Reunions

Before I left Bolivia, I had received a phone call from Hermana Stevenson.

“I’m going home early. My dad had a heart attack, and I need to be with my family,” she said. “I know you’re going to Utah for school. Please look me up when you get there. I’d really like to see you.” She gave me her phone number and said goodbye.

When I got to Utah, I called her, and we met in downtown Salt Lake City for dinner, and then we walked arm in arm around Temple Square talking about life. Her dad had recovered, and she was working as a nurse at a hospital in Ogden.

We sat for a while in my car and talked, and then we both went quiet, and for several minutes there was nothing but awkward silence. Finally I leaned over and kissed her. For two years I’d sort of fantasized about what my first postmission kiss would be like, and never had I imagined that it would be in my car outside Temple Square with a former Miss Weber State.

But it had been two years, and I was kind of scared. I didn’t want to do anything I wasn’t supposed to do, so it ended up a sort of half-hearted French kiss, like two goldfishes opening and closing our mouths. It was quite embarrassing. I later wished many times that I had done things differently that night.

On the way home, I felt really bad about having kissed her. Yes, I was attracted to her, but I had known that we wouldn’t be good together. And in my mind at that point, you didn’t kiss someone you weren’t serious about.

A few weeks later I was walking across the BYU campus when I heard someone calling, “Hey, Williams!” It was Grolsch. He looked much different with shaggy hair and a leather jacket.

“Are you going to school here?” I asked.

“No, just passing through,” he said.

“On your way to where?”

“I don’t know. I’ve just been riding my motorcycle around the country trying to find out who I am.” He looked kind of depressed. “You look like you know where you’re going.”

“Well, no, not really,” I said honestly. “But maybe school will help me sort it out.”

I bought him lunch, and we talked about our experiences together. He said he didn’t resent the two years he had spent there, as it had been a “learning experience” and he had made some good friends. A couple of years later, President Nichols told me that Grolsch had left the church and was living with someone in Los Angeles.

I started dating a sister missionary whom I hadn’t known well at all in the mission. I saw her one day at the campus cafeteria, and we got talking. We went out a few times, and we really connected. One night we sat in my car outside her apartment talking.

“What if the church isn’t really true?” she asked.

I was stunned.

“How can you have spent a year and a half as a missionary without knowing if it’s true?” I said.

“I just don’t know if I believe it,” she said. “I’m just being honest.”

That was enough for me, and I didn’t ask her out again. As President Nichols had said, I wanted to marry someone who was going to go to heaven with me.

At the beginning of the Fall semester, I saw someone I did not expect at all: Brent. He was at BYU and was looking much healthier. But more importantly, there was a spark of life in his eyes that I had never seen before.

“They put me in the hospital for a few days,” he said. “And then I just finished my mission here in Utah. I have to take some medication, but it’s working, and I’m doing well.”

I was really happy, and I told him what Victor had said about Brent’s being the inspiration for his conversion.
“I didn’t think I’d done anything good down there,” he said.

A while later I was at a wedding reception, and the people at the table where I was sitting asked me where I had served my mission.

“Bolivia? Did you know Elder Brent?” the woman asked.

“He was my companion.”

“Oh, it must have been really hard for you. Brent didn’t talk about Bolivia much, but he said it nearly killed him.”

“It nearly killed a lot of us,” I said only half-joking.

She told me that she and her husband had taken Brent under their wings and had cared for him, as he had arrived in obviously poor health. They were helping him pay for college, she said.

“He’s a wonderful young man, isn’t he?” she said.

“Yes, he is.” When we had been together, I was so focused on his problems that I hadn’t really gotten to know him that well. I really didn’t know whether he was a wonderful person or not. I was happy that they had gotten to know him and had helped him in ways that I couldn’t.

In October I went to my first mission reunion. I was rooming with Dannelly at BYU, so we went together. Lewis was there with Hermana Howard and their baby. They seemed really happy. He was going to school, and she was working at the hospital in Provo.

Hermana Stevenson was there, and she had clearly been drinking. She veered between a loud, boozy hilarity and a sort of quiet despair. I didn’t know what to say to her at all. She kept saying what a terrible person she was, and I just put my arm around her and told her that she was a wonderful person who had a lot to offer. She and Dannelly and I went to a convenience store for a Coke, and she bought some wine coolers.

Lewis told me that Hermana Thomas would be coming out to Utah for a visit in a couple of weeks. “We should get together, the four of us, for dinner. For old time’s sake.” I thought that sounded great, so he said he would arrange it.

The reunion itself was a little strange. Somehow it didn’t feel right to be listening to Bolivian music in a church gymnasium. But it was nice to see some old friends.

Beck was there. He told me he was studying geology at the University of Utah. I was planning on law school, so I was double-majoring in English and Latin American Studies. He introduced me to his fiancée, Sandra, and I didn’t see anything particularly “wild” about her. She was quite nice. They had a long engagement and got married the next year. I see him from time to time, as he lives not too far from me. We’ll always be good friends.

The next morning at 4:00 someone was pounding on our apartment door. It was Hermana Stevenson, who was still quite drunk. We sat in the living room for quite a while as she cried and told us how awful her life had become. She had been dating a BYU football player, who had reintroduced her to alcohol. On her boyfriend’s birthday, he had rented a hotel room and had tried to pressure her into having sex with him. She’d been drinking for a few days since then. That morning would be the last time I ever saw her.

A couple of weeks later, I had dinner with the Lewises and with my old friend Hermana Thomas. We had written to each other fairly regularly, and she had moved to Connecticut to work as a nanny because she had some rather large medical bills from her bout with Chagas Disease. It was a surreal experience sitting at the table in that small apartment with three of my closest friends, while Lewis’s baby slept peacefully nearby.

The next day I picked up Hermana Thomas, and we went out to lunch. Something changed that day between us, and I suddenly realized the feelings I had for her. We started writing more regularly, and in February, my brother and I drove to Salt Lake to pick her up at the airport. Her medical bills paid, she was moving to Utah to go to school.

All the way home we talked, and after I helped her take her luggage in, my brother said, “Why didn’t you ever tell me about her? You’re obviously in love with her.”

I knew he was right. Twenty years later she’s still the best thing I found in Bolivia.

The Nichols came home about a year later. By that time, I was engaged to Hermana Thomas.

“I didn’t have you two paired up,” said Hermana Nichols.

Everyone knew that she had made a long list of missionaries and whom they should marry. I didn’t ask her who I was supposed to be with.

The Nichols set to work building a new house—Hermana Nichols’ dream house—and just after they moved in, he was called to be a General Authority of the church, meaning that they would be moving wherever the church assigned them.

“You know anybody who wants to buy a house, two cars, and a bunch of furniture?” Hermana Nichols asked a little bitterly. But they willingly gave up the house, and he served the church full-time for another 15 years or so until the church released him from his office.

I still have dreams—nightmares, really—in which I’m somehow a missionary again. I know that time has passed and I have a life and a family, but in the dream I have to put my life on hold again and go back to Bolivia and serve a mission. Never in the dreams do I think of how to get out of the mission; rather, I have to tell myself over and over that I can do this, I can handle another mission. But I feel nothing but dread.

I always wake up relieved that it was just a dream.

The Homecoming

After I had showered the second time, my mom asked me if she could get anything for me.

“Yeah, I could really use a Coke.” I had been drinking two to three liters of Coke a day in El Beni, and I hadn’t had any for more than 24 hours.

“All right,” she said. “We have to do some shopping this afternoon, so we’ll get some then.”

We went back to talking about my mission, with me showing pictures and the few small souvenirs I had brought home.

“Can we get that Coke now?” I asked.

“Sure, just a minute,” Mom said and asked me about a quena I had brought home.

“Can I have the car keys?” I asked. I really needed a Coke.

That evening the stake president came to our house and formally “released” me from my missionary service. He said that everyone was very proud of me for serving so honorably. And then he left. I was just me again, no longer Elder Williams, missionary.

At church on Sunday, it was testimony meeting, meaning that anyone who wanted to could get up and speak from the pulpit. I still had a really hoarse voice, but I told them how happy I was to be home and how much I had appreciated the letters I had received over the last two years.

I was wearing a sweater Benita, our cook in Cochabamba, had knitted for me, mostly because it made me look heavier, but people still told me I looked gaunt and unhealthy. And since I could barely speak, everyone assumed I’d picked up some horrible disease in Bolivia.

As part of the homecoming process, I had to go to doctor and get some specific tests for parasites and tuberculosis. Before I left Bolivia, I had taken a couple of doses of worm and amoeba medicines and had taken a stool sample to a lab, so I knew I was “clean.” I sat there in my temple garments, which by that time were worn through and a light orange color, wondering if I had done any permanent damage to my body. The only concerns the doctor had were a large cyst on my back and a smaller one on my nose, which he said would have to come off.

I was a little more worried about the dentist. Having seen Bolivian dentistry, I had avoided the dentist completely for two years, and I was sure my mouth would be full of cavities. But the dentist found no problems and no cavities, so I was mightily relieved. I really hate dentists.

Greg came over, and we went out for a Coke and sat in my dad’s car talking for a long time. He had been home almost six months, having opted out of the six-month extension.

“Why didn’t you stay?” I asked.

“My mission president found out that I was good with ‘problem’ missionaries, so I spent almost a year babysitting people he had trouble dealing with. I would have stayed, but I knew it would be six more months of babysitting. I just couldn’t do it.”

His parents had traveled to Finland to pick him up, and they had traveled around Europe together for a couple of weeks. He had spent Fall semester at church-owned Ricks College in Idaho, and he would be going back in a couple of days.

“I don’t think I could have handled Bolivia,” he said. “You guys went through some serious shit.”

“Yeah, but you guys didn’t teach or baptize,” I said. “I don’t think I could have handled that.”

“Oh, who cares, anyway?” he said. “We both got through it, and we’re back.”

He started telling me about his girlfriend, a girl from Indiana he’d met in school, and I found myself wishing I had someone like that to come home to. I had completely shut off all thoughts of girls while I was gone, and that week, it felt like two years’ worth of pent-up hormones had come spilling out of me. I was having all kinds of trouble keeping my thoughts “clean”; not even singing a church hymn helped.

By Sunday I was berating myself for being such a lustful man, but it was time to give my official report to the high council, a group of twelve local leaders, all men of course.

I gave them a brief overview of all my areas and told them a few highlight stories. For some reason, it felt really natural as a returned missionary to sugar-coat the experience. Not once did I mention having a suicidal companion or nearly getting killed or even the living conditions. I just talked about the Bolivian people and how it had been my privilege to bring the gospel to them.

All through my report, I was thinking that they could all see through the façade. They knew that I was a boiling cauldron of lust who was unworthy to stand before them like that.

When I finished, all of them shook my hand, and one of them, his voice quavering, said, “I haven’t felt the Spirit so strongly in a long time. You must really have been a wonderful missionary.”

The shame burned inside of me, and I excused myself and walked out.

My homecoming address at church was a bit of a mess. President Nichols had always said, “Don’t give them a travelogue. Preach the gospel.” So that’s what I planned to do. I chose as the subject the Atonement of Jesus Christ, meaning His sacrifice on the cross for our sins.

When I arrived, I saw on the program that I was the only speaker. The bishop had wanted me to plan the meeting and choose the speakers, but I had never gotten the message, so I was it. That meant that I would have at least 35 minutes at the pulpit alone. This was a problem, since I had prepared for only 15 minutes.

The bishop’s counselor, who was the father of my friend Rob, introduced me by reading the letter President Nichols had written. It was pretty much a form letter listing the areas where I had worked and the leadership positions I had held.

“John’s mission president has written something in the margin that I’d like to read,” he said. “‘How we love this young man! He will always be a son to us,’” he read, and I was suddenly overcome with emotion just before I was to speak. I managed to pull myself together and step to the podium.

I had my voice back by then, and I talked about Jesus and what He had done for us. When I finished my talk, I looked at the clock and realized that I had more than twenty minutes, so I gave them a travelogue, describing the towns I worked in and the spiritual experiences I had. I finished ten minutes early (Dad was grateful), and it was over.

I got a job the first week back at a gas station out in Moorpark, working for the same man I’d worked for when I was a teenager. I sat in a bulletproof glass booth at a self-serve station. It made me feel isolated, but then I was pretty isolated everywhere else, too.

I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself. Social situations were totally awkward, and I could barely force myself to talk to women. My bishop told me I should attend the singles ward, so I did. But it wasn’t any better there. I would sit in church on Sundays in a panic, feeling totally ill at ease.

“You look really lost,” said Jon, a guy from my home ward. He was the stake president’s son and had recently returned from a mission in Arkansas.

“Yeah, kind of.”

“That’s pretty typical, but you get over it.” He smiled.
From that Sunday on, Jon sat with me in church and introduced me to people, inviting me to activities and parties, to the point at which I felt like I was sort of normal again.

I would be heading to BYU again in a few weeks, and I was glad to feel like Bolivia was behind me.

Homeward Bound

On the plane, Crouch told me he was going to miss me. “I’ve never had a companion I felt as close to as I do to you.”

“I’ll miss you, too,” I said. I really hadn’t felt close to him at all but had done my best to get along.

I got off the plane when we landed, while Crouch continued on to Santa Cruz. I took a cab to the office missionaries’ house, where Benita greeted me like a returning son.

“You look really good,” she said. “Much better than the last time I saw you.

It was true. I had regained most of the weight I’d lost since arriving in Bolivia, and I was in better shape than I had been before my mission. And laying out on the roof of the house had given me a pretty good tan.

Almost immediately I noticed that with the sudden change in altitude and climate my skin felt really dry and itchy. I had been in very humid conditions for months, and now I was in a dry mountain valley. My voice also started getting scratchy.

I borrowed the Land Cruiser to take my brown suit to the dry cleaners. Since it was a wool blend, I hadn’t worn it at all in El Beni, but it had hung in the closet, unused. When I took it off the hanger to pack in my suitcase, I saw that it was covered with blotches of mold, inside and out. Somehow I ended up at the same dry cleaners where Hermana Thomas and I had picked up her dress several months before. In some ways it felt like a lifetime ago when that had happened, but now I was going home.

While I was out, I ran into Grolsch, my MTC companion. We ended up going to lunch and doing a little souvenir shopping, which was hard since I only had $20 left to my name.

“Do you believe the church is true?” Grolsch asked me over saltenas at lunch.

“Yes, I do,” I said. “I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t.”

“I’ve been praying to know it’s true ever since we left, and I’ve never gotten an answer.” He looked away, at the wall, a real sadness coming over his face. “I think … I mean … I don’t think it’s really true.”

How could this be happening? Everyone agreed that Grolsch had from the beginning been one of the most dedicated and hardworking missionaries, and he, like me, had volunteered for an extra six months in the mission. But here he was telling me he didn’t believe in what we had been teaching.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Just keep doing what you’re supposed to be doing, and it will all work out.”

“I wish I could believe that,” he said. “By the way, I have an extra bed in my hotel room, and I’d really like it if you stayed with me tonight.”

“Oh, no, thanks,” I said. “My stuff is all over at the office house, and the cook is making me a special dinner tonight. I really can’t.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hang out with him, anyway. Maybe I should have.

That evening Benita cooked a large batch of enchiladas, and I ate way too much. I asked her if I could send her anything she needed from the US when I got home.

“Well, you can’t good cinnamon here,” she said. I promised I’d send her a box of cinnamon from home.

That night I slept on the couch in the living room, and before I went to bed, I knelt down at the side of the couch and poured my soul out to God. “I’ve given thee these two years as an offering,” I said. “And I need to know if my sacrifice is acceptable to thee.”

I thought of all the stupid mistakes, the wasted time, and the times I broke the rules. I wondered just how much of those two years I had really given to God, and I felt ashamed.

I pleaded for forgiveness and asked that my offering, imperfect as it was, be accepted. By this time the edge of the couch was wet with my tears, and I was feeling like I had failed in my mission.

But I remembered some of the good things, the people I had met, and the friendship of companions, and it made me feel better.

In the end, I said out loud these words: “Heavenly Father, I know that these two years haven’t been perfect. I haven’t always done what I should have, and I haven’t always been the kind of missionary I should have been. But I can’t change what I have done. My mission is what it is, and I hope that you will accept it.”

I got off my knees and lay on the couch, feeling more resigned than anything, but at least I wasn’t ashamed anymore.

In the morning I headed over to the mission office for my final interview with President Nichols.

“Well, Elder Johnny-cat, you’re going home,” he said, smiling. “How do you feel?”

“Pretty good,” I said truthfully, my voice even hoarser than the day before. “I know I haven’t done everything right, but I know I did the best I could.”

“I know you did,” President Nichols said. “You’ve been a good missionary, and we will miss you very much.”

“I’ll miss you, too.”

He asked me if I was still worthy to hold a temple recommend, and I said I was. He handed me a signed recommend with my name on it.

He said that he had only one piece of advice to give: “Make sure you find a woman you don’t just want to go to the temple with; make sure she wants to go to heaven with you.”

I promised him I would.

“We’re running behind, so I’m sorry but I have to cut this short.”

We knelt together, and he prayed that God would bless me in my righteous desires. And that was it. He hugged me, and then I went out into the lobby to wait.

At the president’s house, we had a large dinner, and Sister Nichols cried when she said goodbye to me. “You were always one of my favorites,” she said. I was going to miss both of them.

The president’s assistants loaded the luggage onto the rack on the Land Cruiser, and we piled in. I had driven that route so many times, but it would be my last. When we arrived at the airport, a woman named Dunia, whom I had baptized nearly a year before, stood on the sidewalk, waiting.

She gave me several presents: a cassette of Tarija singer Enriqueta Ulloa, some homemade cookies, and a woven sash embroidered with “Cochabamba” on it.

“You really changed my life,” she said, wiping away tears.

“You’ve changed mine,” I replied. “More than you know.”

We were late getting to the airport, so the new travel secretary put all the luggage on the scales, and then we all had to pay an equal share of the excess baggage fee. I had carefully packed so that mine would not be overweight because I was down to my last ten dollars. Two of the welfare hermanas had huge wicker baskets full of souvenirs, so when it was all divided up, we had to pay ten dollars apiece. I was now officially penniless.

Since we were late, we had to run for the plane. I said a quick goodbye to Dunia and then walked as quickly as I could across the tarmac and onto the plane. As I put on my seatbelt, I heard over the PA system a song by Los Kjarkas that I had not heard in quite a while:

Sol de los Andes…
Vuelvo a mi tierra morena
a labrar sus sueños junto a su mañana

I was already crying when I put my bag in the overhead bin.

“What’s your problem?” asked the missionary sitting next to me.

“Nothing, it’s just a hard day for me,” I said.

“Not for me,” he said. “I can’t wait to get home. Want a valium?”

“What?” I asked.

“Oh, we bought some valium so we could sleep on the plane home,” he explained.

No, I didn’t want any valium. He and the guy on the other side of me both took their pills and were soon asleep. I sat on that plane and thought about everything that had happened and wondering what my life would be like when I got home. I had no idea.

We stopped in Santa Cruz, and I had dinner with Dannelly in an airport cafeteria. The shack that had been the airport when I had arrived two years earlier had been replaced by a gleaming, modern, air-conditioned airport.

“Is it weird knowing you’re going home?” Dannelly asked. He would be leaving in a few months.

“No, not really. It feels like it’s time to go home.” My voice was really hoarse by then, but I didn’t really care.
I told him I’d find us an apartment in Provo, as we were going to room together at BYU. Then I gave him a hug and got back on the plane.

In the middle of the night the plane began to descend, and I looked out the window to see the moon reflected in a large body of water. Something wasn’t right. There shouldn’t be that much water in the jungle. It turned out it was the Amazon, and we were landing in Manaus, where we were shepherded into a small glass enclosure for “in transit” passengers. An armed soldier stood guard, and our only company in the cramped room was a woman selling cold Orange Crush. As there were no chairs in the room, we stood for nearly an hour before the soldier unlocked the door and let us get back on the plane.

Once again we stopped in Caracas, and I remembered thinking how easy it would be to just disappear. But why would I want to do that?

We were late getting to Miami, and a computer problem delayed us even more, and we literally had to sprint across the terminal to catch the plane that would take us home. I sat in my seating, out of breath and sweating, just as they closed the door for takeoff. We stopped again in New Orleans and changed planes in Denver. At each place we got strange looks from just about everyone. Most of us did look a little threadbare and tired. But I didn’t care. I was going home.

The plane began descending just as we crossed the mountains separating the high desert from Los Angeles. Past the mountains, the valleys looked like they had been filled with a gray-brown soup, but it was just winter smog.
When we landed I looked out the window of the plane to see my parents and my two younger brothers standing at the window, looking for me.

I stepped out of the plane and onto the top stair. This was going to be a big moment. They could see me now. I took a step forward and tripped on some kind of electric cord, stumbling down three or four steps before desperately grabbing the rail to keep myself from falling into the people ahead of me.

As I came through the door, my mother hugged me and said, “Oh, you look so gaunt. You’ve lost so much weight. I’m so glad you’re home.”

“I love you, Mom,” I tried to say, hugging her more tightly than I could remember. But I had almost completely lost my voice.

“And you’re sick, too!” she said, hugging me even more tightly.

My dad was looking a little misty-eyed and neglected, so I hugged him, too, and told him I loved him.

My brother Danny just laughed and said, “Nice entrance, John. You almost fell on your face on those stairs.”

I was home. Dad snapped a whole lot of pictures of me and the other two missionaries, and then we got in the car to go home.

At home, I showered and changed into a t-shirt and jeans and then sat down on the couch to talk to my parents about my mission experience. A few minutes in, I had a major brown-out and had to go shower again.

I knew my life wasn’t going to be same as it was before.

No More Tracting

We had been half-heartedly knocking doors off and on, but as we had promised, our focus was on working with church members to find people to teach. But we did find one man, a young guy named Carlos, who was really receptive to our message. He had dark, piercing eyes and a bushy mustache and a preference for wearing Red Sox t-shirts, though I doubt he had any idea what the Red Sox or even baseball were.

Everything was going great, and Carlos had committed to baptism, until we got to the discussion about the Ten Commandments. When I got to the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” Carlos lowered his head into his hands and began to sob, his broad shoulder shaking.

He told us that he had been a heavy drinker and that one night he and his best friend had gotten really drunk and had started fighting. Carlos had eventually passed out and awoke in the gutter to find his friend dead beside him.

“I’m not sure, but I think I killed him,” he said quietly. “Do you think God will ever forgive me?”

I told him that the Lord forgave everyone, but I would have to talk to the mission president before Carlos could get baptized.

Our little branch had few members who came regularly, but one family, the Alpires, came every week and to every meeting. Their two boys, aged 12 and 14, even went to early morning seminary classes, something that was unheard of in Bolivia. They invited us to spend Christmas with them, and we happily accepted.

We knew that Christmas would be a huge expense for the family, so we did what we could to get some small presents for each of the family members. We were running out of money ourselves, the exchange rates now not at all in our favor, so we bought a few small toys, some school supplies, and a good-sized bag of rice for the family.

We arrived late in the evening on Christmas Eve to the small home where they lived. Somehow they had found a small pine branch, which they had stapled to the wall and then covered with a few makeshift ornaments. We sang a few hymns and read the story of the birth of Jesus as told in the Gospel of Luke. At midnight the family opened the presents we had given them, and we opened envelopes with hand-drawn Christmas cards from the children, as fireworks exploded all over the neighborhood.

Christmas dinner was a traditional sajta de pollo with potatoes, an unbelievable extravagance for such a humble family, so we were very grateful. This is what Christmas was about. Two years before I had been at home celebrating Christmas as always in a middle-class Los Angeles suburb. The year before I had sat in an affluent Cochabamba neighborhood eating turkey and stuffing while millions of Bolivians went hungry. This year I felt like I was having a Christmas where Jesus would have felt at home.

Christmas Day in Bolivia is a quiet, family time, so we decided to stay home. We made pancakes for breakfast and then went into our room to read and sing a few hymns. All day long the radio played the same three songs over and over: Do They Know It’s Christmas, We Are the World, and Cantare, Cantaras, a similar sort of Latin fundraising song. By noon we were really tired of all three songs, and I still can’t hear any of them without thinking of that hot, sunny Christmas.

That afternoon, we decided to accept the branch president’s offer of his motorcycle. I told him we’d fill it up with gas when we were done, but we wanted to take it for a ride. Crouch didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle, so I drove, with him sitting behind me on the seat. We must have been quite a sight: a short, skinny kid driving a tall, husky guy around the town.

We rode along the canal road that circled the city, the wide green savanna stretching out all around us. We stopped briefly and talked to some Adventist missionaries from Kansas, who had somehow managed to drive to Trinidad in an old Ford pickup with a trailer. A few people yelled “huevos!” at us as we passed, but we just laughed and waved to them.

The week after Christmas we really didn’t have much going on except trying to get Carlos baptized. I called President Nichols, and after he thought about it and prayed about it, he called back and said it would be all right to baptize Carlos. We walked over to Carlos’s house to tell him the good news.

“This is great!” he said, hugging me. “I’ve been talking to my wife about the gospel, and I think she wants to be baptized, too.”

“You’re married?” I asked. I had never seen a wife in his house.

“This isn’t my house,” he explained. “My parents live here, and I work for my father, so I’m always here during the day.” He then led us to his house, where we met his wife, a very shy young woman named Perla.

We gave her sort of an overview of the gospel, and she looked at us quite stonefaced, with no expression. When I started explaining about repentance, she looked straight ahead and said in a monotone voice, “God would never forgive me for what I’ve done.”

I looked at her and said, “God doesn’t really care what you’ve done. If you repent, He will forgive you.”

She didn’t move, but a single tear went down her cheek. “Do you really think He could forgive me?”

“Of course,” I said, smiling. “He loves you.”

She explained that she had had an abortion earlier in their marriage, and she had always been haunted by guilt. We explained that there was no sin so terrible that God wouldn’t forgive it.

We spent a lot of that week at Carlos’s house, teaching both of them and preparing them for baptism. They decided to get baptized on Monday morning, and that afternoon Crouch and I would be leaving for Cochabamba, Crouch having learned he would be going to Santa Cruz. It would be the perfect finish to my mission, I thought.

I told Crouch that I wanted to work hard and endure to the end, so I was going to knock doors and look for people to teach right up to the end. Even if we couldn’t teach them, later missionaries might be able to find them.

Tuesday morning we had no appointments, so I said, “Let’s go knock some doors.”

“This is kind of pointless,” said Crouch.

“I’m determined to do this right,” I said, and knocked on the door. A woman sat with her son behind an open window. She whispered something to the child, and he came out to the door.

“My mother isn’t home,” he said.

“Oh?” I said. “Then who is that in the window?”

The boy looked a little panicked and went back into the house, where the mother once again whispered into his ear.

“Ha fallecido,” he said. She died.

“The hell with it,” I said, chuckling. “I think that’s a sign that we’re not going to be knocking anymore doors. We went to the plaza and bought ice cream cones, watching flocks of green parakeets fly overhead until it was time for our appointment with Carlos.

Crouch was inconsolable when he learned that we would be leaving before the end of “Tu o Nadie.” “I’ll never find out what happened,” he moaned. Oh, well. I was more interested in getting home than finding out if Raquel and Antonio would ever get together.

Sunday at church we said our goodbyes, and Carlos and Perla sat down with the custodian for their baptismal interviews. The custodian came out beaming afterward.

“Once they get married, they’ll be all set,” he said.
I hadn’t thought to ask, but Carlos and Perla, like most Bolivians, had never bothered to get married legally. They had just moved in together.

I was down to my last $30, $20 of which were emergency money. But I would gladly chip in $10 for a civil marriage before the baptism.

The next morning we went to the Registro Civil to wait for Carlos and Perla. When they didn’t come, I borrowed the custodian’s bicycle and rode across the city to their house. It was my last day of mission work, and it was the first and only time I would ride a bicycle in Bolivia.

When I turned the corner on their block, I found Carlos and Perla walking toward the Registro Civil, Carlos carrying his Book of Mormon. “Sorry we’re late, Elder,” he said, and we walked together to the wedding.

Perla cried at the wedding and then cried some more after the baptism. I had just enough time for a quick photo afterward, and then we had to catch a cab for the airport.
“Thank you,” was all Perla could say, and it was more than enough for me.

I got on the plane, and we took off for Cochabamba.

The MTC Winds Down

Every P-day we had the opportunity to attend the temple. We would get up early, trudge up the hill to the temple, and change into temple clothes in a special basement dressing room just for missionaries. As we came up the escalator one week, Elder Lynn’s slipper caught in the side of the escalator. It pulled his foot down into the crack, and the slipper wouldn’t come off, being pulled so tight.

As we approached the top of the escalator, I could see that his foot would be pulled into the metal teeth at the top, and this could potentially be a very serious accident. I knelt down next to Lynn, who was by this time frantic, and I tugged as hard as I could on the slipper. I fell backward onto the escalator as the foot pulled free just in time.

At the top of the escalator, I held up the mangled and blackened slipper to an elderly docent, who was standing serenely by the entrance to the endowment room.

“Uh, can we get a replacement for this?” I asked.

“What on earth did you do to it?” she asked, her eyes wide.

“Um, just a little mishap on the escalator,” Lynn said pleasantly.

A few weeks later, we were assigned as a group to do “sealings,” meaning that we would act as proxies for a deceased family. By kneeling across the altar and making certain covenants with God, we could ensure that this family would endure as a family forever.

The night before, I went to bed feeling like I had the flu, which had been going around. I spent a miserable night and then was awakened at 4:30 by Grolsch, who was far too cheerful for that time of the morning.

“Time to go to the temple,” he called out happily.

“I think I have the flu,” I said. “Can you go down to the nurse and get me some medicine?”

“Come on,” he pleaded. “We may never get to do sealings together again.”

“All right,” I said, crawling out of bed.

At the temple I was miserable. I could tell I had a fever, and I just wanted to go back to bed. But I pressed on, kneeling at the altar and holding one of the hermanas’ hands in the “patriarchal grip,” one of the handshakes I had learned in the temple.

When it was over, Michaels said, “You don’t look good. After the session, you should go back to bed.”

“Session? What session?”

“Oh, we’re supposed to do an endowment session, too,” he said.

I have no idea how I sat through nearly three hours of endowment, but I made it through and then went back to the MTC to sleep.

Greg showed up in the MTC about three weeks before I was supposed to leave. He seemed to be much more relaxed than I was. For whatever reason, Finnish wasn’t difficult for him, and he just sort of cruised through the MTC. I ran into him a few times in the cafeteria, but we really didn’t get a chance to talk much.

I had been avoiding the BYU campus the entire time I was there, but we finally went to the bookstore on campus to get Grolsch’s name printed on the cover of his scriptures. I ran into a few friends, and I couldn’t figure out why I felt so awkward and embarrassed. I guess I had already made a mental and emotional break from my life, and it felt like I was taking little field trips back.

Each week we had a big meeting with all the missionaries and a General Authority would speak to us. In our regular meeting, they asked for volunteers for the MTC choir, and that sounded like fun to me. I always enjoyed singing, so I volunteered. Grolsch was extremely unhappy about it, as my volunteering meant that he had to sing, too. For a few weeks we practiced Isaac Watts’ “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” The words really moved me:

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

I could hardly get through the hymn without bursting into tears. Grolsch, on the other hand, was convinced the song was a holdover from pagan times and a sign of the apostasy of the Catholic Church.

“All that talk about the cross and blood and tears. It’s so morbid,” he complained. “I won’t sing it. I’ll just stand there and mouth the words.”

I think he did just mouth the words as we stood in front of the vast congregation of missionaries. The speaker was Ezra Taft Benson, next in line to be the prophet and leader of the church.

“We don’t ‘Bible bash,’” the octogenarian Benson intoned. “Let me repeat: ‘We don’t ‘Bible bash.’ If we do, we win”—the audience roared—“but we don’t.”

He went on to say that we needed to have the Spirit with us to teach effectively, and we would not have the Spirit if we didn’t love our companions and keep the commandments. It was like they all had the same script.

A few days before we were to leave, we headed to the nurse’s station to get our gamma globulin shots (in the buttocks, of course). A long line of us waited in the hallway. We had all heard about these “peanut butter shots,” which were thick and didn’t disperse into the muscle. I saw a lot of people limping that day, and the guys in our branch who were going to Spain thought it was pretty funny.

One morning our plane tickets and itineraries arrived. We would be taking Lloyd Aereo Boliviano from Miami to La Paz. Haver asked us if we knew what Lloyd Aereo was, and of course, we’d never heard of it.

“Well, there’s this guy named Lloyd who lives in La Paz. Every month he flies his Cessna to Miami to pick up the missionaries. It’s kind of a bumpy ride, but it’s free.”

“Really?” Grolsch’s face was priceless. “What if we crash?”

Both Haver and I burst out laughing at the same time.

“It says here that I’m the group leader, in charge of getting everyone to Bolivia safely.” Grolsch beamed. “That must mean they can trust me.”

“Actually, it means that you’re the first person on the list alphabetically,” said Haver. “Grolsch comes before Williams, so you’re in charge.”

“Well, I’m still in charge,” said Grolsch. I really couldn’t wait to get a new companion.

Angels, Demons, and Pizzas

Before leaving, my future brother-in-law told me two things: “Don’t tell Jesus jokes, and don’t do ‘angel sightings.’” He explained that in his mission, missionaries would tell blasphemous Jesus-themed jokes, and he said that was where he drew the line on humor. Not having heard a Jesus joke in my life, this wasn’t a difficult thing to commit to.

The angel sightings, he said, were common in the MTC. One missionary would stand on chair beneath a sheet at the foot of a missionary’s bed, while another would lie on the floor and shine a flashlight up through the sheet. The victim would be awakened to find a glowing white being hovering in the air near the bed. I promised I wouldn’t do that, either.

The reason that joke was so effective was the folklore and superstition that had grown up around missionary work over more than a century and a half. Early church missionaries reported being attacked by demons in their sleep, prominent church leaders recorded visitations from various supernatural beings, from Cain to angels to God himself. By the time I got to the MTC, legends circulated about missionaries who received miraculous protection from Satan’s power. One in particular I heard from the pulpit in the MTC: a leader at the MTC had been shown in vision the dark forces arrayed against missionary work, but he had seen an army of angels in white surrounding the MTC to protect it. He warned us, however, that soon we would be outside the MTC, and the only protection would be our own righteousness.

I never had such experiences with the unseen, but Grolsch confided in me one Sunday that he had never received an answer to his prayers. He wasn’t sure that the church really was true. He was looking for that kind of supernatural sign that would confirm to him that he should be where he was.

I suggested that he pray about it, so he went off to the “prayer closet” on our floor. Some enterprising missionaries had emptied a custodial closet and had placed a sign on the door to indicate that this was a place where you could go to pray in private without interruption. That afternoon, Grolsch was gone for more than an hour. He returned looking a little frightened.

“I had a weird experience in there,” he finally whispered.

“What happened?”

“Well, I was in there praying—you know, really praying—because I wanted to know for sure if the church is true. I was pleading with Heavenly Father, and suddenly I felt this evil presence. It got really cold, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I kept praying, even harder, but the bad feeling just got worse. It made me feel like the walls were closing in and I couldn’t breathe. It scared me so badly that I had to run out of there and come back here.”

“Well, maybe that’s your answer,” I said, trying not to look like I thought he was nuts. “If someone wants that badly to keep you off a mission, maybe that tells you it’s really true.”

He wasn’t at all happy with that answer, and for the rest of the time he was there, he kept pleading in his prayers for an answer. But none ever came.

One Sunday after church, he lay down on his bed and dozed off while I was reading. Suddenly, he jumped up, shouting, “Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“I was floating about eight inches above my bed, and I could see this dark figure coming toward me.”

“Dude, I was sitting here reading the whole time. There was no floating, and no dark figure. You were just dreaming it.”

“No, it was real. I know it was,” he looked really earnest.

“Whatever.”

Through it all the drumbeat of “confess … confess … confess” continued. One guy I knew finally broke down and admitted that he and his girlfriend had been in a hot tub naked the night before he went into the MTC. “But nothing happened,” he insisted. “I swear.” He, like all of the other confessors, had to have an interview with one of the General Authorities, who are the men in Salt Lake City who run the church full-time.

Each week a General Authority would come to the MTC to hear the confessions of the guilty, and then they would decide on appropriate discipline. If you had done something particularly heinous, such as sexual intercourse, you might even be sent home, making you a pariah within the church. Because the consequences could be so severe, a lot of people just lied and carried the guilt with them.

But not this guy. The guilt had weighed on him enough that he needed to clear it up.That week the General Authority assigned was apostle Bruce McConkie, who at that time had a reputation for being extremely stern and humorless. In the end, Elder McConkie decided that my friend was penitent enough and could continue his mission.

The other mantra was that we must be totally obedient to the rules. Over and over, instructors and speakers reminded us of the Book of Mormon scripture saying that we should obey every commandment “with exactness.” We were not to deviate in any way from the prescribed schedule, which again meant that Grolsch was constantly disobeying by staying up late and getting up early. After a missionary in our branch got a concussion by sliding on some ice, the branch president again reminded us that the missionary was injured because, in breaking the rules, he had forfeited the right to divine protection.

One constant source of irritation to the hierarchy was that missionaries would order pizzas and have them delivered to the back fence. We heard over and over that this was a flagrant violation of the rules and showed a disobedient spirit among those who engaged in this pernicious practice. Yes, it was only a pizza, they said, but it really represented how willing we were to follow the Savior; if we couldn’t follow Him in such a simple matter, how were we going to follow Him in the weightier matters? But the pizzas kept coming, though of course, I never indulged in such rebellious behavior.

But one morning I did cause a big stir among the entire MTC. I arrived in the cafeteria to see a bright yellow sign over the conveyor belt where you put your tray when you finished eating. It read: “Elder Williams, I have something for you. Love, Marie.” When I walked in, someone said, “Hey, your name is Williams. Is that for you?”

Slowly I made my way to the sign and stuck my head in the opening by the conveyor belt. Marie was there doing dishes, and she handed me a plate of peanut butter cookies and said, “I love you.”

The whole cafeteria burst into applause when I came out of the opening with the plate of cookies.

“Dude, I’m so jealous,” said Elder Lynn.

“Don’t be,” I said. “How would you like to see your girlfriend every day and not be able to even touch her?”

“Oh, definitely not, then.”

On Sunday evenings we had “culture class,” which was an hour-long lesson on the culture of Bolivia. The instructor was very enthusiastic about Bolivia, but he really didn’t teach us anything useful. He talked about food we could expect, except the food he described was the kind you’d only get on a special occasion. He said people would come up to us in the streets and beg for baptism; I thought that was ridiculous. We learned next to nothing about Bolivian history, politics, and attitudes towards Americans, all of which would have gone a long way toward helping us stay safe.

The instructor clearly viewed Bolivia through a rose-colored rearview mirror because he insisted that Bolivia was much more modern than we would expect.

“I heard that some missionaries don’t have electricity or running water,” one missionary said. “And I heard that there are open sewers.”

The instructor glared, his face going a little red. “This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Bolivia is not anything like that.”

Culture class did give us a chance to meet some of the other missionaries who would be going to Bolivia. Hermana Rockwell would be going on the plane with us; she was as friendly a person as I had met in the MTC, and for some reason, nothing fazed her. She was always calm and cheerful.

Two other hermanas would be coming a month after us. One, a rather large woman from Idaho, told us she was going on a mission to find a husband. The other sat quietly and ate her hair, one strand at a time.

I’m not sure we picked up anything in our culture class, but we did see some of the instructor’s souvenirs and hear some Bolivian music.

Loving Your Companion

It’s not easy to be with someone every day, all day and all night, but that’s how it was. Grolsch and I, as companions, were supposed to be together all the time, presumably to keep each other focused on missionary work and out of trouble.

Days began at 6:30, when we would shower and then head over to the cafeteria for breakfast. Mealtimes were pretty difficult because Marie worked as a server in the cafeteria, and without fail I would end up in her line. She would usually say little more than “Hello, Elder,” but she would smile, and made me think of how much I wanted to be with her. But it wasn’t the time or place for such thoughts, and I would hurry on to eat breakfast and start the day’s study.

Classes began at 7:30 with Elder Foote telling us, “Hagan un buen semicirculo” (put the chairs in a semicircle). We spent most of the day learning Spanish, with some time dedicated to memorizing the discussions. We also had a thick stack of white note cards, each of which was printed with a different scripture we were supposed to memorize. Most of us punched holes in the cards and put the entire stack on a metal ring that we clipped to our belt loops. Most days the missionaries in line in the cafeteria would be focused on the stack, busily memorizing.

At lunchtime I would often see Marie again and then sit and mope at a table while everyone else was either chatting or memorizing. The food was pretty much the same as the BYU dorm food, so I really didn’t enjoy it and didn’t usually eat much. After lunch it was back to the classroom until dinner time. If we stopped paying attention or simply felt the effects of long hours and not that much sleep, Haver would start yelling “Gritar!” (the Spanish word for shout) and expect us to yell it back at him until we were wide awake again.
The time there was incredibly stressful for me, and I started this weird nervous tick. When I was memorizing something, I would “write” it in cursive on the desk with my index finger. Haver pointed it out to me several times, but I couldn’t stop.

“Maybe it’s just helping you learn the discussions,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a big deal.”

I never did that again after I left the MTC.

The evening “P and R” sessions were less structured, with only a brief formal lesson at the beginning. The rest of the time, Elder Curtis would help us one on one with our studies. Grolsch would always turn his desk toward the wall and practice giving the discussions to a cinderblock. If we volunteered to help him, or if we asked him to listen to our practice, he always ignored us and stayed with his wall-gazing. P and R ended at 9:30, and then we had a brief prayer and spiritual thought in the commons area of our dorm floor.

Each night we were to be in bed at 10:30, and though I had often stayed up late in college, it was no problem for me to go to bed that early. I was almost always physically and mentally exhausted when it was time to go to bed, and I would fall asleep rather quickly.

I discovered early on that Grolsch was determined to be the hardest-working missionary of all of us. Most nights he would stay awake until 1:00 or so, and then he would be out of bed, clomping across the floor in his “Forward Thrust” shoes by 4:30. He was going to out-study all of us if it killed him. I knew that what he was doing was against the MTC rules, but I figured it wasn’t worth making a fuss about.

He was particularly proud of his work ethic, and if someone made a mistake in class, he would roll his eyes and say something like “It’s obvious some people aren’t working as hard as others.” He constantly “corrected” our pronunciation, insisting that his rural Idaho accent was the proper way to say it. By the end of the first week, I wanted to beat the crap out of him.

Sometimes in the evenings before lights out, four of us from our little class—me, Gonzales, Michaels, and Lynn—would sit and talk. Justice would just go and lie on his bed, ignoring us, and Grolsch, of course, was busy studying.
Gonzales was a fairly recent convert to Mormonism, having been in his younger days in a Puerto Rican gang in Brooklyn. We thought he was joking until he showed us the knife scars on his back and side. He had grown up speaking a sort of bastardized street Spanish, and it was really difficult for him to have to remember the more formal structure of the language. I couldn’t imagine this really sweet man ever being in a knife fight. I thought he was one of those “salt of the earth” types.

“How are you getting along with Grolsch?” Lynn asked me one night. “I think I’d kill him if he was my companion.”

“Oh, he’s OK,” I lied. “He’s just a little different.” I had been feeling so guilty for not liking Grolsch. Every day they kept telling us that we needed to love our companion if we wanted to have the Spirit and be effective missionaries. I hated mine, and I felt so guilty about it. I knew I was never going to have the Spirit with me.

Monday was “preparation day,” or “P-day.” This was the day set aside to write letters, clean our room, and do our laundry. A lot of missionaries would go to University Mall to go shopping on P-day, but we had been warned against it. “Do not be tempted to go to La Plaza de la Universidad, the branch president said one evening in solemn tones. Remember, it can truly be La Plaza de Iniquidad (“Iniquity Mall”) for you. I couldn’t figure out why a mall would be such a sinful place, but other than picking up my hideous suit from Mr. Mac, I obeyed and stayed away from the mall.

On P-days Grolsch would sometimes vanish for two or three hours at a time. We would be walking down the hall as a group, and suddenly he would be gone. He would show up later, saying only that he had needed some time to himself.

“Shouldn’t I say something to someone?” I asked the others.

“No, don’t do that. I don’t think he’s getting into trouble,” said Lynn. “Besides, if you rat him out, they might send him home, and you don’t want that.”

So, I said nothing but just endured the constant barrage of self-righteousness. Given the constant pressure to confess unresolved sins, I went to the branch president and confessed that I really couldn’t stand Grolsch.
“Just pray for that love to come, and it will,” he said. I wasn’t so sure.

A few weeks in, my sister’s boyfriend came to the MTC, fresh from his mission in Korea. He said he had come to offer me any advice or help he could.
“Jim, I hate my companion, and I feel so bad about it,” I said, unable to look him in the eye. “They say you can’t have any success as a missionary if you don’t love your companion, and I really don’t love mine.”

He laughed. “If that were true, I never would have had any success on my mission. Sometimes loving your companion means that you keep yourself from punching him in the nose. If all you can do is put up with him, that’s loving him.”

I was so relieved. I knew I could put up with Grolsch, but developing a genuine love—even liking him—was simply impossible.

I arrive at the MTC

The Missionary Training Center (or MTC, which is what most Mormons call it) stands at the northernmost end of the Brigham Young University campus, in Provo, Utah, just down the hill from a gleaming white temple that at the time had a golden spire pointing heavenward. The buildings, made of light-orange brick, are utilitarian in design, most of them housing either classrooms or dormitories. A large administration building stood at the front, the flags of several nations posted along the semicircular drive marking the MTC entrance.

I got up early and dressed in my suit: a brown pinstriped wool blend I had picked up cheap in the garment district, a wool sweater vest underneath, the only extravagance a gold tie bar my sister had given me for Christmas. We stopped at BYU to have breakfast in the student union, where I posed for a last photo with my parents in front of a large snowbank.

We pulled into a driveway that was already jammed with missionaries and their parents unloading luggage from their cars. We got my two suitcases out of the trunk, and Mom and I waited on the sidewalk while Dad parked the car.

When he arrived, we walked into the lobby of the building, where an elderly woman directed us to a large chapel to one side. Most of the new missionaries had the same look on their faces that I am sure I had. They looked a little scared, but mostly just sort of resigned, as if they knew they were now part of something well beyond their control.

The head of the MTC then stood at the podium and welcomed us. He told us that the Lord was pleased with our decision to serve him, and that here we would learn how to be true servants of the Lord. He outlined a few rules—no visitors, no phone calls, no fraternizing with the opposite sex—and then told us it was time to say goodbye to our loved ones. I hugged my parents and told them I loved them, and then I walked out the door to a different life.

The hallway outside the door was lined with tables, behind each of which sat a person with a notebook. As you passed each table, you gave your name, and they gave you the appropriate items: a black name tag with “ELDER WILLIAMS” and the church logo (in Spanish, of course) stamped in white letters; a copy of Spanish for Missionaries, a thick, red, paperbound book containing basic grammar and vocabulary that we missionaries would need; a Spanish hymnal; the University of Chicago Spanish Dictionary; a room key; and a “White Bible,” the small plastic-bound booklet containing a list of missionary rules and a small certificate showing that I was indeed an authorized minister of the church.

I followed the directions I had been given and found my room. The room looked like a typical low-rent college dorm: two bunk beds at opposite corners, with a large double wardrobe and dresser at the foot of each. For some strange reason, there was an enormous stack of empty soda cans against one wall, reaching up past the windows. The industrial-grade carpet was rust-colored, with rough curtains to match.

The room assignment listed my companion as an Elder Grolsch, who arrived as I was unpacking my clothes and arranging them in the wardrobe. Grolsch was a little shorter than I was, with dark brown hair; very light, freckled skin; and intense light-green eyes. A wrestler in high school, he had a thick neck; broad, muscular shoulders; and a tiny waist. He told me that he was from northern Idaho, a place of pine forests and beautiful mountains. It sounded like a nice place.

After lunch we had another orientation meeting. The speaker stressed two things. First, we needed to learn to love our companions because if we didn’t love them, we couldn’t have the Spirit with us. And without the Spirit, we could not teach effectively. Second, we needed to make sure we had confessed every sin before we left for our mission assignments. If we had “unresolved sins,” we needed to confess and repent now, before it was too late. Carrying around the burden of sin would also deprive us of the Spirit.

Then we went to our first class, which was held in a small classroom perhaps ten feet by 15 feet, if that. Each of us had a desk/chair like you would find in a high school classroom. On one cinder-block wall was a large chalkboard, and the other three held posters representing the countries where our group would be going: Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru.

Besides Elder Grolsch, there were four other male missionaries in our group. Michaels was a friendly guy from suburban Salt Lake City who struck me as not being particularly bright. His companion, Elder Gonzales, was a Puerto Rican guy from Brooklyn, New York, who was four years older than we were at 23. Elder Lynn was from the San Joaquin Valley in California, and we immediately hit it off. The last guy was Elder Justice, a very tall and very quiet guy from somewhere in Oklahoma. They were all going to Rosario, Argentina.

Two women (“hermanas,” or sisters) were assigned to our group. Hermana Taylor was from Texas and already spoke fluent Spanish, having lived in Mexico for many years while she was growing up. Hermana Marshall was quiet with almond-shaped blue eyes and red hair. Both Hermana Marshall and Hermana Taylor were heading for Arequipa, Peru.

Our instructor, Elder Haver, was a guy who was joking so often that you never knew when he was being serious. He had done his mission in Venezuela and during the next couple of months would enjoy telling us stories of rule-breaking and fun P-day activities. I think he mostly liked seeing the utter shock in our faces when we heard such things, which were definitely not in the White Bible.

We would have three regular classes during the day, and we were expected to make the most of our time both to learn Spanish and to memorize the lessons (called “discussions”) we were to teach. In the morning, we met with Elder Foote, a painfully thin guy who had recently returned from Chile and who would regularly update us on his dating progress. Haver had the afternoon shift, and Elder Curtis had the evening Practica y Repaso (practice and review, or P and R, for short). Curtis, who had also been in Chile, would write his favorite quotes and sayings on the board in Spanish and challenge us to interpret them. I liked all three of them, though they were very different in temperament and personality.

That first evening we would have “branch meeting,” where we met to worship with about a hundred other missionaries, all of whom were going to Spanish-speaking missions.

Before dinner, we were handed a slip that read as follows:

Soy Elder _______
Voy a la mision _________

In branch meeting, the branch president would call us each up to the front of the chapel where we would read the slips to tell people who we were and which mission we were going to.

Grolsch thought it was a good idea to practice. I had taken four years of Spanish in high school, so I went first:

“Soy Elder Williams. Voy a la mision Bolivia Cochabamba.”

“Nooooo!” shouted Grolsch. “That’s not it at all!”

“What do you mean?” It seemed pretty straightforward to me.

“It’s not Co-CHA-bamba,” he said, clearly indignant at my butchering of the city name. “It’s Co-KA-bamba.”

“I’m pretty it’s not,” I said, trying to be helpful.

“Look, I know Spanish, and you have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, looking far too happy with himself. So I just ignored him.

At the meeting, I stood there in front of all those missionaries and read the line the way I knew it was supposed to be read.

After giving me a very dirty look, Grolsch said, very loudly, “Soy Elder Grolsch. Voy a la mission Bolivia Cokabamba.”

Several missionaries snickered, and the branch president said into the microphone, “I believe that’s pronounced Co-CHA-bamba.”

Grolsch’s face was red with humiliation, so I didn’t say anything.

We went to bed that night sleeping in opposite corners in the bottom bunks, as we didn’t have roommates. I really couldn’t believe I was actually in the MTC. I had felt like my life had been planned up to this moment, but I wasn’t sure what was coming.

The Farewell

The rest of the Fall semester is kind of a blur. Greg was going through the interview process so he could go on a mission, but his was a little rockier trip.

“I had to confess something to the bishop,” he said. “I chewed on a boob. I won’t do it again.”

Somehow, he didn’t sound all that repentant to me, but he said his bishop wanted him to wait a little before going. For the first time in our lives, we wouldn’t be doing something major together.

I had wanted to leave without any attachments, so I had pretty much given up on dating. But I had started jogging with a girl named Marie whom I’d known the year before. We would jog for an hour or so and then sit on her kitchen floor sipping water and talking, sometimes until late. I thought we were just kind of hanging out together until one day she introduced me as her boyfriend. And just that quick I was her boyfriend. But we weren’t really talking about the future, just enjoying each other’s company. She worked in the cafeteria at the MTC, and she said she couldn’t quite picture me as a missionary, but she was sure I would be a good one.

At the end of the semester, I drove home with some friends. I wasn’t focused at all on Christmas, as I had a lot of shopping to do for my mission. My mom and I went to the garment district in downtown Los Angeles to get a suit, some slacks, several ties, and a lot of white shirts.

Christmas was pretty quiet, as most of my family gave me things I would need for my mission: a wind-up alarm clock, warm gloves, and a missionary journal to write in.

Before I was to leave, I needed to give a farewell address at church. In those days this was a pretty big deal when your family got to plan the meeting for the Sunday before you left. My parents decided that my mom would talk about missionary work in general and my dad would talk about me. My father is not one who gets emotional, so mom figured he would be better at the farewell.

My mom managed to get through her talk and cry only a couple of times. What surprised me was how emotional my father was when he spoke. I’d never seen him like that, and it made it difficult for me to give my talk, which incidentally was about how important it was to teach people about Joseph Smith and how he restored the true church to the earth.

After the meeting, my dad said he would be a few minutes late, as he had to talk to the bishop about going to the temple. He wanted to the temple with me just once before I left for the MTC. My father hadn’t been to the temple since the day he had been married 25 years before. It had apparently been a traumatic experience for him, and he had not wanted to go again, until now.

That afternoon we had a little reception at the house, and several people pressed checks into my hand, so I suddenly had money for an extra suit. When it was over, I drove to the stake president’s house to be “set apart” as a missionary. From this moment, I would be a dedicated missionary and would have to live by missionary rules.

The stake president laid his hands on my head and made me an official representative of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He pronounced blessings on my head, that I would be protected and that my faithful service would bless my family at home. I took great comfort in that, as my family was half in the church and half out. The way he said it, it sounded like I could help my family come back into the church if I was faithful in serving as a missionary. I vowed that I would be.

We came home to a college football game on TV, and I retired to my bedroom to read, knowing that I wasn’t supposed to watch television anymore.

The next day Greg and I went together with our parents to the Los Angeles temple for Greg’s first endowment. I still felt uneasy about the whole thing, but I rested on the emotions I had felt that day in Salt Lake. Greg was more than a little freaked out by the whole thing, as was my father.

“I wish they would take some of that stuff out,” my dad said as we came out of the dressing room.

“It’s just symbolism,” I said. “It’s not a big deal.”

After a lunch of sushi in West LA, we got in the car and headed to Utah, arriving late at night. I slept on a couch in my sister’s apartment. I had given her all my vinyl records, and for some reason, I lay awake in the middle of the night listening to The Police’s “Synchronicity,” but feeling a little guilty about it.

The next morning we got up and did some last-minute shopping. My mother asked my aunt, who lived in Provo, where a good store was to buy a suit. She told her to take me to Mr. Mac, the low-quality store that catered to the unwitting missionary and his family. I pleaded with them not to take me there, but Mom insisted. I ended up with a hideous navy-blue “Swedish knit” suit and a crappy overcoat with a label that read “Made in Czechoslovakia.” I could see the salespeople looking at us like we were sitting ducks.

I went to bed that night wondering what the next day would bring, the day my mission officially began and I entered the Missionary Training Center, where I would live for the next two months.

I Go to the Temple

The next step was going to the temple. Every day for a year and a half I had seen the gleaming white Provo temple on the hill above our student dorms, and I had wondered what went on in there. I went home for a funeral a couple of weeks after I got my mission call, so I took advantage of the time to get my temple recommend.

The bishop didn’t say much about what I could expect, just that I would receive my “endowment,” wherein I would be endowed with power from on high to exercise my priesthood in righteousness and teach the gospel. The stake president, one level higher than the bishop in the church hierarchy, was a lot more forthcoming.

“Don’t worry if the experience seems odd or troubling the first time,” he said. I honestly hadn’t contemplated the possibility that it might be anything but a spiritual high. But then I had no idea what went on in the temple.

“First you’ll be taken to a dressing room where you’ll change into a ‘shield,’ which is a thin covering like a poncho. But don’t worry; you won’t be completely naked.”

OK, now I was starting to worry. Shield? Naked? What did it mean?
“Then a temple worker will anoint your body with oil and water and pronounce certain blessings on you.”

My head was spinning at this point.

“Then you’ll be clothed in your priesthood garments.” Garments I knew about. These were the special underwear that “endowed” Mormons wore: basically a scoop-necked t-shirt and knee-length shorts with special markings in them.

“Then you’ll watch a film that describes the creation of the world and the Fall of Adam. You’ll be given signs and tokens by which you’ll be able to return to the presence of the Savior.”

He must have sensed that I was a little panicked.

“Like I said, it’s not that big of a deal. You get used to it.”

I went home and asked my parents if we could go to the temple together over the Thanksgiving holiday, and my father said he would try and get a recommend by then.

Thanksgiving came and went, and Dad still didn’t have a recommend. Disappointed, I went instead to our medical clinic to get the vaccinations I would need: 5 in all. Then I went to the Federal Building in Los Angeles to apply for a passport.

The week after Thanksgiving, I arranged to meet my grandfather at the Provo Temple so he could be my escort through the endowment. When I awoke that morning it was snowing, and I trudged up the hill to the temple carrying a paper bag containing a brand-new pair of garments, still in their plastic bags.

First I was taken to the dressing room to put on the shield. My stake president hadn’t quite done it justice. It was nearly transparent and covered only the front and back. I clutched the sides together, trying to cover myself even a little bit as I walked through the dressing room toward the “initiatory” booth, a small curtained area where an elderly man dressed in white dipped water from a small ladle and with his finger touched various parts of my body, pronouncing blessings as he went. He got a little too close for comfort when he anointed my “loins.” He then repeated the process using olive oil.

Finally, it was time to be “clothed in the garment of the holy priesthood.” The man explained a little about the sacred nature of these garments, and then held out the bottom for me to step into and then pulled them up to my waist. He then pulled the top over my head and tucked them in. There is nothing quite like having an elderly stranger put your underwear on you.

Thoroughly bewildered at this point, I was taken back to the dressing room, where I put on white slacks, a white dress shirt, white tie, and white slippers. I was handed a folded cloth “packet” about 1 foot square and then taken to another booth, a blue scrap of paper pinned to my shirt indicating that I was here for my own endowment. In the booth, I was given a new name, Jeremiah, which I was told was sacred and was never to be repeated at any time except at a certain point in the temple. I was then reunited with my grandfather, and we were taken to the endowment room.

The room looked like a movie theater (because that’s what it was) with theater seats done in pale colors with gold carpet. At the front stood a small, padded altar with a lace cover. We sat in the front row, which apparently was reserved for newcomers like me.

A man stood behind the altar and pushed a button on the back of it. The lights dimmed, and we were reminded that we had been washed, anointed, and clothed, and that we were about to make sacred covenants, or promises to God. If we wanted to back out, we could leave now. Not knowing what was coming, I wasn’t about to back out now.

Then the movie started.

Unseen voices narrated the creation of the world, which was shown with very bad special effects and stock footage of scenery, plants, and animals. God the Father (called Elohim in the film) sent his son Jesus (called Jehovah) and Adam (who was Michael) to manage the “six creative periods” and create what we now know as the earth. After each day they would return and report to the Father in meticulous detail what they had done. I’ve always wondered why an omniscient God would need anyone to report back to Him, but I digress.

Michael was then created in the image of God (but for some reason we were told that “this is simply figurative”) and placed in the Garden of Eden and to be joined later by Eve. After a few idyllic moments, a jovial man with curly brown hair, a beard, and a twinkle in his eye appeared. This was Satan, who was there to tempt Adam and Eve. Adam of course refused to eat the fruit, but Eve, realizing that eating the fruit was necessary for human progress, reluctantly ate.

The jolly Satan suddenly seemed a little more menacing as God returned and Adam and Eve hurriedly made fig-leaf aprons to hide their shame. We put on our own green aprons, too.

God appeared and cursed Satan for what he had done and cast him out of the garden, putting “enmity” between Satan and Eve’s descendants. Satan didn’t take it too well. Said he:

Then with that enmity I will take the treasures of the earth, and with gold and silver I will buy up armies and navies, Popes and priests, and reign with blood and horror on the earth!

Needless to say, I was a little spooked by the whole thing. We then made covenants with God, the first being that we men would obey God and the women would obey us in righteousness. We raised our arms to the square and said “yes” we would obey.

Next we agreed in the same way to obey the law of sacrifice, which meant that we would promise to “sacrifice all that we possess, even our own lives if necessary, in sustaining and defending the Kingdom of God.” I was certainly ready to do that, and I again raised my arm to the square and said “yes.”

This time the covenant was accompanied by a token, a name, and a penalty. The token was a special handshake, the name was the new name (Jeremiah, in my case), and the penalty was a pantomime of having my throat slit; we were told, “The representation of the execution of the penalties indicates different ways in which life may be taken.” The narrative implied that the penalty meant that we would rather die a violent death than reveal these things:

We desire to impress upon your minds the sacred character of the … tokens of the Holy Priesthood, with their names, signs, and penalties, which you will receive in the temple this day. They are most sacred, and are guarded by solemn covenants and obligations of secrecy to the effect that under no condition, even at the peril of your life, will you ever divulge them.

Other covenants followed with their accompanying tokens, names, signs, and penalties, each as graphic as the last.

Adam (and we by proxy) was cast out of the garden and into the lone and dreary world. Satan again appeared, this time accompanied by a sectarian minister, a buffoonish character apparently representing the rest of Christianity with its apostate notions about God. Clearly, we were meant to understand that ministers outside the church were unwittingly in Satan’s employ.

With each covenant, we put on more temple robes until we were wearing a sort of baker’s hat, a robe over one shoulder, a sash around the waist, and the green apron. The women wore long veils.

In the film the apostles Peter, James, and John, soon arrived to cast out Satan and attempt to steer us and Adam onto the correct path toward heaven. But Satan had a parting word:

I have a word to say concerning these people. If they do not walk up to every covenant they make at these altars in this temple this day, they will be in my power!

At this point I was terrified. I could hardly remember all the covenants I had made, and I was sure that, being such a weak person, I would probably break them all.

The endowment finished up with our standing in a circle in the “true order of prayer,” during which we did all the signs and handshakes. And then we approached the veil of the temple, a white curtain through which we would give the tokens and their names. A man would stand on the other side of the veil and put his hand through an opening; we would clasp the hand in the appropriate token and whisper the names through the veil.

For the last token, we had to repeat a long “name” (really a recitation of a very long sentence fragment) on the “five points of fellowship. As the narrator explained, “The Five Points of Fellowship are ‘inside of right foot by the side of right foot, knee to knee, breast to breast, hand to back, and mouth to ear.” Thus, we embraced the man on the other side of the curtain while he whispered the name to us and we whispered it back.

Finally, we were brought through the veil into an ornate room meant to represent heaven. Here, we had been told, we could sit and ponder, or we could ask questions of our escorts (my grandfather in my case) if we wanted to. Throughout the endowment ceremony, I had been turning to my grandpa with questions, but he kept saying, “Be quiet, or you’ll miss something.” Once we were through the veil, I had so much I wanted to ask, but he looked at his watch and said he needed to get home. I went home that day troubled and emotionally exhausted. How could something so beautiful have been so traumatic for me?

I went back to my dorm room gloomy and depressed.

“Was it amazing?” Greg asked, clearly wanting to know more about what went on in that mysterious building.”

“I really don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

“Oh, right, you’re not supposed to talk about it. Got it,” he said.

But that wasn’t really it. I couldn’t sleep that night, for the first time in my life worried that going on a mission might be a mistake.

All that week I worried, but I remembered that the bishop said I would get used to it. I finally told my friend Terry, who had just returned from his mission in Arizona, about my struggles. We decided to go to Salt Lake City and attend the temple there. This was the famous granite structure that most people think of when they imagine a Mormon temple.

We managed to get a ride to Salt Lake with a guy who was trying to impress my sister. All through the ceremony the same troubling thoughts kept coming back, and I found myself fidgeting and wishing it would just end. Why couldn’t I feel right about this? Why did I feel so creepy and uncomfortable?

I prayed hard for God to give me a sign that this was really His temple. I knew I couldn’t go on a mission if this wasn’t really true, so I pleaded for Him to show me. That moment I felt a surge of emotion throughout my body so powerful that I began weeping. I had my sign, and I knew I was doing the right thing.