For a few years now, Pepper and I have been planning to serve a mission for the church. These so-called “senior” missions are quite different than the ones the younger people serve. We’re so proud of all three of our kids for spending 18 to 24 months of their young lives sacrificing their time in the service of God, and I wanted to do something similar.
Well, we finally got organized and submitted our application in mid-February. Typically it takes a couple of weeks to receive an assignment, and then typically you head out “into the field” a month or so after that. The weeks went by, and we didn’t receive anything. Granted, our church has something like seventy thousand missionaries serving worldwide, which means every week there are around 1,400 either leaving or coming home. I’m sure it’s a complicated process. Still, I was impatient to go… or at least to know our assignment so we could plan.
The weeks continued with no word, but today we finally received our call. We coordinated a video chat with the kids so they could all watch us read it. In the olden days, mission calls were sent by mail, so you’d have this big envelope to open and a physical letter to read. Alex read his in 2015, and Kyra got hers in 2017. By the time Zack went on his mission in 2019, calls were sent electronically. It’s a little less exciting, but the end result is the same.
So I set up a camera to record a video of us opening our call, and it apparently only recorded a couple minutes before stopping– and that was well before we actually read the juicy parts. Here we are getting ready, looking at my computer monitor as we opened the web page:
Sadly we don’t have video of it, but when we got to the assignment we both smiled pretty wide. We’re going to serve in the San Diego Mission for a year, beginning in mid-May. To be more specific, we’ve been asked to work in the city of El Centro, California, which is about 120 miles due east of San Diego. It’s in the middle of the Imperial Valley, and less than ten miles from the Mexican border. We looked up the climate and were dismayed to learn that on average, it’s hotter than Phoenix… when we arrive in late May, temperatures will likely be above 100 degrees already!
But we’re going to be teaching and working with youth and young adults as part of the church’s religious education program, and we’ll also be serving in the community in whatever capacity we’re needed. We’re excited about the opportunity to dedicate a year of our not-so-young lives to a worthy cause.