Homecoming

When the semester had ended, Cole and I went down to Arizona for a week so I could finally report my mission to the stake high council and give my official homecoming address. It may have been five months delayed, but it was worth it.

Here it is.

Six months ago, I got sent home from my mission in Nicaragua due to medical issues. My last Sunday there, the bishop had me stand in front of the congregation and bear my testimony. I cried through the whole thing as I had to face those people I had grown to love so much, and tell them I had to leave. Afterwards, they all swarmed me with hugs and kisses on the cheek, telling me they’d miss me but that God had a plan for me. Coming home was hard, but I told myself it would all be okay because the doctors were going to fix me and I was going to go back. But the Spirit kept telling me to go back to school. By the time I accepted that as my next step, I was already readmitted, had housing, a job, and books. A few days later I skipped back to happy valley again, and yes, I am engaged. When you’ve been home for six months and you are living in Provo, what can you expect. But through all the stresses of wedding planning, I’m realizing that this is the plan God had.

So there’s some good news and some bad news. Everyone always wants the bad news first, so I’ll just get that over with. I was only out on the mission for six months. I got sent home early because of problems with my back and tendinitis in my knee. They found the problem in my knee, gave me a new brace, sent me to physical therapy – quick fix. My back, however, was a much bigger problem. After meeting with tons of doctors, two rounds of x-rays, chiropractic care, blood tests, physical therapy, and an MRI, I was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease. I received an epidural steroid injection in my spine back in January, which didn’t work, and I was sent to a pain management specialist who wanted to do two more injections in the joints of my spine. My mom told me to hold off on more invasive treatment, and I got to meet with a neurosurgeon when I was home in Arizona just a couple of weeks ago. All he said was that I need to focus on the muscles in my back rather than the discs and the joints. So I’m still fighting that battle.

Working in Nicaragua was painful. I told myself it was a sacrifice I needed to make to prove that I was a worthy, hard-working missionary. I had committed to 18 months, and I was going to stick it out – no matter what. Everyone said the mission was hard, and I went in knowing I would be pushed past my limits. When it was becoming a reality that I was going to get sent home, my companion told me that a mission was like a refiner’s fire, tumbling and burning at rapid speeds until you were molded in to what you needed to be. She said that my refiner’s fire tumbled a lot faster and at a much higher heat than that of most other missionaries’. I refused to accept it.

Suddenly I found myself in my final interview with my mission president. All I could say was, “I don’t want to go home.” My mission president is a very calm, patient, Costa Rican man. He looked me in the eyes and said, “I know you don’t want to. But do you need to?” Then the tears, the long plane rides, the tears, the culture shock coming back to the states, the tears, taking off my plaque, and of course, more tears. I couldn’t even look at my nametag for a couple of weeks after that. Coming home was hands down the hardest thing of my life. After being in and out of the hospital my last few days in Managua, I was confined to the house with nothing but a companion from Guatemala and a lot of church magazines. I was reading an article about a missionary who got sent home early and couldn’t understand why. Revelation he had noted became revelation to me. He said, “The Lord cares just as much about His instrument as He does about the task at hand.”

When we decide to serve a mission, we give our heart, might, mind, and strength. We get that call to serve and it completely consumes us. We are so full of excitement that it doesn’t even phase us when people say the mission is hard. Nothing can prepare you for those moments when you want to sit down in the middle of that dusty dirt road and cry; the moments when you would give anything just to give your mom a hug; the moments when you can’t even look at your investigator because you get so frustrated that they don’t understand the principles you’ve understood since primary. That being said, even thinking about leaving them hurts you. Going home is not the easy way out. Lately, the church news has been flooded with stories about missionaries being sent home due to mental health issues. My heart reaches out to them as I know how hard it is to come home, but I almost wish I could hear more stories about missionaries getting sent home due to physical injury. We suffer some of the same pains that they do, struggling with feelings of failure and inadequacy, always wondering if we did enough. I just hope that these numbers slow down and that more missionaries can complete their anticipated time in the field.

So that’s the bad news. Now for the good news! I was sent to the best mission in the world – and you can fight me on that. Nicaragua is my absolute favorite place and holds some of my favorite people. I just love everything about it! Yes, it was hot. I don’t think I ever stopped sweating. There were diseased mosquitos that made us sick. There were stray dogs everywhere. We lived in houses infested with rats and cockroaches and our shower was just a pipe coming out of a concrete wall with freezing cold water. We had crazy guys on the street reaching out to touch us and asking us to be their wives. We drank dirty water, we had nasty dusty feet because of all the walking we did, we got caught in crazy monsoon-type of rainstorms… I loved every second of it. I loved how the Nicas couldn’t sing to save their life. I loved their tiny bananas. I loved that they all called each other brother and sister. I loved that they had “red-flavored” soda. Not cherry, not strawberry, not raspberry – red. (It was an acquired taste.) I loved that they never smiled in pictures. I loved that you didn’t knock on people’s doors. You stood in front of their house, sometimes putting your face between the bars of their front porch, just yelling “Buenas!!!” until someone came and talked to you. I loved that a machete could be used for anything. I loved that they called America “Gringolandia.” I loved that they drank everything out of plastic bags. I loved how much they loved Christ.

I helped 10 people enter the waters of baptism and a family of three get their recommends to be sealed in the temple. Each story is unique and I could talk about them for days. But since my time is limited, I’ll have to pick favorites. First, is Nelson. He was 40 years old, lived with his dad, two brothers, and four nephews. There were so many boys in that house, it was insane. He was super open at first, and would always let us in. He could hardly read but was reading the Book of Mormon, he came to church with us, he went to baptismal services, ward activities, three sessions of General Conference, and met with our ward mission leader to ask him for help with a personal sin he was struggling with. He was stronger than some of the members in that ward. We invited him to baptism so many times, but he refused because when his mother was on her death bed, she made him promise that he would stay Catholic forever. We would try to tell him that she is the reason we were there. She sent us to him. She is on the other side and she knows the truth. She sent us so he would understand and do the work on the earth to save their family. We would extend an invitation to baptism, he wouldn’t accept it, and we would drop him as an investigator. It happened like four times. But then he kept showing up at church on Sunday! He just came by himself! So we would talk to him and asked if he had changed his mind. He would say no, and just said he liked how he felt in the church because he could feel the spirit. I said, “You can feel like that all the time if you got baptized and received the gift of the Holy Ghost as your constant companion.” He said, “No Hermana, I like the darkness.” NELSON. WHY. My companion and I decided we could no longer sit down and teach him since, in mission terms, he was not “progressing”. But there was something so strongly pulling us towards him, so we couldn’t help but stop and say hi when we were passing through his street. He knew the principles, he knew how the church worked; maybe it just wasn’t his time.

Easter Sunday, I heard from my companion, who was still serving in that area. She updated me on the lives of people I haven’t been able to keep in touch with, saying this person is pregnant, this person is getting married, this person is the new ward mission leader, things like that. Then she said, “Nelson died.”

My heart stopped. There is no way. I cannot believe we didn’t baptize him. How is it that we could never find the right thing to say to get him to make the decision to get baptized? What more should we have done? It’s too late. He’s gone. Our efforts were wasted.

I heard back from my comp, and she said, “In a year, we can get permission from his father and we can do the work for him. We will save him.” Brothers and sisters, this is an eternal work. Not only did I change people’s lives, and they changed mine, but the eternities were involved here. It is thanks to the restored gospel and power of the priesthood that we can do work for people like Nelson. Without it, we would be so lost.

When I was up at school, I was sitting in my ward’s fast and testimony meeting when a girl stood up and started telling her conversion story. She’s from Virginia and got baptized two years ago. She said it breaks her heart hearing people question whether or not they did enough on their mission. She said she gets aggravated when they say they feel like they wasted those 2 years or 18 months. She was the only baptism her missionaries had. She said, “If those elders ever think their mission was wasted, I will kill them. They saved my life. They changed my eternity.” She stared us down in the congregation and said, “Don’t you ever think you wasted your time. You made a bigger difference than you think.” Her words have stuck with me. Every time Satan makes me doubt and think I failed because my time was cut so short, I remember what she said. Those 10 people that entered the covenant of baptism… They needed me. I did make a difference.

In my mission, we focused on families. We had to contact a certain number of families every day, count how many families we brought to church, and we were supposed to focus on completing part-member families. My companion and I had been praying to find one to teach for so long. After struggling for a few weeks, we decided to make a deal with God. We told Him we would act on every prompting and follow every rule if He would give us a miracle family. Here’s what happened:

We were out tracting late at night after walking probably 10 miles that day and decided to take a short break before our legs fell off. We had been sitting down on the side of the road for maybe a minute when my comp jumped up and said we forgot to go visit our recent convert Emeline. Emeline lived way on the other side of our area. I hesitated, thinking Emeline probably forgot we were coming anyways and that it would be a waste of time, but then I remembered that deal we made. So we booked it over to Emeline’s house. Turns out, she wasn’t even home. So we were slowly walking back home, telling ourselves we had to contact two more families to reach our goal for the day. We saw a woman with her two boys walking towards us on the road, and we decided to contact them. We introduced ourselves like we always did, saying, “Hola, somos misioneras de la Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Ultimos Dias”, “have you ever heard of us? Sometimes we’re called Mormones. We have that church on the corner up the street.” Then something crazy happened. The mom said, “Yes! We pass by there every day on our walk to the school! It’s so beautiful. We’ve been waiting for someone to invite us in!” WELL YOU ARE MOST CERTAINLY INVITED. Then she said, “Follow me, I’ll show you where we live so you can come visit us tomorrow!”

At this point in the mission, my mission president was counseling us to focus on finding the escogidos, or the “chosen ones.” He said that the Nicas are so nice and open and they love talking about Jesus so almost anyone will let us in and sometimes even commit to baptism without really having a testimony of the gospel. He said the way to find the escogidos was to invite them to baptism at the end of the very first lesson. Terrifying.

We went back to see this family the next day, we taught the first lesson, invited them to baptism, and they accepted! My companion and I were in shock. We found our miracle family! They went to church with us twice, and they were baptized and confirmed the day before I came home. I was weeping as I saw the mom, Jasmina, get baptized first. Her boys were standing next to me in front of the font, just radiating with joy as they watched their mom. Then Jose Manuel went. His little brother, Onasis, who just happened to be eight, was jumping up and down he was so excited. Then it was his turn. That may have been the most powerful moment of my mission, watching a family take that step together.

 

Miracles do happen. And the work we put in does not go unnoticed. The baptisms of this precious family began with just a prayer of two humble missionaries asking for help.

My mission scripture was D&C 82:3: For of him unto whom much is given, much is required. I have been beyond blessed to have been born in this time, when we have the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and the power to save our fellow men. Once you let that sink in, you can’t help but want to share it. I have been given so much, and because of that, I had to give back. I worked hard. The time that I had committed to my mission I consecrated to the Lord. It was His time, and I didn’t want to get in the way.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Nicaragua and the people I fell in love with. Those six months went by so fast, but they changed me.

Elder Holland, preceding his recent face-to-face event, answered a question from a guy who got sent home early from his mission due to mental health issues. His response was an answer to my prayers. He said:

I want you to take the dignity and the strength and the faith that came from your [six] months and cherish that forever. I don’t want you to apologize for coming home. When someone asks you if you have served a mission, you say yes. You do not need to follow that up with, ‘But it was only [six] months.’ Just forget that part, and say yes you served a mission, and be proud of the time that you spent.

I am proud of the work I did in Nicaragua. I worked, I loved, and I learned a new language! I miss it, but I know I’m where I’m supposed to be.

 

 

 

 

The Church is true. Live it.