chilled monkey brains or praying mantis larvae served from a human skull. Upon their return, they want to regale their roommates and dates with tales of carving machete paths through steaming jungles, rescuing small children from alligators, or converting an entire tribe of nomadic goat herders.

I was one of those prospective missionaries. Around the time I received my mission call, my close-knit group of high school friends were getting their own calls … to Russia, South Africa, France, Mexico, Uganda, the Dominican Republic, and other far-flung lands. It was with great anticipation, therefore, that I held my mission call.

Some guys make a huge ordeal out of the opening of the mission call. They gather friends, family, and vaguely associated acquaintances to witness the opening of the sacred call, like Nazis congregating on a mysterious island to see the opening of the Ark of the Covenant. (Luckily, I have yet to see any faces melt upon the opening of a mission call.) Others will take the mission call to a secluded place, and will only return to their impatient family after solitary meditation. My own call opening was somewhere in the middle. The call came in the mail, and my mom made me wait until at least my dad and grandma could make it. After I opened it, I called my friends and family to let them know the news.

So there I stood, ripping open the envelope. The mission call goes like this:

Dear Elder [or Sister] _______,

You are hereby called to labor as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the _________________ Mission. You will be called to labor in the _______ language.

[Next follows several paragraphs detailing your duties and giving words of counsel. These are generally the same for every missionary.]

Signed,

Thomas S. Monson [Or whoever the president of the Church is at the time; my call was signed by President Gordon B. Hinckley, who died shortly after I returned.]

Those prospective missionaries who are especially disciplined with read the first couple lines aloud while the onlookers hold their breaths. Others, like me, will skip directly to the actual mission to which you’re getting sent.

“Albuquerque,” I said, with just a hint of disappointment. “English-speaking,” I added after a moment.

They -- and by they I mean generations of well-meaning Sunday School teachers and condescending returned missionaries -- say it’s not where you serve that matters but how you serve. That was only a slight comfort when I remembered that my friends would be hacking their way through jungles or knocking doors in remote villages whilst I was resigned to canvassing subdivisions.

Dad

We call it the "man-cave." It goes by other names, including "Dad's arsenal" and the unpretentious "room in the shop." We built it underneath the loft in the glorified garage called The Shop and filled it with masculine necessities: a fridge of soda pop, a Nerf basketball hoop, cable TV, and couch. That's the front of the room, at least. The back of the room is made less navigable by two gun safes, overflowing shelves of ammunition, racks of fishing poles, and Sportsman's Warehouse clearance items. There's always a soft hint of gunpowder lingering in the air; you might say the room is a little volatile.

On this particular day I found my dad working in there. A car had just exploded on the television, but the sound of the conflagration was muted and some REO Speedwagon chorus thumped from the shelf above Dad's head. Dad turned to me, his grin resembling the one on Dr. Brown's face when he first shows Marty McFly the time-traveling DeLorean.

"Ryan," he said, "have I showed you the new one?"

Dad crossed the room and spun the lock of one of the gun safes. From its confines he withdrew a gun I recognized from countless action movies.

"AK-47," my dad explained, though no identification was needed. "It's not automatic," he added, "but semi-auto's still cool." He went on to touch on the pesky government regulations against civilians owning automatic weapons."You want to go shoot these out in the desert?"

I noticed several other guns on his shelf for cleaning, all of which looked to have been plucked out of action movies of various subgenres.

"Yeah," I said, grinning.