Thank you for being bored enough to click the link to this blog post! Thank you and you're welcome.
December is the gift-giving month. I have already spent hours probing Pinterest and Amazon, tracking down the perfect Christmas gifts for my loved ones, or at least my liked ones. As I traverse these commercial waters, I recall another journey I undertook, a journey I consider one of the greatest gifts I have ever received (besides the blanket that Andria made me when she had a broken thumb many years ago. It's the warmest thing I own.) That is the gift of my mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon church).
This time three years ago, I was preparing to serve an 18-month volunteer mission in Nagoya, Japan (i.e. watching Netflix and shopping for knee-length skirts).
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| I went everywhere but the yellow. Why am I even writing this caption? |
From February 2015 to July 2017, I wore frumpy skirts and floral blouses and shared the gospel of Jesus Christ in gringo Japanese, all while riding a bike for the first time in my life. Every week, I sent out a mass email detailing lessons learned, miracles witnessed, and yummy foods devoured. Since I returned from Japan over a year ago, however, I haven't really shared how much my mission impacted my life. Until now.
*Cue dramatic music*
Introducing 25 Gifts, a series of blog posts I will produce daily for the first 25 days of December. Each day, I will select a journal entry from my mission that highlights a gift my mission gave me. These posts will be short so you can get right back to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Home Alone 12, or whatever else ABC is playing. I don't feel like explaining anymore. Let me show you!
February 5, 2015
Missionary Training Center (MTC), Provo, UT
"It seems a lot of people said that the mission gets easier when you learn to love the people-- and that has been a huge theme in the MTC. But how do I love people I don't know? I asked Burns Choro (Elder Burns) about this and his response was 'well, I love all of you.'...I guess the most important thing to know is that I am a [representative] of Christ, so I should love as He loved."
I wrote this entry my second day at the MTC, my home for the next nine weeks where I would learn how to be a missionary human in Japanese (think nice, Swedish prison but with too much chocolate milk). Because I was never very affectionate, I never considered myself very loving. The MTC changed that.
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| The humans in question |
Burns Choro was one of the eleven missionaries that crammed into the same tiny classroom every day to study the gospel and Japanese. This group of strangers in dark suits and bright dresses opened my heart in ways I cannot begin to describe. How do we love people we don't know? I'm still not sure, but I have a couple of guesses.
1. We don't. We cannot love people unless we truly get to know them. And I definitely got that spending nearly every waking hour with these amazing humans (think LOST, but cleaner. And chubbier from chocolate milk. And Mormon).
2. Some French guy once said, "to love another person is to see the face of God." I can't help but think that God and loving other people are inextricably linked. On my mission, I was relying on God more than ever before and doing that opened my heart.
Learning to love more fully was one of the greatest gifts I received on my mission. Taking more time to get to know people allows me to feel a morsel of the love that God has for them. There is no gift box big enough to wrap that feeling.
Make sure to check out tomorrow for Gift #2! If not you, who? (Seriously though.)
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| Beautiful people. Ugly expressions. |
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| Some of us as humans with scary eyes. |
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