Twenty Years

In preparing for day’s Primary lesson on missionary work, I did a quick search to see if I could find anything out Seymour Brunson’s mission.

The short answer is, not a lot of detail on an iPhone during sacrament meeting. I mean, access to the D&C tells me he was called on a mission in 1832. And, thanks to the Joseph Smith Papers Project, I know that his mission was in Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia. And, per Ferron Olson’s Seymour Brunson: Defender of the Faith, he went through those states, baptizing hundreds (as missionaries did in the 1830s) and organizing branches along the way.

Me, more than 20 years ago. The back of the picture tells me a truck had just passed and splashed a line of mud on my pants, shirt, and face.

The lesson was actually fortuitously-time for me. Just the other day I realized, I returned home from my mission 20 years ago this week.[fn1] I was in the São Paulo East mission from August of 1995 until August 1997.

Twenty years is a nice round number, and it means that my life after my mission has been longer than my life before my mission. I’m actually (believe it or not) not entirely sure what I want to say here, but I feel like 20 years is something worth commemorating, and my mission was worth commemorating.

There are legitimate criticisms of the way our missionary program works in our 21st-century world. (John F. has offered a compelling recommendation for how we could make it better.) I agree with many of the critiques and recommendations.

And yet, my mission was an important and a defining part of my life. It wasn’t a life plan for me—I decided at 12 that I wasn’t going on a mission, and didn’t change my mind until I was 18. Those two years were a spiritual cementing for me, and a chance to engage with a world I’m not a part of. Before my mission, I was a music major at BYU, and those two years gave me some distance and time to rethink my future. Perhaps most importantly, when I met my now-wife, our initial common ground for conversation was our missions.

I’m a different person today than I was in 1995 when I left on my mission, and than I was in 1997 when I got home. I don’t want to be the person I was 20 years ago. But without my mission experience, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. And that’s something worth commemorating.

[fn1] I don’t remember exactly when I got home—it was 20 years ago, after all—but I’m pretty sure it was the first week of August. I know I had not more than three weeks at home before I left again for BYU. The exact date may well be in my mission journal, but my mission journal was destroyed in a house fire a number of years ago.