Wife of MP blogs about the missionaries.....

[_Jonah]

Here is a face/bio to go with the blog -

https://www.LDS.org/church/news/first-p ... ng#murdock

10 children. Wow.

[_Runtu]

Here is a face/bio to go with the blog -

https://www.LDS.org/church/news/first-p ... ng#murdock

10 children. Wow.

When we lived in Utah, I remember seeing that guy on the commercials for Murdock Hyundai.

[_sock puppet]

For the life of me, I can't figure out what the harm or downside could be. I mean, if one were a missionary in another religion are they not allowed to call home to family whenever? Are members of service organizations or say, the Peace Corps less effective because they can call home and check in every now and then?

The LDS Church can better control the indoctrination if they can deprive the missionaries of other influences and ideas, even those of their families and friends back home. It it cultish, and it is essential to the indoctrination.

[_sock puppet]

it must be a damn blast out there for the pocatello idaho mission president.

Well, if he went to lunch with Tator and me at Buddy's, he could enjoy good conversation, a beer and an Angie's style pizza.

[_Runtu]

I just read a relative's weekly email from Germany. Sounds like they have a huge influx of new missionaries, but "contacts" are way down. He talks about meeting a lot of refugees who can't speak German, so the missionaries have a hard time teaching them. They find most of their investigators on the subway, which I'm sure ingratiates them with commuters. After discussing a few potential investigators, he mentions that he may get an opportunity to teach an inactive, part-member family, and he jokes that it means he'll be teaching an actual German. Apparently, that doesn't happen very often.

[_Mayan Elephant]

i am actually happy they privatized the blog. that was a disaster effort on her part. there was too much personal information, i agree. what a privileged dumbass. completely clueless. must be nice to have all those car dealerships and all that money and be the mission presidents ohsobusy wife and take vacations from her mission and then take all that time to write about these kids and their dang depression and pills and problems. ridiculous.

[_SteelHead]

it must be a damn blast out there for the pocatello idaho mission president.

Well, if he went to lunch with Tator and me at Buddy's, he could enjoy good conversation, a beer and an Angie's style pizza.

I miss Buddy's salad......

[_Mayan Elephant]

i have a few blogs that friends and family link to as well. occasionally i will read them just for s's and g's. they all seem to be about the same thing. nobody to teach. working the members over for someone to teach. and our zone/mission/district/whatever/general conference was so special. and they felt the spirit so much. i do not think i have ever read anything like what sister murdoch wrote though, where she describes kids running away and going on medication and being suicidal and having blake give them all a blessing and convincing them to stay on their missions.

i notice that sister murdoch never asks herself why these kids are so depressed? or why some of the missionaries took a mission car out of the mission to go to a college campus party with missionaries from another mission? why did they do that? and why did some of them run away, abandoning their belongings?

the source of the problem is not considered at all. i like what jonah said. i think a lot of these kids are going through withdrawals from the lack of stimulation they were used to having. and they are probably not very good at lying about everything they do, day in and day out. many missionaries have to learn to lie and that causes them a ton of grief. they are lying to their leaders, the mission president, their families and themselves. some of them crack from it and some just roll with it.

you gotta hand it to sister murdoch though, at least she was telling the truth about the pills, depression and anxiety. i bet she stops, but for all the wrong reasons.

[_cafe crema]

part of raised-bar standard was to keep missionaries out of the field that required medication for mental illnesses. at the time, i heard a variety of discussions around that. one, was to eliminate the complete drain of time for mission presidents, and two, was to alleviate undue added stress or anxiety to these young people. it seems neither of those reasons really caught on. now they are back to sending stressed kids to doctors and to LDS social services. strange.

if that is a real blog post by a real mission president family, shame on them. it is just as inappropriate to discuss, publicly, the mental health of their missionaries as it is to discuss the narrow urethra, enlarged prostate and suppository medications of the mission president, and the prolapsed uterus of the mission president's wife.

i have heard from couples returning from missions in the last year that the mission presidents are slammed with babysitting nonsense. absolutely slammed. i cannot help but wonder how different it would be if these missionaries were doing real service missions where they were building something and working with real trades for two years.

You know it wouldn't have to change to service missions, just change the culture (sure that's a tiny task) so that all young men, and now women, aren't expected to go and those that decide not to go aren't looked down on. Other religions only send out those who are "on fire" for the lord or the gospel or what ever, if the LDS church did that they wouldn't have to medicated so many young people.

[_cafe crema]

wow. i just read more of her blog. that is insanity. every week she posts is another list of missionaries having panic attacks, going on medication, being depressed, and exhausting her and the mission president. i thought the september 2013 post would be an outlier, it is not.

what she is describing is much worse than what i experienced in terms of the volume of homesickness and health issues. i travelled with my mission president to every branch, ward, stake, zone, district and apartment in my mission over a period of about six months. i stayed in hotels all over france travelling with him very frequently. i can honestly say that our mission was a lot more fun than what this woman is describing, and even though we had our issues, it wasn't as smothering as what she is describing. we had a ton of fun in our mission. it was not perfect, but it wasn't a stifling calamity.

runtu/john, i am curious as you read this. you and a few others have great journals and publications about your missions. do you think some of what this woman is writing about is exaggerated? do you think the problems are any worse now than they were when the missionaries were a bit older? is it worse for missionaries in remote areas or better?

also, how much of this stuff she is writing about is because these kids are stuck in denver (just another city to them) and how much of it is that they are completely bored and annoyed by their jobs?

look at the numbers too. holy crapola. 40 baptisms a month with over TWO HUNDRED missionaries. and they claim to be one of the best in the area. on pace for 444 baptisms in a year. i was in france for hellsakes, with half that many missionaries, and we baptized more people than that, in goshdang france! we had a lot to make the day interesting for us as well, it was france and switzerland. on our p days there was a ton of cool stuff to do. we had our zone conferences in cool places, like the old roads where napolean travelled, or the reformers wall, or the bullfighting ring, or the roman aqueducts. i cannot imagine what it is like for these missionaries to average a couple baptisms a year, and be in a boring town, and not have contact with family and friends. it must be a damn blast out there for the pocatello idaho mission president.

It's certainly different from my mission. We had at the peak around 270 missionaries in our mission. I can remember 2 missionaries having mental/psychological issues, and one of them was not allowed to leave and was pressured to stay. The other was suicidal and was sent home. I would guess around a dozen missionaries went home for health-related issues, which shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with the living conditions in Bolivia. 4 were sent home for sexual behavior.

So, yes, what she's describing is a much higher incidence of such issues than we saw in Bolivia.

It seems so odd, what you and your fellow missionaries faced in Bolivia was so much more traumatic, she's writing from Colorado, how awful can it be, yet the depression numbers for you were so much lower. Why the difference?