Most Important Lesson From Your Mission


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I'd like to ask folks to share what tremendous life lessons or spiritual lessons you learned on your mission that isn't too personal.

Here's what came to my mind.  I really had an easy time with scholastics-- all the way through high school graduation.  I was under the impression that most of my life would be easy.  It just didn't occur to me that my difficulties associating with people and with dealing with a lot of other life issues would be an impediment.

During my mission, I found that my academic knowledge didn't really help.  Here and there I could bring up a scripture that was helpful.  But most of my mission was simply a beat-down.  I just endured it.  It felt like two years of torture.  I just endured it. I thought of it as one of the worst experiences in my life.

What I learned afterwards was that life isn't really supposed to be easy.  And it isn't.  But anything that is really worth it is also really worth working hard for it.  Those things that I can do easily because I was born that way are not something I take a lot of pride in anymore.  But those things that I've had to really work at, where I had to learn to be good at, makes me feel like I've actually done something.

I also came to realize that my ability to just take a beating has helped me in other aspects of my life.

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46 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

During my mission, I found that my academic knowledge didn't really help.  Here and there I could bring up a scripture that was helpful.  But most of my mission was simply a beat-down.  I just endured it.  I thought of it as one of the worst experiences in my life.

I had more or less the same experience.  While missions are perhaps "the best two years" for many extroverts, I think they can be very difficult sometimes for introverts like myself, no matter how hard we work.  I personally tried very hard, kept the rules, and tried to make it click, but never quite figured out how to "do" mission work well - I never really knew what to say to people and that kind of thing.  As a result, my performance was always mediocre, and for someone who was a straight-A student in high school, that was hard to accept and sometimes very demoralizing, especially as it seemed to come so naturally for so many others.  I had a really horrible experience late in my mission that directly tested my commitment to the gospel in a way it has never been tested before or since.  I am glad I went on my mission and tried it for the Lord, but I have to be honest - I did not have a classic "good" mission.

Which leads to the lesson I took home from this - being a good missionary does not necessarily equate to being a good member of the Church, and being a good member of the Church does not necessarily equate to being a good missionary.  When I got home, everything was OK again - I went to college on a full scholarship, I was active in the singles' ward, I got married in the temple, and everything was OK.  No one but me, my wife, and the Lord know that I simply did not have a very good mission.  On the other hand, some of the highest-flying missionaries in my mission got home and just lost it - I know of several who left the church, and at least one with a felony record!  To be fair, many high-flying missionaries from my mission got home and are currently wonderful members of the church and great examples of living the gospel.  Point being, you can be a good member of the Church even without having been a really good missionary.  You can also be a really good missionary and then proceed to come home and be a pretty awful Mormon.

You are not defined by your past failures.  Moreover, so long as you are still on this Earth, no past successes guarantee that you will live happily ever after.  No matter where you are, you can change your life for better or worse at any time.  I think this applies both within and outside the missionary context.

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41 minutes ago, DoctorLemon said:

I had a really horrible experience late in my mission that directly tested my commitment to the gospel in a way it has never been tested before or since.

 

If I can be honest, I did learn something else from this really horrible late-mission experience (which I do not wish to discuss in detail, but did NOT involve sin or worthiness issues, in case you are wondering).  The experience forced me to closely evaluate my testimony and commitment to the gospel for several years after my mission.  Through this study and introspection, I eventually came away with a far stronger and more resilient testimony than I ever had beforehand.  Indeed, this horrible experience helped me move away from my perhaps innocent, and blind, faith and towards really getting to know the gospel and becoming truly converted and embracing the Church.  It helped me move from a testimony of innocence to a much stronger testimony of experience, complete with a much more complete knowledge of the gospel, how the Church works, and the Lord's love for all of us.  As such, this horrible experience, which occurred in the middle of my mission, directly led me to become the person I am today.  

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For myself I did learn many things that have helped me and made me the person I am today.  I served in Leeds England from 79-81.   I was shy and raised in a dysfunctional family.   When I first arrived I struggled.   I took it upon myself to buy and read the book titled ....How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.   Thru the power of prayer and that book woke me up and brought me out of my shell.  I served a successful two year mission for the Lord and did the best I could.  Did not baptism many but my mission was still successful.   A few things I learned was Charity and Humility and a testimony of Jesus Christ.  

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I loved my mission. But, it was one of the most difficult experiences of my life. As a missionary, living with companions, we certainly learn all our faults and weaknesses! lol. I can laugh about it now, but at the time, it was so excruciating. The discussions were hard for me to memorize, and I castigated myself over my seeming inability to memorize them. I did manage it finally, but it was a long time coming. I have a phone phobia to this day that I think stemmed from my mission. I had such a hard time making myself understood with my American accent. The German language did not come easy for me. I would panic whenever I had to make phone calls to set up appointments or rearrange times, etc.  I was able to make myself understood so much easier in person. To this day, I have a hard time picking up the phone and making a phone call, and that started out in the mission field.

When I look back, the reason my mission was one of the best experiences of my life was because I came to understand some of my strengths. One strength I learned about myself was my love for people. I loved my companions, even the difficult ones. I loved all the Elders and Sisters! I loved our investigators. I loved the members over there. That is what made it so worthwhile. I forged friendships that are eternal. And, the few investigators I taught who joined the church brought me so much joy! It reminds me of Ammon in the Book of Mormon. That is an experience I would never want to give up. I love them so much, even to this day!

In Germany, missionaries don't get a lot of baptisms. There is rejection after rejection every single day. Physically, it was hard. We did a lot of tracting. There were several cities I worked in where I rode a bike. That is no easy feat with a skirt! I had several crashes, and as I fell, I would be trying to pull my skirt down, so I didn't show the world my underwear. 

I left on my mission with faith and hope that the church was true. I came home with a firm testimony. What I came to realize was the love my Savior had for me individually. There was a time when I was so upset about a certain personal experience, that I didn't know if I could overcome it. I literally felt someone hugging me when I had been on my knees praying for hours. I have no idea who that was, but I tend to think it was probably my father who passed away when I was 6 years old.

So, yes. My mission was difficult! But, I am so grateful for the experiences I went through. 

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My mission experience was the culmination of joy and misery, it is where I finally understood what the Lord meant in scripture where he said if not for opposition all things, "if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead." ( 2 Nephi 2: 11)

I loved my mission, not because it was easy, but because I learned by deep spiritual knowledge that I was indeed a "Son of God" by witness from the Spirit of all truth. I learned that God works through dreams. I learned that God will provide dreams for learning and the conversion of his children. I thought it most interesting that these dreams, I encountered, centered around three truth: 1) This is the only true and living church 2) Families are indeed eternal 3) The Book of Mormon is the word of God.

I remember one difficult time where pride entered into my heart and caused issues with my companionship (the sad thing is that we worked so well together). I blamed my companion for my shortcomings. I knelt down in prayer addressing my concerns with our Heavenly Father and to which I said, "Father, if not for my companions pride we would have been more successful." I can count on my two hands the number of times I have actually received an answer while kneeling and this one one of them. "Anddenex, it is not that he was prideful, it is that you were prideful." My prayer changed from hubris to repentance. The next time I saw my companion I asked his forgiveness and told him what I experienced. To my dismay, he said the same prayer and he received a similar answer and he apologized to me. We prayed we would serve again together, but was never answered. I learned to look inward when issues result in a companionship, this lesson has blessed my marriage, as I realized if arguments occur I am rarely innocent, and fortunately my companion is of a similar heart and mind.

These thoughts suffice for me for this thread.

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Guest LiterateParakeet

Carb, I love this question and I'm so glad you asked.   I confess I haven't read the other responses yet (first I must impulsively share my thoughts) but I look forward to doing so!!!

I don't recall ever thinking about this before, but when I read your subject title, I knew immediately what the answer would be.  It's is my self-esteem.  I had a troubled childhood (as I have mentioned here before) and so as commonly occurs I had a very low self-esteem.  I was on my mission in 1989 when Elder Nelson gave the talk, Woman--Of Infinite Worth.  It had a profound effect on me.  I wrote down this quote and kept it with me.

"Her self-esteem cannot be based on physical features, possession or lack of a particular talent, or comparative quantities of anything. Her self-esteem is earned by individual righteousness and a close relationship with God. Her outward glow is generated by goodness within. And her patience is much more apparent than any imperfection."  https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1989/10/woman-of-infinite-worth?lang=eng

On my mission when it was just the Lord and I surrounded by strangers (granted these strangers: companions and such quickly became friends) I really came to rely on the Lord and know Father, Christ and the Holy Ghost in a closer way than I had before.  I came to understand that they loved me and felt I had great value (as do all of you!) and that there was only ONE opinion that mattered.  The Godhead.  They loved me and that was all that mattered.  Sure, there are things about myself that I don't like and want to change, but overall, I have a healthy self-esteem. And it all started with my mission.  

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 My fear is that I did not learn enough on my mission. I had a great mission, I loved it, and for sure it has had a lasting and powerful effect on my life. And for sure, I gained many many and greater understandings of things than what I had before my mission. However, due mostly to my slothfulness, but many other factors, such as time, competing priorities, a broader range of responsibilities now than what i had as a missionary, and perhaps the generally lower level of daily spiritual life that many of us live in after the spiritual highs of mission life, many of the understandings that I gained on my mission have not had as much or as long lasting an impact as they should have. The impact of lessons fade without repeated application, and my application has not always been as good as it should have been. 

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10 minutes ago, askandanswer said:

 My fear is that I did not learn enough on my mission. I had a great mission, I loved it, and for sure it has had a lasting and powerful effect on my life. And for sure, I gained many many and greater understandings of things than what I had before my mission. However, due mostly to my slothfulness, but many other factors, such as time, competing priorities, a broader range of responsibilities now than what i had as a missionary, and perhaps the generally lower level of daily spiritual life that many of us live in after the spiritual highs of mission life, many of the understandings that I gained on my mission have not had as much or as long lasting an impact as they should have. The impact of lessons fade without repeated application, and my application has not always been as good as it should have been. 

Don't be so hard on yourself bro. I'm sure you touched many lives on your mission and learned a great deal. 

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To be short in writing:

 

1. The Spirit is never wrong and will never lead astray. Learning to decipher the Holy Ghost's promptings is the key to Eternal Life, but is going to be a lifelong process. 

 

2. Most people are more interested in justifying what they want the truth to be rather than trying to discover what the Truth actually is. Therefore, see #1. 

 

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Mission President told us to make a decision right then and there on how we were going to live the rest of our lives and commit to keeping a higher standard. Specifically he mentioned rated R movies. I know this can be debated, but I decided that I wasn't going to do it and it has stuck. I have made other commitments based off of this discussion he had with us. 

I had a companion that showed me by example what it meant to teach by the spirit. Make no mistake, we had a ton of fun teaching, but I have never forgotten how strong the Holy Ghost testified to me when he taught. Because of these times, and others in my life, I cannot deny the gospel or it's teachings. They are my anchor experiences when any doubt creeps in. 

 

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  • pam featured this topic

I learned many valuable lessons on my mission. I do not know how to prioritize them. Some of those lessons were of eternal worth, and others doubtless, well, were not. Here is a non-prioritized list of a few of these lessons.

  • I learned that I am not as smart as I thought I was, and that in some areas, I'm actually pretty dull.
  • I learned a love for linguistics that I never even suspected.
  • I learned humility. Lots and lots and lots and lots of humility. It has been an ongoing, painful, and vitally important lesson.
  • I learned of my own ignorance about gospel topics, which I had believed myself well-versed in, as well as many other subjects.
  • I learned that people see things from their own perspectives and based on their own experiences, and that those perspectives and experiences might not line up well with my own.
  • I learned that people who see things as listed above and who are at complete loggerheads with me might well be right.
  • I learned that there was a lot of resentment toward the US, some of it justified.
  • I learned that I needed to choose how to live my life: Was a a dyed-in-the-wool Mormon, or a part-time philosophical Mormon? Did I actually believe and practice the things that I professed? Was the whole gospel thing nothing but a nice philosophy, a good idea, a place to take the kids on Sunday, or was it a reality in my life? (This was one of those life-changing things, and it happened before, during, and after my mission, but my mission was a catalyst for the whole thing.)
  • I learned that, to be blunt, I wasn't a very good missionary. I was obedient and I tried, but I really wasn't very effective.
  • I learned that some guys are great to be around and associate with, and others you just need to put up with.
  • I learned that for some people, I'm that first kind of guy, and for other people, I'm the second.

In other news: MormonHub, huh?

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Perhaps similar to Vort's mention of non-prioritized lessons, I have difficulty identifying a "most important" one. But I often find myself thinking about the contrast between the me-and-mine-centered world view I held when I occupied my bubble before my mission to an all-of-us-together world view after I stepped outside and realized I didn't want to go back. For me it was like leaving Smallville and gradually noticing a world filled with colors coming into my view. It was gradual sometimes and came in fits and starts at other times. Sometimes the lesson activities were blunt, and other times they were poignant and tender. 

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The only thing I brought from my mission was that I was taught to persevere in the face of brutal, difficult trials.  I suffered from major depression until I turned 54.  I had it horribly on my mission.  I had extreme social anxiety and meeting new people literally made me sick.  Knocking on doors was a major trial for me and I averaged about 55 hours a week tracting.  I wasn't overweight to begin with, but the first three months of my mission, I lost 25 pounds because I simply could not eat.  None of my companions understood what was going on and my mission president didn't help.  Up to that point in time, my mission was the most miserable two years of my life.

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The most important thing I learned on my mission was that Heavenly Father guides this Church and he loves me. That's pretty much it. 

Some odd things I learned. 

- The Church continues to grow despite the missionaries. 
- Not all members share the same beliefs about many things. I remember a heated argument in our apartment with a missionary who believed that the only purpose of sex was to have children and believed having sex with a spouse for any other reason was a sin. 
- There are individuals within the Church that believe the position they hold determines whether or not the Lord accepts them. How many they baptize and how quickly they made Senior, DL, ZL was super important to them. I grew up in an area with few LDS, but seeing this in the field really floored me.
- I'm different then most guys because I don't care about sports and my experiences in the field led me to believe that team sports bring out the worst in people. 

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My experience was much like @Carborendum and @DoctorLemon - I'm an introvert, and the missionary experience was nearly pure hell for me; compounded by the fact that it was the first thing I'd tried to do that I didn't really do well.

I think frankly the most valuable experience I had, though, was seeing (pardon the judgy-ness of this) bona fide bad guys working up the mission leadership ladder based on the number of people they were able to schmooze into getting baptized; and then seeing them use their authority to make everyone else's lives miserable.  I finally concluded that often a leadership calling represents God giving someone enough rope to either pull themselves out of the pit they've been mucking about in--or else, to just hang themselves.  It hasn't led me to view LDS leaders with fear and suspicion and paranoia, the way many LDS progressives seem to; but it has enabled me to love and learn from the many, many genuinely good leaders in the Church while still, when necessary, being able to steel my resolve and just say "Okay, Elder/Bishop/President; you go ahead and bluster about the mission/ward/quorum as you see fit, and I'll just stay over here quietly doing my thing knowing that sooner or later you'll be gone and I'll still be here".

Not sure that's the healthiest dynamic in the world to establish vis a vis Church leadership; but it's worked for me.  ;) 

Edited by Just_A_Guy
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1 hour ago, Just_A_Guy said:

My experience was much like @Carborendum and @DoctorLemon - I'm an introvert, and the missionary experience was nearly pure hell for me; compounded by the fact that it was the first thing I'd tried to do that I didn't really do well.

It has been really nice to just be able to talk about the mission experience honestly on this forum.  In LDS culture, when someone asks you "how did your mission go?"  you are expected to say, "it was the best two years!"  I understand the reasoning behind this, that you don't want to discourage youth from going, and I believe that for probably 80% of missionaries it really was honestly the best two years.  However, for the other 20% of us, it was not the best two years, and that can be hard to come to terms with, especially when we did everything "right" and it should have been a better experience than it was.  I know I silently struggled for many years to figure out exactly what went wrong on my mission and to come to a feeling of peace about it.  In any case, I am glad to see that I am not alone in having this experience.

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6 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

So, why 14000?  It would seem that 15000 is a more round number.

Not true at all! Both 14000 and 15000 have the same number of round digits - 000, although admittedly, the bottom part of 5 does appear to be more rounded than the triangular part of 4.

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I learned a lot from my mission. Here are just four lessons, one positive, one sort of negative, and then another two positives.

1.       1. I learned fairly early on in my mission, I think when I was still with my first companion, that love is the greatest motivator. There was no particular event or incident that led me to this conclusion. It came about as a result of pondering and reasoning, followed with reflection about the example of the Saviour’s love for us, and my observation of missionaries who appeared to be motivated by a sense of competition and pride. I couldn’t see that anything other than a total and sincere concern for the eternal well being of those whom I was called to serve could bring about the changes that they needed to make in order to be ready for baptism. To serve these people properly, and to really be a help to them, I needed to love them. After coming to this conclusion, I began to pray for a love for the Filipino people and it wasn’t long before the Lord began to bless me with what I had asked for. Its been a long time since my mission finished but this feeling the Lord blessed me with continues to linger. To this day, I continue to have an interest in the Philippines and enjoy associating with Filipinos and every now and then I go back to the Philippines. After my mission when I returned to university, I changed my course and studied anthropology and sociology, with a focus on South-East Asia. As part of my course I ended up doing many assessments that allowed me to explore and further develop my love of the Philippines and the Filipino people. And of course, I ended up marrying a Filipina who I had met on my mission.

 

2.       A day or two before I left for the MTC, I asked for a blessing from a friend. Certain promises were made towards me during that blessing. Perhaps somewhat pridefully, I paid more attention to the promises rather than to the conditions attached to the promises. When I arrived in the mission field, I went about sure in the knowledge that what had been promised would eventually come about. It never did, despite my hopes and expectations. Probably because I did nothing to bring them about. I just did my normal missionary activities and did nothing to earn, or work towards, or make myself ready for, the blessings that had been promised. I arrived home after my mission without having received the promised blessings. I learned from this that when it comes to receiving blessings, it is better to work than to wait.

 

3.       This third lesson is sort of like two combined. It relates to the importance of obedience and hard work. In almost every Zone Conference, the Assistants to the Mission President would provide us with training on what they promised us was a guaranteed successful method of increasing the number of investigators and baptisms. Many of the more experienced missionaries, sometimes including myself, would sort of roll our eyes and say no, this will never work, this is totally impractical, what a dumb idea, I’m not going to do this. But it was clear to me, that those missionaries who did faithfully follow the counsel that had been given, did experience the promised success. All that was needed on their part was faith in the counsel that had been given and a willingness to follow it and do what was required. The counsel might have seemed like a dumb idea, and inconsistent with my own experience and understanding, but when it was faithfully followed, it produced results.

 

4.       Closely related to this is my own experience with the blessings of hard work. I served in a mission that had many areas where tracting was not necessary. However, I ended up serving in some areas where tracting was necessary. When we had no referrals, we would tract, sometimes for weeks at a time. While we rarely got any really good investigators from tracting, when the Lord saw how hard we were trying, and how committed we were, He would often bless us with investigators from unexpected sources. I am convinced that He would not have blessed us with these investigators if we had not shown our commitment through our tracting. The lesson I learned from this is that if we are doing the right thing for the right reason, and working hard, the Lord will bless us, sometimes in ways that are not directly related to our efforts, but are definitely a result of our efforts.

Great topic Carb, its been helpful for me to reflect on this and write down a few thoughts.

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On 11/5/2016 at 5:32 PM, askandanswer said:

Not true at all! Both 14000 and 15000 have the same number of round digits - 000, although admittedly, the bottom part of 5 does appear to be more rounded than the triangular part of 4.

You are correct that both numbers have the same number of prime number denominators.  But in our base 10 system (specifically a 2x5 system) 15 is more round than 14 - arithmetically speaking.  And if you're talking about graphically, well, yes, 5 is more round than 4.  So, neener.

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