“Quite similarly to the youth groups who silently hung DVD’s on doors or sent them in the mail. Yet THEY were accused of a hate crime. Pathetic when you think about it.....so don’t.”
Yep, it’s quite pathetic to consider that a threat. Quite similarly to the Mormon missionaries.
I remember on my mission, in the first city to which I was assigned, we went to a retirement home every week for a few hours. All we did was chat with the residents - or, in some cases, listen. I wasn’t very good at Italian yet, so I mostly played chess with a lonely, crotchety old man. He beat me every time. Kept critiquing my style, my strategy, I learned quite a bit, at least after I learned what “rook” was in Italian.
Finally, the week before I transferred out, I beat him. He grumbled and growled the whole time I was tearing up his line, but in the end, when I told him that I wouldn’t be returning, he touched my cheek in a kind of grandfatherly way, and said that this always happened to him. Every time there was someone in his life he was starting to like, they left.
It was a fantastic lesson for me. Because of my mission, I was given the opportunity to just be a blessing in the old man’s life. That single instance completely rearranged how I viewed people like him.
I can tell you dozens of other stories where I was blessed with the opportunity to be the instrument to bring a little happiness and joy into others’ lives; through me, the Lord expressed His love for His children. From the elderly lady whose deadbeat son neglected her, whose yard we cleaned up - she loved having a garden (I still remember watching her make pasta by hand) - to the Iranian man we helped to find Christ to the fourteen year old Brazilian, his sister, and their mother who found something precious in the LDS Church. My eyes still well up when I remember how he told us that he knew the Book of Mormon was true, and that he wanted to be baptized. His family followed suit; he recently returned home to Sao Paolo from his own mission in Connecticut. It turned him into a better man. It turned me into a better man.
Such fruits are not the Devil’s work. It is the Lord’s, and I count myself fortunate to be a small part of it.
The Lord operates for good through all His followers, regardless of denomination.
Thank you for serving a Mission. Thank you, thank you, thank you.