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.