Stories: GODSPEED, ELDER LONSBERRY
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| Bob Lonsberry writes a newspaper column and lives in up state New York.
GODSPEED, ELDER LONSBERRY
My son became a Mormon missionary yesterday.
We sat through a briefing in a crowded auditorium and then they said it was time to leave. The families were to go through one door and the new missionaries were to go through another.
We stood up, my son and I, and hugged each other. I kissed him on the cheek and shook his hand and he turned and walked away.
I will see him again in two years.
I have never been happier.
We both had smiles on our faces. Full, joyful, gleeful smiles. I whistled as I walked past the long line of crying parents headed back out to the parking lot.
It started when he was a little boy, I guess. I showed him pictures of when I had been a missionary, and as the years passed it was mentioned often and it became an expectation. When you turn 19 you will go on a mission.
And then as 19 approached he had to make a decision. He had to decide what he wanted. He had to decide if it was his dream or his parents dream.
The hard part, as I look at it, is not what you go to, but what you leave behind. My son is a social guy, who is close to people and makes friends at the drop of a hat. He has a fun life, a very fun life. Things go his way. Hes on top of the world. And saying goodbye to that is hard. It is difficult for a young man to lay aside the fun and frolic of life for two years of no dating and no movies and no Friday nights with his friends.
Its no fun knocking on doors and asking people if you can talk to them about Jesus. Its no fun missing Christmas and birthdays and the warmth and love of hearth and home.
But thats what Mormon missionaries do.
And I wondered if that is what my son wanted to do.
He never told us what he decided. He merely mentioned that he had begun the process. That he had gone to this interview and that interview and a doctors appointment and that his paperwork was finalized and in.
And at Thanksgiving, home from college, a big envelope came from Salt Lake City. He was going to Mexico, it said, and was to report to the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, on the third of March two thousand and four.
For a long time he didnt tell his friends. For most of a month it was a family secret. A private thing we didnt want to explain or be asked about.
But slowly it came out and the people in his life who are overwhelmingly not Mormons seemed curious and understanding and proud. It became a good thing in their minds. They were happy for him.
And Sunday night at the Rochester airport he sobbed with his mother and sisters. Tears down their faces as the finality of parting rang home. They had spoken in church the week before, each in turn, and the farewell had lasted for weeks. But Sunday night it was real and it was hard.
Tuesday he and I went looking for some bald eagles, out by the Great Salt Lake, in an old Jeep in four-wheel drive, bouncing through the mud and snow, laughing as the splashed water washed in waves across the windshield. Later we went to a Brazilian grill for his last supper before going in. Guys with foreign names kept coming to our table, each offering delicious meat they carved from huge skewers.
For desert to take home we got chocolate cake that was $7 a slice and worth twice the price.
His is still half eaten in the refrigerator at the motel.
Yesterday dawned kind of tense and distant, neither one of us really quite there. This was jumping off time. This was the brick wall and youre going 90 miles an hour. This was Ive enjoyed the party but its time to pay the bill. We got around and said a prayer and carried his suitcases to the Jeep.
Then we went to Dennys. His late-night place. His hanging-with-his-friends place. There wasnt much for us to say. He only ate half of his breakfast.
We got to Provo an hour early and drove past his apartment from school. Then we walked through the bookstore and stood for long minutes watching a ballroom dancing class.
On the way back to the Jeep we passed the college bowling alley and my son suggested we play a game of air hockey. It was 40 minutes before he was to report and I got change and he got the paddles and we tied at one game apiece before we put our suit jackets back on and left.
The training center is a big complex of buildings, and on Wednesdays when the new missionaries come old men, volunteers, stand out front in vests directing you where to go. You unload the missionary and his luggage and then the parents go to park and they get back together under a big canopy, where families of every type take pictures and clutch handkerchiefs.
For me, it happened when I walked through the door. It was as if someone had flipped a switch. A feeling of relief and then joy. Big full-face grinning joy. My son came in a different door and stood briefly in a line to get his nametag a white lettering on black background thing that slides onto his pocket and which will for the next two years define him.
He carried it to me to pin on him.
He had the same smile on his face.
All the anxiety, all the sadness, all the uncertainty and sense of loss. For the two of us, it was gone. Wiped away. Replaced with a sense of rightness and gratitude. I dont know if weve ever been happier.
We took pictures and looked around and then went to the auditorium for the meeting. It was kind of a whir. Spiritual and sweet, but kind of in the way. He was champing at the bit and I could feel it. He didnt want to talk, he wanted to do. He was ready for this to begin. He had looked forward to it since he was a boy and he wanted to get after it. The time for goodbyes had passed. He wanted to get busy doing some good. He had gospel to preach and souls to save.
We both felt that whispered to us, in the happiness and gratitude in our hearts.
My son became a Mormon missionary yesterday.
We sat through a briefing in a crowded auditorium and then they said it was time to leave. The families were to go through one door and the new missionaries were to go through another.
My son did.
And he didnt look back.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2004 |
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