In the hands of the Lord of the harvest

This week I finished reading the account of the mission to the Lamanites (Alma 24-29). The story about burying the weapons of war screams to be discussed, but I’ve decided to save that for some future reflection. I feel moved, instead, to use today’s post as an opportunity to reflect on my mission.

As Ammon and Alma reflect on the mission to the Lamanites (especially in chapters 26 and 29), three themes stand out to me. First is love. In 26:9, Ammon rejoices that he and his companions have been able to love and be loved by people they thought of as enemies, as Other. In 26:13, 15, he rejoices that he has been an instrument in bringing people to “sing redeeming love” and that “they are encircled about with the matchless bounty of [God’s] love.” Ammon characterizes the burying of the weapons as a sign of the converts’ “love towards their brethren” and suggests that there has never “been so great love in all the land” (26:32-33).

A related theme is that of the worth of souls. Ammon says that he and his companions embarked on their mission with the “intent that perhaps we might save some few” (26:26). Had they been able to do that, they anticipated, their joy would have been full (26:30). In other words, their years of labor and everything they suffered would still have been worth it if instead of converting thousands, they had converted just a few. Immediately D&C 18:10-15 comes to mind. This is an utterly, utterly impractical way of thinking—all those years of work would have been worth it if you’d saved just one soul?—but what we’re being told here is that this is God’s way of thinking. That’s how much every individual matters. That’s how much God loves each individual.

Alma builds on this theme in chapter 29. He starts off with his famous wish that he could be an angel and preach with a voice of thunder to every soul (the way he was preached to), so that “there might not be more sorrow upon all the face of the earth” (29:1-2). But immediately he retreats from this grandiose wish: “I ought to be content with the things which the Lord hath allotted unto me. . . . Why should I desire more than to perform the work to which I have been called?” (29:3, 6). Instead, Alma glories in the possibility—the sheer possibility, mind you—that “perhaps I may be an instrument in the hands of God to bring some soul to repentance; and this is my joy” (29:9). (I wish, frankly, that I’d gotten this message more often when I was a missionary: that being called to work for even the potential benefit of a single person is a sufficient reason for joy. It would have been a healthier message than being told there was no reason I couldn’t baptize thousands if I was just obedient enough and exercised enough faith, as per Alma 26:22.)

A final theme that stood out to me is the hope or trust that God will preserve the converts. Ammon uses a harvest analogy: the sheaves have been gathered into the garners, where they will be safe from storms. “They are in the hands of the Lord of the harvest, and they are his” (26:5-7). Alma closes this week’s reading by praying that God will grant that missionaries and converts sit down together in God’s kingdom, “that they may go no more out, but that they may praise him forever” (29:17).

What does all this mean to me? My mission to the Dominican Republic was the most powerful experience of my life because it was the only period in my life (thus far) when I have been blessed to experience full-time ministry. I feel guilty at times about the fact that the mission continues to be my life’s spiritual high point, because I’ll get to thinking that there’s no reason I couldn’t be having new powerful experiences of service to others. I worry that instead of going out and undertaking new forms of service, I’m sitting around enjoying the self-satisfaction of fondling the memory of service past. I think that’s a valid worry, and I think it’s the Spirit goading me to get out there and act.

At the same time, it’s also true that the mission was a unique experience because I was more separated than I will probably ever be again from mundane concerns. Virtually all I had to do for two years was go out and immerse myself in other people’s lives. And that’s what made the mission such a powerful spiritual experience: relationships. I met people—strangers, from another culture, another race, another history, another economic class—who allowed me to become intimately involved in their lives, their interior lives, their religious lives, their personal problems, their family problems. It occurs to me as I write this that the intimacy was not altogether reciprocal—they weren’t as involved in my life as I was in theirs because of the hierarchical nature of the missionary relationship. But I was certainly more open with them about my interior life than I am with most people with whom I daily interact. (Barring this curiously self-revelatory yet anonymous blog . . .)

I’m talking about this at an abstract level. Let me tell a story to make it more concrete—and to bring together themes from the week’s reading. In 1997, four years after completing my LDS mission, I returned to the Dominican Republic to work as an education volunteer in a set of isolated mountain villages. One day the other American volunteers and I drove into Santo Domingo. I made my way by bus to a shantytown on the outskirts of the city, beyond the city dump, where I had opened the area for missionary work in 1992. I dropped in on a woman—let’s call her Yolanda—whom I had baptized with her husband a few months before her husband unexpectedly died of a bleeding stomach ulcer. They were poor people, living with their four children in a one-room shack, but happy in a way I still have a hard time understanding. (I don’t mean to romanticize poverty; I’m just trying to explain how they approached their lives.) I have powerful memories of reading the scriptures by candlelight in their home, or taking my battery-powered portable keyboard to sing hymns together. Yolanda’s husband’s favorite hymn was “Know This That Every Soul Is Free,” which I was therefore pissed to see get cut from the new Spanish hymnal. Yolanda devoured the Book of Mormon—she loved to read. Random memory: I’m smiling as I remember the little pinwheel they drew onto their cardboard wall to spin to determine who would offer family prayer.

Back to 1997. When I arrived at Yolanda’s home, it was a wonderful reunion. We sat outside the house, I saw the kids, how much they’d grown. And as we talked, I learned that Yolanda was no longer active in the Church. She was now living as some married man’s second woman. That’s a not uncommon arrangement in the DR: it’s a way for women to get by financially. (Another woman I baptized early in my mission, who was very poor, was living in such an arrangement by the time I finished my mission.) So after the visit was over, I made my way back to the hostel where I was staying. Dinner was over, but my plate was still sitting on the table out in the back patio. I sat down alone and started to eat—and then out of nowhere I just broke down sobbing. (I’m tearing up as I write this, dammit.) There was this little boy playing on the patio—he was staying in the hostel while he waited for surgery—and as I sat there crying, he came over and stroked my hair and asked, “Qué te pasa? Qué te pasa?” What’s wrong? What’s the matter?

I thought at the time: It’s stupid for me to be crying about this. I mean, I’m no longer active. What entitles me to expect that Yolanda stay active? In fact, of all the people I baptized during my mission with whom I’ve managed to reconnect, only one is still active in the Church. Ironically, that person is someone whose baptism I didn’t really take seriously. She was the teenaged maid of the bishop of the ward where I was working, and I was sure she was doing this just to please her employer. Plus, she was a soltera, a young single woman, which put her at the bottom of our mission’s ranking of desirable converts. (Families were at the top, followed by single men, who at least could become priesthood leaders.) But in 2000, I revisited that ward and found that she was still active. Wipe the egg off my face.

What am I trying to say here? I thank God that I was blessed to experience the relationships I did during my mission: relationships with people I baptized, relationships with already baptized members, relationships with investigators who were never baptized, relationships with people who never really became investigators. I think about Chieko Okazaki’s cat’s cradle: the intersecting lines of our relationships which take their shape from the empty space between them, which is Christ. I believe that. I experienced Christ in the relationships I forged during my mission. And I pray that I did some good through those relationships. People had so many problems that we, as missionaries, were really powerless to do anything about. I’m thinking of one man who briefly gave up smoking, at his own initiative, right after we started teaching him. He wanted to quit so badly, and he was so addicted. But he didn’t go to church, so we dropped him, the way we were supposed to. I feel awful about that now. In the long-term, my mission is full of stories of failure like that one, at least if failure is defined as baptism and Church activity. And that’s when I have to trust in the teaching that the relationship itself—the love we shared for as long as we were together—is reason enough for my joy to be full. What has happened to all of us since then, and what happens in the future, is another matter. “They are in the hands of the Lord of the harvest, and they are his.” We are encircled about together in the matchless bounty of God’s love, and I hope that someday we’re able to sit down together in God’s kingdom and reminisce about the old times.