So I’m posting a nothing post on my blog, and I start browsing around the Mormon and LDS tagged blogs. I found this one:
I don’t know why reading this stuff and looking at his photos made me so depressed. He recites the same things we all did about our progressing investigators and how the Lord did all of it. He talks about mission politics (his companion is rumored to be a “frontrunner for ZL”). And there’s the obligatory missionaries-pointing-at-map photo. I have one of those somewhere, but I’m pointing a little farther south.
I swear that his photo album looks like it could have been taken back when I was in the MTC in 1984. Kids in suits look pretty much the same, and it looks like the furniture and decor in the MTC haven’t changed a bit in 24 years.
But in the end, I see a couple of kids wasting two years of their lives in a painful and ultimately pointless exercise. They’ll do their time and come home and give their report, complete with their testimony (and the really special ones will get to bear testimony in another language).
Sometimes I think a mission is a good thing in that it teaches kids to reach outside of themselves, but then you could learn that doing a lot more productive things.
March 20, 2008 at 12:20 pm |
yeah, pretty much my same impression. having been through that and now being where I am, I feel kinda bad for these kids.
March 20, 2008 at 12:28 pm |
I agree, I have been there as well. I expressed in a recent blog that i think the mission was a big waste of time. I learned hard work skills, but I hated trying to get converts. We did a lot of over the age baptism and part member stuff.
Exmo now.
March 21, 2008 at 8:54 am |
I read through it. The usual missionary ignorance/arrogance combo. People in Ohio talk “dumb” and mumble because have horrible teeth. (Too bad he can’t hear his own utard accent). I also think he has no idea that he seems to be out tracting among the working class; he’s entirely out of his milieu.
This was funny: “We share a message on a doorstep about how our families can be together, and be with god again. They agree with us, but before the door closes they say they are catholic. The catholics don’t even believe in that.” Good grasp of Catholicism there. I guess there’s no comparative religion study in the MTC, eh?
I know I should be sympathetic. I know the pressure and stress these kids are under. I know that Brother Chas’s ignorance of other parts of the united states is about par with that of many americans of his age.
But still. So depressing.