A missionary is a composite. It has the appetite of a horse, the enthusiasm of a fire-cracker, the patience of Job, the persistence of a fuller brush salesman, and the courage of a lion tamer. It likes letters from home, invitations to sunday dinner, conferences, checks, and visits from the Mission President. It isn’t much for tracting in blizzards, ladies who slam doors, hats, suits and dull ties, apartment houses, transfers to hot areas, shaking hands at arm’s length with the opposite sex, alarm clocks, and “Dear John” letters.

A missionery is an odd character. It can get homesick, discouraged, and temporarily lose faith in the whole human race. Yet nobody else can knock so boldly with such a shaky hand. Nobody is so early to rise or so tired at 10:30 p.m. and nobody else can get such a thrill at the end of a discouraging day from the words, “Come right in – I’ve been waiting for you.”

A missionary is truth with a pocket full of tracts, and faith with 69 cents in its pocket. “Hey, Dad, where is that check?”

Yes, they are all this, but a strange lump will rise in its throat the day it receives its letter of release, and on arrival home its homecoming speech will probably contain the phrase it once considered trite. “The time I spent in the mission field was the happiest time of my life.”

- From the finnish mission newsletter, November 1959

Elder osorio
01/05/2007