Mission 2023

My Mission Decision - In February of my junior year of high school my high school sweetheart broke up with me. Mainly due to the fact we could see our lives were not going toward the same direction as he wasn’t a member of the church. I chose then to live my life as a disciple of Jesus Christ. I experienced how it felt to lose things because of my personal beliefs. More than the loss though I felt a draw, a pull, a yearning toward God. The next month, in March, I met this newly returned missionary that was full of the energy and spirit of sharing the gospel. I was drawn to him as he shared all of his mission stories with a joy that I wanted in my life. Even though I had to keep trying to contain my boy crazy teenage ways, I knew with all of my heart that I wanted to serve a mission. I was looking forward to turning 21 when girls could serve back then. I knew that was a righteous desire that God would also be happy about. Well, it soon became clear to me that the proper time in my life to serve a mission wasn’t going to be as a young adult. That was 40 years ago. When I decided to get married at a young age, some thought I was throwing my life away and giving up way too many life experiences. I am here now with my first mission call. 107 days away until I am in the mission field with my eternal companion. We made a lot of decisions along the way that got us to this point. I see it as one of those things which prove that, D&C 4:3, “Therefore, if ye have desires to serve God ye are called to the work”. As we started putting our life in a place to make serving a mission possible I have experienced many times the same feeling Nephi experienced in 1 Nephi 4:6, “ And I was led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do.” Learning to be led by the spirit sometimes feels like doing things when you aren’t sure why, but you know it feels right. Sometimes it is doing something you never thought you would do, but are at peace with it. Those decisions come in big and small sizes. I continue to feel we are being led by the spirit. I still don’t have all the answers to what comes next. I have experienced an amazing amount of waves of joy over the past few months. I am taking it all in. Scott and I went to see the area where we will be serving soon last summer. While we were there I watched in amazement. There was so much joy radiating from Scott’s face that I have never seen him so happy. I took that as a sign that we were thinking about doing the right thing. We were able to go get advice from the missionaries there. In hindsight, it was important that we went because we wouldn’t have gotten our application turned in soon enough. We thought our life had to be perfectly ready to leave to begin the paperwork and we thought the paperwork would take maybe a week to get done. Both of those ideas would’ve caused us to miss this opportunity. Instead joy came when the paperwork was done. Joy came when we were interviewed and it was turned in. Joy came when shared with our family and friends our upcoming hopes. Time was endured as we waited to receive our call. Then, lots of joy and celebrating as we received our call and it was exactly what we had hoped for. Now we have many milestones of preparation to truly be ready to serve and all along the way I keep feeling joy. I am breathing it all in because I know at some point all this joy will turn into work. Some of it will be discomfort. My future includes being physically cold, physically hot, physically tired, and so right now I am appreciating all the joy I feel.