My last entry for Five Little Monkeys was long and drawn out, but there is another story needing telling, since there needs to be a little clarifying.
I loved my mission, though it was very hard. For anyone who ever thinks that I have kowtowed and followed my priesthood leadership like a little lamb, they do not know me. They do not know me.
This is my version of the story. It started with the mission president switch out. President Gillette loved sister missionaries. This permeated through out the mission. We were treated like favorite daughters, and there weren't a few of us. President Gillette would take sisters who got sick in other countries and visa waiters. If a sister needed a place to serve her mission, he and Sister Gillette welcomed them. There were over 40 sisters in the mission when I came in.
President Munns had a different way of working. He got the elders. He did not get us. He would speak to the elders for a long time during their interviews, making us wait, so that we could spend 5 minutes with him, almost like an afterthought. The pre-Munns sister missionaries stopped being called as trainers. Sisters who had been out a month were training. President Munns stopped asking for large amounts of sisters to be sent in. There were only 18 sisters when I left. Fine. Fine. Just a different way. Fine.
Then came my downfall. Our Zone Leaders kept making fun of one of the elders. It made me mad. He was different, but he did the work. We should build each other up, not take each other down. My companion and I confronted them and they got angry and said we shouldn't mind what they did because we weren't being made fun of. At that point, I called the mission president. At that point, I became a tattle tale. I got sent to the "outer darkness" of the mission for the rest of my time there.
Every time, for the next 6 months, when I would get a new district leader, they would tell me that they had been warned about me. They would also say that they knew what they were told was wrong. I got the sisters as companions that no one else wanted to get a long with. I got my hardest companion twice. We worked hard. We were obedient. We learned to love each other and the work. It didn't make a lot of it easier.
I could not wait to leave. I actually left a week early, because my parents came out to Massachusetts to get me and had been told that I would be released at a certain time. The transfer date got changed, but plans had already been made. At that release interview, I could barely look at President Munns. I was pretty angry. When he told me not to expect to get married for three years, oh, how that rankled. How dare he?!
My repentance on this hasn't been easy, but it has taught me lessons that I hope I can apply to the rest of my life. I don't know how much of what happened I could have done differently and still been right before Heavenly Father. I do know that the anger did not serve me well. However, I have come to terms with the fact that the fall out from that one action is on the heads of people other than me.
I have learned that our leadership will not always meet with our approval. They will get things wrong. They will say the wrong thing. There will be misunderstandings. That doesn't change my responsibility for my actions. If I raise my arm to the square and sustain my leader, then I need to sustain them. Obviously not through wickedness, but through those aforementioned differences and distractions. I need to pray for my leaders. I also need to trust the system that Heavenly Father has in place. I do. It was that trust in Him that helped me to get through this and to a point where I can look back at the story and feel sadness for what could have been, but not anger.
And the last thing President Munns said to me? Well, that never was about him. I may have heard it colored by my own anger or perhaps by his disdain of me. It was never about him. It was a message from a loving Heavenly Father through the conduit of my current priesthood leadership. It was a gift that I can see now and the sting is gone.
No comments:
Post a Comment