charity wrote:Jersey Girl and Pokatator,
I get so tired of people saying they were "foreced" to go on a mission, "forced" to marry in the temple.
I was a District Leader on my mission to Denmark, Charity, and I can tell you that a significant portion of the missionaries I met had, in fact, been forced to go on their mission by their family. They're just 18-19 year old kids, Charity, most of whom had little backbone or experience in the world. Fully half of the missionaries in my mission didn't want to be there and couldn't wait to go home.
I even supervised a lady missionary whose bishop and stake president had forged her name on her mission papers unbeknownst to her (as with many religious matters, they felt the end justified the means), skipped the interviews, and presented her with the prophet's miraculous call out of the blue to go on a mission and forced her to break off her engagement. Small wonder she kept suffering from undiagnosable illnesses. Finally, one of her Danish doctors signed a paper stating that she was too ill to continue and should be sent home. It only took a few days home for her to miraculously recover from her illness. Unfortunately, her dumped fiance from before the mission had already gotten married to someone else. He didn't believe her when she'd told him the mission call had come out of the blue. He thought she'd instigated it. She genuinely thought the call came out of the blue. After dealing with her duplicitous SP and bishop getting her home convinced me of their deceit.
I was even forced to go. I just wish I knew then what I know now and I would have told my bishop a polite, but firm, no thank you. Had he forced the issue, I'd have told him if he was so hot for someone to go on a mission, to divorce his wife (if it was true love, she'd wait), and go on the mission himself.
As it was, the change from two-and-a-half years to two year missions came during my mission. Officially, we were to have been given the choice to stay for the original calling or leave at the end of just 24 months, but my mission president was bucking to be chosen a General Authority and he lied to us about the option because (as he foolishly confided to one of the elders working in the mission home) he was afraid too many of us going home after 24 months would hurt his chances for ecclesiastical advancement. Fortunately, several dozen of us got copies of the Church News announcement about the choice, and held our own missionary conference, got our families to agree to foot the bill to fly us home, and then simply presented our mission president with the ultimatum to either give us honorable releases at the end of 24 months or we go home on our own dime (already arranged for) and hold news conferences when we got home to tell about his falsehoods and refusals. Next thing we knew, he had the mission secretary arrange for our tickets home.
What a spiritual giant this guy was. At one point, the GAs were pushing for placement of the book,
Meet the Mormons. So to rack up brownie points our mission president ran around placing consignment copies of
Meet the Mormons in Danish at bookstores. Then he gave local members mission money to buy the books. THen he would place the same copies back in the same bookstores and buy 'em back again. And again. And again.
Another time, he had a revelation for us to pose as BYU sociology students doing a research project using the Family Home Evening manual in Danish. If asked if we were LDS missionaries, we were explicitly told to lie and say we were BYU research students. The point was to place lots of copies of the manual to impress the GAs at home.
I learned a lot on my mission, but it wasn't worth the cost. The next time, Charity, that you hear someone complain about being forced to go on a mission, remember they could well be telling the truth.
James Clifford Miller (no sockpuppet here)