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.