Letter to my mission president.

Today I wrote a letter to my mission president. I had a pretty good mission and don't regret it, but there were a few things that kind of haunt me. I wrote this letter as a means of closure for me, and I haven't decided if I'll actually send it or not.

FYI, "tracting" is the Mormon term for when missionaries go door-to-door.

Let me know what you think, if I should send it, etc.

Dear President M.,

It has been about two and a half years since I returned home from my mission. I look back on those two years with fondness, and will never regret serving a mission. I appreciate the growth that I made personally during that time, as well as your contribution to it. However, there are several moments from my mission that I remember with such distinction that the same feelings I had at those times come back in full force—feelings like anxiety, trembling, and fear. From my personal experiences, I believe that these feelings were intentionally inflicted by you on your missionaries, as well as promoted as a form of “leadership” and copied by your assistants. The first two experiences I will describe are minor compared to the effect the third had on my mission and the effect it still has on my self-confidence.

The first such memory I have is from Burton-on-Trent. You and your wife came to visit for church one Sunday. We hurried and cleaned up our apartment, and went to church with you. Afterwards, you came to inspect our apartment. All was well until you opened our area book. You were disappointed, and rightly so—we had done a very poor job at keeping up the records that were supposed to be updated daily about our tracting and teaching activities. However, afterwards you rebuked us for at least 10 minutes, and seemed to feel that the sole reason we had not been baptizing by the hundreds was because we were poor record keepers. After you left, my companion and I felt like we had failed completely as missionaries as well as personally. You left us not uplifted and encouraged, but sad and dejected. Not long after you left, our zone leaders “dropped by.” Not only did they continue to rebuke us, but they also went through our personal things (even our scriptures) and went so far to ask if we were doing any missionary work at all. At this point I had been on my mission for approximately 6 months. While I admit whole-heartedly that we were poor record keepers and that we could have been working a little harder, I don’t believe this response was in any way helpful, and remember that day as one of the days where I felt I had little or no worth.

The second such instance happened a mere three or four months before the end of my mission. In the intervening time, I worked hard, had great companions, and was very successful. I trained a new missionary, became a District Leader, and then Zone Leader. Around February of 2008 you gave a talk about sin and repentance, based mostly on the teachings of Bruce R. McConkie (who may be partly to blame for this experience). After your talk, I became convinced that I needed to confess certain things to you from before my mission. When our regular interview came along, I determined to confess to you that before my mission I had viewed pornography. It came time, and I braced myself and told you. It soon became clear that you did not believe for one second that I was sincere or repentant, apparently because I was not showing enough emotion (doesn’t feeling like you want to die count?). And as if the embarrassment of discussing intimate and personal details of one’s life isn’t punishment enough, when I told you the steps I had taken to rid myself of this “sin,” such as fasting, praying, and abstaining, you scoffed. You even tauntingly said, “Elder Hansen, I don’t think you’ll be going home in June with your parents!” At this point my steely resolve to do the right thing finally broke down completely and was followed by gushing tears. This seemed to satisfy you, because you told me that we were done, forced me to pray aloud, and sent me out of the room. You later called me (again arousing feelings of anxiety and fear) to tell me that you had decided to let me stay on my mission. How gracious.

The third and most traumatizing experience was just two transfers before the end of my mission. You transferred me to the Forest of Dean, and my companion and I replaced the senior couple who had just finished their mission there. We were pumped and ready to go, as we had been told that around 15 people were practically waiting to be baptized there. We accepted the challenge, and got to work not only in our Zone Leader responsibilities but also in learning to navigate the Forest (a maze of country roads and villages, where houses are known by names rather than numbers) and—we hoped—baptizing all those people. We soon found out that all but a few of these investigators were only interested in being friends with the previous missionaries—not in the church at all. So, in the midst of determining who we should spend our time on (as well as driving all over southwest England for our Zone Leader responsibilities), I wrote one of the required weekly letters to you, explaining all that we’d done with the investigators who had been left for us, as well as our efforts to find new people, which had started to produce new, exciting results.

I was on an overnight exchange with the District Leader in Worcester when you called. Elder H. handed me the phone, and I said “hello?” During the next thirteen minutes (timed by the phone), I received the tongue-lashing of my life. This was no ordinary tongue-lashing; it was harsher than anything I’d ever been subjected to before, even worse than any from my own parents. You started out by asking how my zone was doing. I could tell by the tone of your voice that this was not a question you actually wanted an answer to. I gave a feeble but honest reply, and then you tore into me. I can’t recall the specific order of the things you said to me, but I do remember a couple parts:

“Elder Hansen, you have single-handedly destroyed Cheltenham Zone. Before you, it was a well oiled machine, and now you’ve managed to drive it into the ground.”

“When you went to the Forest, there were people waiting there for you to baptize. Now I get this letter from you, saying that you’re throwing away all of the [senior couple’s] investigators to go TRACTING. I think you’ve just given up on your missionary work!”

I will at least give you the benefit of the doubt that some of this was caused by misinformation. One of your assistants, Elder S., had never reported information about me in a good light (I know this from the time I lived with him in Nottingham), and perhaps that happened again this time. In his haste to please you and place the blame of low baptisms in the zone, he probably forgot to remind you that we were suffering from a short transfer (5 weeks instead of 6), in addition to General and Stake Conferences taking up two more Sundays, leaving only two weeks in that period where baptisms could occur.

Regardless of what you knew, the respect (and perhaps fear) I had for you at the time made those words really hurt. By the time you were finished berating me, my whole body was trembling. It was now past bedtime, so I went into the bedroom to say a prayer with Elder H. He asked me to pray, and I accepted; I was barely able to speak because my jaw was shaking so bad. Toward the end of my prayer, we once again heard your familiar ring tone on the phone. I answered, and you began speaking much kinder than you had just a few minutes before. You now said that I wasn’t so bad of a missionary and that perhaps you had been “a little harsh.” Because I trusted your opinion and the fervor of your previous phone call, this second call was pretty hard to believe. Luckily this call was much shorter—perhaps a minute or two—and soon I was able to privately plead with God in prayer to make me a better missionary. I promised to work harder, study better, and be stronger. I’m not sure how long I prayed, but I’m sure it was quite a while. Still, I felt no comfort, no answers, and no peace.

The next week was another round of interviews for our zone. During the period of instruction for all of the missionaries, you called Elder W. and I up in front of everyone, and asked us how things were going. We warily said that they were OK, but not great; you asked us what had happened the previous weekend, and we told everyone how we had set a baptism date with an investigator. You seemed to think that this was your doing, and told everyone with a laugh in your voice and a smile on your face that you had called me and “gotten me going” again or something. The funny thing about this is that the investigator who was to be baptized was found through tracting—the very method you were angry at me for focusing on.

It is now more than two and a half years after this last incident, and yet I am still affected by it. Whenever my boss calls or sends me an email, my heart races, and my palms start sweating; but I’ve realized that in the real world, superiors don’t treat their employees the way you treated me. In the real world, I am a person who has feelings and real worth, undiminished by others.

While I can’t say enough how grateful I am for most of the experiences I had on my mission and the way that they changed my life, I believe it is important for you to realize the massive impact you had on your missionaries, and not always in a good way. I have come to realize that the reason the mission baptized more people was not necessarily because of greater faith and work by the missionaries (although we can hope that played a part), but because of the severe pressure administered by you through your assistants. I will always wonder: your mission may have been successful by the numbers, but at what cost?

Sincerely,

Elder Hansen