20 Years Ago

20 years ago today I entered the Missionary Training Center and embarked on my full-time mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

It's hard to believe it's been 20 years. Kids that weren't even born when I started my mission are now on missions.

It was a wonderful yet challenging experience that I wouldn't trade for anything. It has been said that you learn more in the 18 months or two years you were a full-time missionary than you would learn in the most strenuous academic program. I believe it. I've done both.

I would encourage anyone who is able to and is contemplating serving mission to do so. You will never regret it. But you will most certainly regret not serving if you have the opportunity.

I was going to post a picture of me on my mission but I don't have any scanned into this computer :-(. After all, this was before digital cameras.

This was the era of pagers and pay phones. In the Florida Tampa Mission we didn't have telephones in our apartments. So we carried around rolls of quarters with us and had to find a pay phone whenever we got paged. Ah, good times!

I will share just a couple funny stories with you. One time my companion and I stopped by the church at the end of the day, 9:30 PM, to use the phone to report to our zone leader. (As sisters, we were not in a district at the time). As I got my keys out, and opened the door, a frog fell on my head. My companion started freaking out, screaming at me, telling me that there was a frog on my head. It was quite hilarious.

Another time, I had a new companion straight from the MTC, a Greeny as we call them. She thought it would be cool to send her parents a souvenir from Florida. Since we had a plentiful variety of cockroaches in our apartment she thought she would preserve a few by putting them between two pieces of clear packaging tape and send them home. Well, they didn’t fare so well during the trip. By the time her parents received them they were decomposing and the smelly liquid oozed out from between the two layers of tape and got all over everything in the package.

We did a lot of tracting in the Florida Tampa Mission. It was a mission rule that we tract at least 15 hours per week. We would usually tract for 3-4 hours at a time, if not more. One time, towards the end of a long, hot, grueling, probably unsuccessful tracting session my companion started complaining about everything. Then, she tripped on the asphalt and complained about the asphalt in Florida having broken seashells sticking up out of it, causing her to trip. I busted a gut. -- maybe you had to be there. But I found it hilarious.

That’s my two cents.