Probably not as excited as that girl.
As much as I try to keep this cynical private reaction from entering my mind every time someone asks me this about my mission, it’s been harder and harder these past few months.
But you have to understand that for me, this is like if someone had asked me if I was SO EXCITED to move from sophomore to junior year of high school. Asking me if I was SO EXCITED to turn 20 when I was 19. Sure, it’s always exciting to move on to a new phase of life, to experience new things. But a mission was something I’d always planned on, since I was young enough to conceive of what missions were. My mom went on a mission (she was a welfare services missionary in Indonesia until all the missionaries got expelled from the country and she was transferred to the Philippines). HER mom served a mission (when she served on the east coast it was still the “Eastern States” mission. She’s 95 and still kicking…metaphorically). My dad served a mission. My three older brothers have served missions. I can count on one hand the number of times I was told that I ‘could’ serve if I ‘didn’t get married first, that is’—actually, I can’t, because it never happened. I was raised to serve a mission by parents that fully believed I could and would. Of course, it was my choice in the end, but I can’t pretend it didn’t have a profound effect on the course my decisions took.
I’m aware that part of the reason I feel so cynical about the current culture surrounding girls serving is that I always got attention for the fact that I wanted to serve a mission. Especially at BYU. I endured all the heckling from my male freshman friends about how I would never make it to 21 without a ring on my finger. I made it through sophomore year with a new peer group made up of returned missionaries, a third of which thought it was awesome, a third who just talked about how much they hated sister missionaries, and a final third who continued the ever-popular disbelief that any girl at BYU wasn’t just looking for a ring by spring. I made it through half of junior year, when I had bets placed that I would stay and get married, and conversations about my mission were met with hushed whispers of “but…aren’t you dating someone?” Whatever the reaction, I liked that it set me apart, that a mission wasn’t something every girl wanted to do, was supposed to do, or even (don’t stone me) had the right skill set to be capable of doing well.
Then came October. Now I’m just one of hundreds, of thousands, of sisters preparing to serve. Pretty exciting. And trust me, they are all SO EXCITED. They tweetfacestagram about how excited they are on a daily basis. They tweetfacestagram about making appointments with their bishop. They tweetfacestagram about buying Preach My Gospel for the first time. They tweetfacestagram about how excited they are to get their call. They tweetfacestagram about how they it seems they will never get their call. And when they actually get their call? Oh boy. Tweetfacestagram all OVER the place. Once they have their call, tweetfacestagram is filled with sentences like, “Just get me to ______ already! I can’t wait four months!!!!!” and, of course, how SO EXCITED they are.
I am happy for them. I’m glad they are excited. If this news had occurred when I was a freshman, I would’ve been right there with them putting in my papers when I was 19. But something about this new culture reeks of a bandwagon, and though I sincerely hope I am wrong, of a fad. Notice that I’m not saying that sister missionary service itself is a bandwagonfad. But I fear that the way girls are treating it is somewhat cheapening the task.
Last week, a Facebook event was organized from a new “future sister missionaries” group, the premise of which was that any girl who is planning could go to the SLC temple and meet up with all the other girls who are planning to serve, and they were going to take a big picture together and “send it to the first presidency” and “maybe even get on the news!” They got their wish. Deseret news wrote an article on the SLC gathering (found here: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865568402/Future-sister-missionaries-gather-outside-Salt-Lake-Temple-to-celebrate-shared-plans-to-serve.html)
The two best quotes they managed to get out those girls about why they are in favor of the age change—girls who are SO EXCITED to serve that they trekked up to salt lake in the snow for a photo op—were these:
“I’ve been wanting to go since I was 16 but didn’t think that I would ever be able to, just with school and stuff. I would be in the middle of my major,” said Sheri King, who just turned 20 and has received a mission call to Tallahassee, Fla. “But now that it is lowered, I can go before I start my major — kind of like the young men have been doing.”
Lindsey Lockhart said she is excited to serve a mission before she is 21 as well because she won’t have to interrupt her life to go.
“Now that I can go at a younger age instead of having to be 21, there are so many other things I can do when I come back,” Lockhart said, “and I don’t have to necessarily interrupt my life with a mission.”
This sounds all kinds of alarms. If you’re ready and willing to give up eighteen months of your life to preaching the gospel, it’s going to “interrupt” things no matter how old you are. And your major still would have been there when you got home. But it seems these girls have decided to serve because hey…it just got like, so much easier! The real hard thing about a mission was managing to somehow make it to 21, not the day-to-day work of walking the streets of an unfamiliar city, communicating in a second language about the things that are most personal and sacred, or keeping the grueling schedule of missionary life. I’m sorry, Sheri and Lindsey, you’ll probably be great—but the way you talk about missions makes it seem like you would never have considered serving until it became so “convenient” that it was just like, why NOT, amiright?
I fear that this is the general attitude among younger women about why the age change is so great. The mindset that this change somehow made missionary work any easier is a joke. I hope all the thousands of sisters that are going out in this flood were prayerful in their decision and realistic in their expectations, or else they’re in for a rude awakening—and is that what really makes for a good missionary? If you know in your heart that you would never have been willing to wait until 21, pray hard about whether a mission is something you really want to do. Perhaps gaining all those sisters who wouldn’t have waited is the Lord’s plan in all of this. But I fear that at least at this moment, some sisters are going because it’s simply becoming the thing you do.
The best metaphor I can think of for this new attitude is that of a girl who wants a wedding more than a marriage. Suddenly I hear far more about all the steps that lead up to going on a mission than I ever hear about actual missionary work. Ladies: I’m not saying you shouldn’t be stoked for the fact that you get to go serve the Lord. Absolutely you should be! But don’t let your excitement for what YOU are going to do drown out His message that you’ll be taking to your brothers and sisters in the field. Calm down. Remember that you always could have served a mission. And remember that at its core, missionary work isn’t so much exciting as it is important, and that the world doesn’t need yapping chihuahuas, it needs lionesses.
So though I’m just as guilty as anyone, let’s put less emphasis on the question “Are you SO EXCITED?” when we discuss missionary work. For to imagine the worldwide missionary army in a year with so many new elders and sisters is, indeed, so empowering and so exciting. But for us on an individual, I would bet that the more productive emotion is a desire to prepare fully, a quiet determination and a prayerful pondering of what missionary work really means.
jennaljackson 