The thing that kept me from snapping sooner was shame. I didn’t want to be “that” missionary–a delicate case requiring special handling, the homesick momma’s boy who couldn’t handle it. So I quietly endured the first two months of my mission to Santiago, Chile, without complaint, slogging through the muddy streets of the poorest neighborhoods, withstanding the jeers of children, and struggling to comprehend a new language. But the shame didn’t go away; it was a private shame between me and the Lord whom I was supposed to be serving.
In that two months a great chasm grew between what I was supposed to be feeling and what I was actually feeling.
I was supposed to feel grateful to have been called to Chile because, we were told, Chile was a special place in the Lord’s vineyard, and we were special missionaries. This was the preparation ground for the Church’s future leaders. The field here was ripe and ready to harvest, and the numbers proved it. Santiago North, my mission, was the lowest baptizing mission with a mere 500-600 baptisms per month. The other Santiago missions baptized between 1000-1500 per month, and they taunted us by faxing their reports to our office.
I was supposed to love the people. That was the mantra, learn to love the people. But I didn’t love them. I didn’t know why, only that this was a spiritual defect. My companion loved the people. He joked and laughed and gave them high fives on the street. He knew how to work a crowd, and I would watch him in awe, feeling exhausted that this was the thing I should aspire too.
He would almost apologize for me to his admirers. ”He’s new,” he would explain. “Just arrived from Los Estados.” But in private, he would do his best to get me on board. “Dude, you gotta get PUMPED!” he would say, generating enthusiasm or “animo” from thin air. I soon realized he was merely repeating the rhetoric of our monthly zone meetings.
At my first zone meeting, the chapel was cold with tile floors and concrete walls. Steam rose from the twenty or so missionaries that gathered in a damp clump in the front pews. They greeted one another with cool handshakes and hugs. It was like they were part of a secret club I wasn’t sure I wanted to join but still envied. The zone leader, a grizzled looking veteran missionary sporting a hat and mittens made of alpaca wool, drew a grid on a chalkboard with the name of each companionship on the left. At the top of the grid were the numbers we were to report–contacts, discussions, and, most importantly, baptisms. He labeled the grid “Weekly Comparativo.” This was the routine throughout the mission, putting up the numbers for the zone to see.
He went down the row, alternatively celebrating big numbers and questioning, with a tone of concern, the lower numbers. It became clear that “loving the people” meant baptizing them, as many and as quickly as possible. And why shouldn’t it? “Todos nececistan un bautismo.” Everyone needs a baptism to get into heaven. Besides, the South and West missions were getting cocky; we needed to step up our game and reach the mission goal of 800 baptisms.
One companionship had a good month. Fifteen baptisms. “Look at this, Elderes,” he said, slowly circling the number. “Let’s hear some animo!” The missionaries shouted and cheered as the meeting took on the feeling of a football pep rally. I tried to fit in. I shouted and smiled and gave high fives and got pumped, for worse than the shame of pretending was not pretending and being discovered as a dud missionary.
After the meeting I found a rare moment when I could be alone and wonder why I was not on the Lord’s side, why I couldn’t get pumped about this great kingdom building work, and why all I could think about was the mountains of Montana I left to come down to the bottom of the planet where the seasons were backward and even the angle of light was wrong.
“It hugs the northern horizon down here, the winter sun,” I said to my companion once.
“Huh…never noticed,” he said.
I could not admit it, not even to myself, but I wanted out. I knew it was a sin to want to leave, but I wanted it more with each day. It never occurred to me that something was wrong with the mission. The mission was from God. If I didn’t like it, there must have been something wrong with me. I was a soldier in God’s army fantasizing about desertion–a secret I couldn’t share with anyone. Not my fellow missionaries, not the mission president, and especially not my proud family back home, for whom “having a missionary out” was the one bright spot in their otherwise unstable life. So I kept my dislike of the mission a secret, a guilty secret.
I did not know at the time that I was part of a phenomenon in Chile that Salt Lake would later come to see as a problem that needed special clean up. The baptizing heydays of the 1990s in Chile produced such a vast wasteland of rushed or questionably baptized people that the Church took the unprecedented step sending Elder Holland in 2002 to personally oversee the effort to clean the records of “chueco” (crooked) baptisms and refocus missionary efforts on reactivation and retention. In the decade of the 90s, membership in Chile grew by 211,000. By comparison, during the following decade membership grew by a more manageable 54,000.
The pressures this environment produced were immense. A hard working missionary in Germany, for example, would produce the same results as a lazy missionary in Germany–that is, practically nothing at all. But in Chile, if you did not baptize every month, it was conspicuous. Something was wrong. And the wrongness and the shame of it were on display for all to see.
If you wanted to get promoted, you had to produce baptisms consistently. A couple months of double digit baptisms could get you to Zone Leader as well as special attention from the mission president. A couple of dry months, and you were treated with special care, with the president’s assistants doing splits to train you in the high powered sales tactics that got results.
I was often witness to sincere spiritual seeking and teaching and was deeply touched by it. But too many times the thing that secured the baptism was the charisma and relative handsomeness of the missionary (and yes, this was a man’s mission. The few sisters there were not part of the numbers race, for reasons that would require another essay). When young Chileans, even children, found themselves lavished with the attention of sparkling, white shirted gringos, it was hard to resist. Jesus got baptized. Didn’t they want to follow Jesus? They would have their chance at the chapel the coming Saturday. That they had, technically speaking, become Mormons in that process was not always obvious to them or their parents.
The thing that kept me going was a sense that I had to pay my debt to my culture. I wanted a good Mormon wife, and a family, and roast beef on Sundays. Those blessings didn’t come free, so I had to earn my place.
But I still wanted out.
The tipping point came when I was transferred to the country, a move I hoped would be a rest from the crowded, dog infested streets of Santiago. For the first few weeks it was. But then the “Mamita” who hosted us in her home decided our rent was not sufficient and gave us notice to find a new place. I was with a native Chilean companion at the time who had zero sympathy for culture shock or homesickness. He was also relatively new to the mission, and this was the first time he lead a companionship and could make a name for himself. He fantasized about Pentecostal-like conversion of the small town of Curacavi.
My companion arranged for our new accommodations without talking to me. We would be moving to live in a squatter’s settlement on the outskirts of town with chickens, goats, and open sewers. We would live at the residence of a man the missionaries nicknamed Gargamel, after the Smurf nemesis. This was the same man whose infamous fresh-squeezed juices (from an orchard irrigated with contaminated water) was believed to be the source of a previous elder’s Typhoid fever.
I found out about the housing change when the zone leaders arrived from Santiago to help with the move. Something happened in that moment. Something took over. I needed to go away. It was as if I was no longer making decisions. I watched myself get on my bike and ride past the zone leaders and my puzzled companion.
“Where are you going?” asked the zone leader.
“Away,” I said, for that was all I knew.
I had no plan, only a vague sense that I needed to grab hold of something solid, reach out to something familiar. I rode my bike away—out of the gate, onto the street, then toward town on the highway. My flight was not calculated like a prison escape, but was more like that of a criminal caught in the act. I knew they would be in pursuit, so I pedaled hard.
I had a vague notion of needing to reach a phone, and I knew there was one at the town’s only bank. I ditched my bike and ran inside. At the phone, I contemplated my options. I couldn’t call my parents and tell them I had become a deserter in the army of Helaman. Nor could I confide in my brothers, both decorated mission veterans who earned accolade of “AP.” I couldn’t call my nonmember friends who thought I was on some kind of study abroad program picking up girls.
I decided to try my inactive sister. This was a risk. She was already a little suspicious of my mission, and I was afraid she would catch the next flight to Chile and demand my release. The phone rang. No answer.
For a brief moment I imagined running into the hills and building a hut in the Andes Mountains until I could gather myself. But everything was falling apart. I looked outside and saw the zone leader and companion approaching the bank like police.
I had nowhere to run. The game was up. It was time to turn myself in. When I walked down the steps and saw the missionaries eyeing me nervously, my arms went numb. I grew dizzy and my breathing became irregular—a sort of hyperventilation that frightened both myself and my approaching comrades.
To my horror, I was coming undone on Main Street in the full light of day. In an instant I changed from the quiet greenie who kept to himself, to something I had never wanted to be: a special problem to keep at arm’s length. I could already hear the mission gossip: Dude, when we found him he totally started freaking out.
When, after a few moments, my soul reentered my body, the zone leader took me to a park bench and bought us each a cold Coke. I told him everything, that I didn’t like the work, that I didn’t know if I belonged there. And there was something else, something I hadn’t told anyone.
“My dad is sick,” I said. “He has some nervous system disease that is only going to get worse. I don’t even know if he’ll be there when I get home.”
He said he would talk to the president and see what could be done. Now the president would know about me. Everyone would know. I felt shame, of course, but there was also something liberating in it. The breakdown and fleeing were the most honest things I had done on my mission.
We moved to Gargamel’s house right away. The new housing would not have been approved by the mission office, but I knew the office didn’t know the details. We were at the outer reaches of the empire; my companion was Col. Kurtz and was not entirely under the rule of mission law.
The new housing provided an opportunity to plan for a seemingly honorable escape, for this was the house where a missionary had contracted typhoid fever during just a brief visit. Still depressed, one day I asked Gargamel for a sample of his legendary orange juice, a request he happily and quickly obliged. For one who was teased as a “germ freak” and who would not share a can of soda with friends or family, the will power required to drink the diseased potion was significant. But I believed the unsanitary blender, unwashed hands, and foul-smelling orchard would do the dirty work of getting me home.
When he produced the juice, I raised my glass and toasted in English so as not to offend my host. “To home,” I said, then downed the concoction as if it were a shot of hard liquor. But nothing happened. Days passed without the drink producing so much as an upset stomach.
The mission president offered to send me home. But I stayed. One more day. One more week. Then a month. I was soon transferred to a better situation, and slowly the fog lifted. In time I gained the confidence to resist chueco missionaries, even if only in passive aggressive ways. And there were good times, times when it felt right and good. And there were turning points. I remember a moment in prayer when I said to God for the first time “Let thy will, not mine, be done” and meant it. Then there was the moment I chose to stay no matter what, an act of defiance more than devotion. Somehow the power to run, the power to leave, made the decision to stay mean something.
My kids recently pointed out that I rarely talk about my mission. Apart from sharing a few funny anecdotes, it’s true. I grew in those two years in ways I could not have done otherwise. I do not regret my mission, and even feel gratitude for it. But I still don’t understand it. In some ways, I’m still in that bank, phone in trembling hands, wondering who to call and wondering what to say when they answer.
This experience raises some interesting questions from the perspective of Mormon letters. How do we handle “non-standard” and less-than-positive experiences, particularly with respect to such iconic Mormon experiences as the mission–both as individuals and as writers?
I recall a gathering at Eugene England’s house when a prominent Mormon author talked about a story he had written based on his mission experience. It was, he said, one of the better and more powerful pieces of writing he had ever done. His wife read it and said, “You can’t publish that and stay in the Church.” So he never published it. (English Department chair Burt Wilson tried to argue that he should publish it as a cautionary tale.)
Interesting. I wonder if things have lightened up since England’s day. Whenever I write on Church related themes I have that concern in the back of my mind, especially since I teach at a Church school. If we can’t tell the truth about our experiences then we’re in trouble. It’s a poor literature indeed whose only options are the disgruntled expose on the one hand and faith promoting inspiration on the other. How many good essays by active LDS have likewise been buried for fear of getting in trouble?
That’s something like the argument that Burt Wilson made. The author, on the other hand, said that on rereading the story after he’d gotten away from the heat of writing, he realized that the story had the potential to do a lot of harm to the Church’s missionary effort. People who had read the story would be a lot more likely to turn away missionaries at the door. On reflection, he seemed at least as concerned about the potential effects of the story itself as about any official reaction.
Which does raise an important question. Is truthfulness, or artistic truth, the sole criterion on which a story should be judged, or should an author (if not the readers) also judge based on likely real-world impact of that story?
An important factor in judging potential impact is that of audience. Sheldon may have been worried about potential readers and their reactions, but could probably make some assumptions about readers of his blog (and the AML blog) suggesting that anyone likely to find their way to this story would already know and not be shaken by the sad truth that–guess what!–Mormons are humans too. The author I speak of, on the other hand, is one whose works are sufficiently well-known to a non-Mormon audience to guarantee that they *would* be seen by some with a far less nuanced view of the subject matter.
Jonathan, that was exactly my concern. The first draft of this essay had some more fire, more to say about the “sales” tactics I believed were messed up. But I deleted them. I know things have changed and that not all missions worked that way. I didn’t want non-LDS readers dismissing the sincerity missionaries or the missionary program.
Getting in trouble. Interesting question.
Just after my mission I was in my father’s office on campus one day and saw an intriguing book with a white cover and pen and ink drawing of a man lying down on his stomach reading. Nothing Very Important and Other Stories, by Bela Petsco. He told me Bela was one of his graduate students, and the book was his thesis.
Later for an interdisciplinary class team taught by my father, Clayne Robison (music), Hagen Haltern (art), Jon Green (humanities), Gary Moss (religion) and Tom Rogers (theater), I wrote a short essay about the book and how it shows missionaries growing through the hard things that happen on their missions.
One of my classmates objected, saying we shouldn’t talk about hard times on missions because it might discourage people from going on a mission.
I was surprised because Bela presents missionaries as heros, structuring Mihaly Agyar’s mission as the archetypal hero journey.
Didn’t matter. My classmate wouldn’t hear it.
About a year later I took a creative writing class from Bela, and maybe a year after that Bela and some of his students adapted the novel and performed it in various places.
After one of our performances a young man told me we needed to be careful about stories like that because Satan could use them to discourage people from going on missions. “How would you feel if someone saw that play and decided not to go on a mission?”
It’s hard to take such a question seriously. It’s coercive because it doesn’t allow for discussion, it’s based in fear, and it denies the agency of the readers.
I wanted to demonstrate that by saying, “How would you feel if someone left the Church because of the political activities of a senior apostle?” The answer I would have wanted that rhetorical question to coerce would be that anyone who would leave the church that way would be exercising his free agency and couldn’t blame his actions on an apostle’s opinions.
I was actually wise enough not to ask him that question (one of the few times I’ve been wise enough not to say something stupid). I wish I had been wise enough to gently ask if there was anything he could have read before his mission that would have dissuaded him?
I suspect most missionaries are too excited about their missions to pay attention to contrary voices. I suspect most missionaries would serve even if someone told them, “Your faith will be tried and tested on your mission, especially by your leaders,” as my stake president told me in his setting-apart blessing.
Our young audience member wasn’t the only person concerned by the play. One of the university officials took a dislike to it, and eventually Bela was told his services as a part-time instructor were not welcome.
I don’t know if that was tied to the novel or play or something else. I’ve never asked Bela for the details. I probably should. He called me a couple of weeks ago, just home from the hospital. He had been sitting in his doctor’s office and his aide looked over at him and “I think you’ve just had a stroke. Your speech is a little slurred and your face is a little slack.” Further examination showed evidence of an earlier stroke he hadn’t been aware of either.
Sorry; that should be “Bert Wilson.”
“Which does raise an important question. Is truthfulness, or artistic truth, the sole criterion on which a story should be judged, or should an author (if not the readers) also judge based on likely real-world impact of that story?”
Excellent question, Joanathan, and it deserves an excellent answer, but I’ll offer a cavalier comment instead: The artist has no responsibility at all for how an audience reacts to a work.
Now as soon as I say that I immediately think of objections, like Wayne Booth’s claims about The Rhetoric of Fiction, or Lionel Trilling’s concerns, in Beyond Culture, about the tremendous destructive power of modern literature.
Still, I was searching my posts yesterday to see how often I’ve mentioned Willis Barnstone and came across a comment you left a few years ago quoting Gandalf’s words to Bilbo on the various meanings of the phrase, “Good Morning,” and you said you thought the philologist in Tolkien was having some fun.
So if I look at my cavalier comment philologically, I have no response-ability for how others perceive and receive my writings. I do not have the ability to respond for someone else.
I can imagine how someone might respond, but no matter how carefully I craft my sentences, or try to take other peoples’ sensibilities into account I can’t guarantee someone won’t do something as horrifying as the student Reynolds Price tells about who called him around 3 AM and said, “Did you really mean what you said in your last novel?” “Yes,” and the student went and killed himself.
Price wrote a poem, “Questions for a Student” (in Vital Provisions), where he wants to ask his student, ‘What did you think I meant?’
Trilling images the destructive power of modern literature as a howitzer, which you don’t point at your students “without assessing how much damage you could do.”
I’ve never found that image satisfying. I much prefer N. Scott Momaday’s comment from a BYU forum address maybe 20 years ago that as often as these stories were told they were always but one telling away from extinction.
(I couldn’t find a published source for a direct quote for one of my AML papers, then a year or two back I found a recording of House Made of Dawn, and it appears in a sermon one character gives.)
Twelve or fifteen years ago I started writing an essay called “Lucid Dreaming,” a corrective to Trilling, an attempt to apply the idea of agency to reading, to invite readers not to think of art as something that comes against us and overpowers us, a howitzer we take cover from or flee before, but as a lucid dream, where we participate and guide the dream.
It got off track and I set it aside, but went back to it a few years ago and found where it got off track, and maybe one day soon I’ll actually finish it.
I suspect most of my litcrit for the last 25 years has wrestled with and tried to promulgate the idea that interpretation is always a choice, we always have a choice regarding a work of art, and we should pay attention to our intents as we confront intense works in our tents.
This is a great essay, it must have been hard to write, thank you for doing it. How terrible to have Zone leaders writing your stats out for everyone to see, I’m glad I never saw that in my mission in Japan. We had more talk about making goals an achieving number success then I would have liked, but I never experienced that kind of public comparison/shaming.
Thanks, Andrew. It wasn’t hard to write so much as share publicly.
Sheldon, your last paragraph reminds me of Paul Fussell’s book Wartime, which I first encountered late one afternoon in the Kirkland, WA library, with its picture windows looking out over the sun reflecting off Lake Washington. I was thumbing through a year’s worth of back issues of The Atlantic to see if any letter writers had replied to an article where the novelist-author had said anyone who didn’t agree with her about abortion simply didn’t know how to think.
No one had, but I came across Fussell’s article in the Aug 1989 issue, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1989/08/the-real-war-1939-1945/306374/, “The Real War 1939-1945” and was struck by its first sentence, “What was it about the Second World War that moved the troops to constant verbal subversion and contempt?”
The article was a chapter from Wartime (The Atlantic published several other chapters as well) Later my wife got me a copy of the book. I think reading Fussell’s work was the first time I heard that veterans from WWII didn’t like to talk about their experiences, and I’ve heard similar things about veterans from Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Partly because the people back home don’t have a frame of reference for understanding what it’s like to be hit by someone’s flying body part after a shell or mine explodes. (Fragmented sentences mirroring fragmented bodies.)
I’m not suggesting that missionary work is warfare, but there is spiritual violence done by chueco baptizing, and violence and trauma can be hard to talk about.
The goo gull recently celebrated Fred Korematsu’s 98th birthday (though he died several years ago) with a drawing of him on their search page. I deeply admire his heroism in challenging his concentration camp detention in the 1940s before the Supreme Court, but his daughter only learned about the challenge when a junior high classmate did a presentation. When she went home that night she learned that her older sister had found out the same way.
Harlow, thanks for the insightful comments. You’ve given me much to think about as well as a good book reference. I also wouldn’t compare my experience to warfare, yet there are some interesting analogies. I’ve had people write me since sharing this essay that they felt there mission was something they had to recover from, and even have nightmares that they’ve been called back.
Thanks, Sheldon. That happened to Bela Petsco, too. After he published Nothing Very Important and Other Stories he would get letters saying, “I thought I was the only one.” Have you considered sending your essay to somewhere like Dialogue or Sunstone?
If you’ll forgive another long-winded comment, Sheldon, I heartily agree with this sentence, “I didn’t want non-LDS readers dismissing the sincerity of missionaries or the missionary program.” It’s a challenge to capture the hijinks and the spirituality, the sincerity and the use of sales tactics. And I think we need to meet that challenge.
In my mission there was pressure to be Iron Eddie, the hard working, baptizing, strictly obedient missionary. (I heard that some missionaries even started The Order of the Iron Eddies, which became something of a secret combination and the mission president had to step in and break it up.)
You may be aware that missionaries in your mission were not the first to perform chueco baptisms. Growing up I occasionally heard the phrase “baseball baptisms” referring to missionaries in England in the 1960s who had baptized a bunch of boys, hundreds at least, telling them it was an initiation ritual to join a baseball team.
Around 1994 I read D. Michael Quinn’s account of being sent, as a missionary, to clean up the mess from the baseball baptisms in one area, “I-Thou vs. I-It Conversions: The Mormon ‘Baseball Baptism’ Era” (Sunstone, Dec 1933, 30-44, http://www.sunstonemagazine.com/pdf/093-30-44.pdf)
Just for curiosity I asked the Duckduck to go find the phrase “baseball baptisms” and came across an essay called “The Consequences of Overly Strong Incentives: Wells Fargo, Baseball Baptisms, and Academic Advancement,” on the blog Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal, blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/151868138482/the-consequences-of-overly-strong-incentives (which contains a link to Quinn’s article).
He talks about cheating inspired by overly strong incentives in Tokyo when he was there, and when he mentions his grandfather touring the mission I realized I was reading something by my next-door neighbor from high school. (How’d I miss the by-line? There is none, but the Bio tab confirms that the blogger is Miles Kimball.)
I attended the Sunstone Symposium in 1992 or so when Michael Quinn presented the paper that became the Sunstone article about Baseball Baptisms. I went up to talk to him afterwards, and Miles Kimball was also there, and the three of us talked about the similarities between the Baseball Bat period in England in the 60s and the “Streeting Jidai” period in Japan around 1980. My mission was almost 10 years after this period in Japan, but its impact (lots of inactives on the roles who had entered and left the Church very quickly) was still felt.
My dad went to Holland in the 60s. Baseball baptisms were huge. He hated it.
Moriah, I meant to ask if your father’s mission president was aware of the baseball baptisms? It seems to me one cause of baseball baptisms is applying business theory about goals and targets measurable in numbers to missionary work, but I don’t know whether the application is coming from the mission president or from over-zealous missionaries.
Our great-niece told us she was preparing a Family Home Evening lesson Monday night. She taught us some things she had learned on her mission about setting goals. She had us write down some desires, then said, “Ask yourself if these desires are realistic. If they are, think about the steps you would take to achieve them.”
I’ve long resisted goals because I associate them with the powerplays and competition of a certain kind of rough, even cutthroat, capitalism, so I appreciated her gentler approach. She also acknowledged indirectly that there are really important things we can’t set as goals. One that comes to mind is the blessing in D&C 88:68, which, the verse warns us three times, can’t be time-bound.
Harlow, you know, that’s an interesting question. I thought about it and I don’t ever remember him talking about his mission president at all. He always talked about the branch president, who was always a senior missionary / zone leader type. Anyway, not much older than he was.
Lots of stories about his mission, not many of them good except for the food, the lady who ran the kosthaus, ice skating on the canals to get around during the winter, and his trip home on the Queen Mary. For all that, he occasionally seemed to be homesick, for lack of a better word.
As for Mormons’ penchant for cutthroat business and/or micromanagement, I have some theories about this.
First, we worship at the altar of respectability and propriety. And that, I think, comes from 1950s upper middle-class country club culture. Not upper class, but upper-middle, who are still insecure because they’re not upper class.
Second, our culture teaches men to suffer in stoic gentility, sacrifice family time for others, and generally try to quantify Christlike service. So, if you have a man who’s naturally aggressive but he’s suppressing this, he ends up in high-stakes litigation or cutthroat business. Socially acceptable rampant aggression. Also, church ball.
Third, we are so works-oriented that we want some validation that all this is worth it. Validation. Grades. Baptism and home/visiting teaching numbers. Check-off lists. We’d do better if we got a sash and merit badges on our journey through life in the church.
That all makes me sound bitter, but I’m not. It is what it is and by and large, the fruit of this tree is sweet. I had a friend once who told me if his temple recommend depended on whether he thought Brigham Young was a prophet of God, he wouldn’t have one. But so what? He got the Saints where they needed to be, which was out of the country. He built a city and raised an army.
As for baseball baptisms, my feeling is, God is not bound by what men do. Do I think people who are baptized who got there under deceptive tactics will be held responsible for their sins? No. Do I think some good can come of just about anything, even sin/evil? Sure.
What I AM bitter about is that in all this sweet but labor-intensive fruit, the gospel’s been lost. My dad’s mission was long before the Rise of the Correlation Department, but I think Correlation’s the second-worst thing the church has done to itself. A bunch of rogue missions in the 60s wouldn’t bury the gospel, but Correlation did it. The worst thing? Letting The Miracle of Forgiveness become our golden calf.
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I have nothing to say for a) the beautiful essay and b) the insightful commentary that followed. This page should be noted as an example of just what this blog is for and what it can do.
I felt so relieved at the end. I really felt sorry for you. What a rough mission. Tell your kids how hard it was and how you relied on the Lord to pull through.