Book Excerpt: Eighteen Months
Chapter 5
Early Returns
God clothed himself in vile man’s flesh that
so He might be weak enough to suffer woe.
—John Donne, Holy Sonnet XI
Nevertheless, the Lord God showeth us
our weakness that we may know that it is by
his grace, and his great condescensions unto the
children of men, that we have power to do these
things.
—Jacob 4:7
I sat curled on our ratty couch with my red cotton dress tucked beneath my feet. The apartment air was already thick from humidity and mixed with the steam billowing from Sister Smith’s 111 shower, it made reading uncomfortable and itchy. Prickly heat bubbled along my shaking hands as I clutched my quadruple combination. Scrunching my eyes tight, I tried to bore a hole through the stained ceiling with a desperate prayer: “Please God, please. Please let me open up my scriptures and find an answer. Please? I promise to listen.” The four-inch span of pages offered no clues. None bent or stuck out slightly. I sighed, and then randomly opened the book, closed my eyes again, and stabbed at a verse with my finger. It read, “And now, as ye have begun to teach the word even so I would that ye should continue to teach” (Alma 38:10).
The phone rang. President Jolly muttered something to me about my worried parents, an MRI, a scarcity of doctors on the Mexican border, and my clear level of emotional distress. During the phone call I stared at my quad. Then the disconnected voice on the other end of the line startled me: “Well, Sister Garrard, what do you think? Do you think you should go home for a month to get more medical testing? I think you ought to, but I’ll leave it up to you.”
I would that ye should continue to teach . . . played over and over in my mind.
“Yes, President,” I answered. “I think I should.” ?
Everyone assumes that the hymn “Shall the Youth of Zion Falter?” is a rhetorical question. When new missionaries enter the Missionary Training Center, they quickly memorize the song “Called to Serve” and imagine themselves as part of an army, Christian soldiers who “march forth to conquer on life’s great battlefield.”222 Most of us followed the mission rules devoutly, memorized discussions and desperately tried to “Speak our language!” whenever possible. We knew that preparation banishes fear and that the Lord blesses those who work hard. I certainly believed it. World, meet Sister Garrard, a red cotton-clad soldier for Jesus in an overwhelming host of suits. I felt certain I’d serve with the whole and passionate heart I’d wanted to give to missionary service since I was 16, reap the rewards of my efforts, and return with an unshakeable testimony to a homecoming filled with praise. Instead, nobody brought balloons to the airport. When I walked into church everyone turned and gawked. Worse, of course, my testimony did not resemble Captain Moroni’s: it shook harder than the fever, chills, and emerging arthritis shook me. I felt like a deserter, a frightened soldier whose inadequate faith made her run away.
While the Church Missionary Department keeps statistics on early return confidential, it’s no secret that not all elders and sisters serve their full terms. Nor is it a secret that many of us feel like abysmal failures— especially in heavily LDS areas, where a missionary’s return can seem both more obvious and more stigmatized. Of the thirteen missionaries in my MTC district, one had gone home with meningitis the previous winter and another three—myself included—wouldn’t make it to the one-year mark. One elder began receiving odd revelations and started to randomly prophesy; another honestly admitted that he had no testimony and had simply wanted to see the world on the Church’s dime. Then there was me. By my second month of training we knew something was wrong. I stood in the shower and watched my hair rinse down the drain; long orange hair from my head left a lacy pattern on my dresses by the end of every day. The tips of my fingers and toes turned grayish-blue and the knuckles on my right hand started to resemble my grandmother’s. A rash betrayed my embarrassment by blushing a scarlet butterfly-shaped mark across my face, and the headaches knocked me flat on my top bunk, crying.
I insisted on boarding the plane for Texas anyhow.
“The next house is yours, Hermana,” Sister Smith announced pointedly as we turned from yet another closed door. Since the mission van had picked me up from the airport the previous day, I had been worrying about this moment. Talkativeness, not timidity, has always been my plague, but trying to represent my Savior in a language I barely spoke intimidated me.
In less than half a minute, we approached the next modest casa that was a broken-down, one-story clapboard with a car resting on blocks in the front yard. I knew immediately that Heavenly Father had given me exactly what I needed. Children bounced in, around, underneath and on top of the car like crazed electrons. They saw us and honked the horn, waved little brown hands and grinned. I practically ran to them, making up for my paltry vocabulary with exaggerated facial expressions and a willingness to join in any game immediately. By the time Dikki and Ezekiel DeLeon ventured into the yard to enquire why two white women had camped out there, I was bewitched. Four-year-old Sena settled into my lap as soon as we went inside. She rested her jet-black ringlets on my breast and played with my nametag while my heart joyfully embraced a love more potent than my headaches.
Each time we came to visit, the children would rush to the door with an excited, “Did you come to talk to us about God?” However, their parents acted differently. They always smiled graciously, offered us food and gave prayers, but they didn’t emanate the same careless joy as the children. When we asked how long they’d been in the States, Dikki’s eyes clouded and she gazed at the painting of the Virgin Mary in their entryway. Ezekial would push his glasses high onto his nose and go silent if we brought up El Salvador. Finally, someone—I do not recall whom—had the heart to tell us they had left to escape civil war and that they could not go back for fear of being shot. Dikki kept silent much of the time, her soft eyes smiling at the sensuously overblown flowers in the yard.
Her eyes looked like Elder Green’s, the missionary who’d gone home with meningitis. His pale blond hair, long for a missionary, and transparent blue eyes gave him an air of femininity, as did his tentativeness and emotional honesty compared to the bluster and boisterousness of the other elders. Some of them teased him, and he spent much of his free time talking to my companion and me.
One evening a messenger came and retrieved him. I didn’t think much of it—they needed to follow up on his old illness. A little while later I darted out of the classroom and across the hall to visit the bathroom. When I emerged and started to return to class, I noticed Elder Green standing in the hallway. He was just standing there, not moving toward the door and not saying a word.
“Hey Elder, what’s up? Enjoying the five second freedom without your companion?” I joked.
He looked over at me, his gigantic blue eyes wider than I’d ever seen them. Clearly, he wanted to keep the tears in his eyes from actually falling.
“My grandma just died,” he said to me. “My grandma died and I’m here.”
We must have stood facing each other for several minutes, neither of us speaking. I looked into his agonized face and desperately resented the rule forbidding me to hug him. I wanted to tell him to go ahead and cry, wanted to take his hand and squeeze it, to be a mother for his sorrow.
“Oh Elder, I am so sorry.” It was all I could do, so he thanked me, wiped his face, and we returned to class.
In the years since my mission I’ve learned about the concept of performative identity. In short, the theory holds that little of our self-hood emerges as necessary genetic outcome. Rather, we construct our identities through a combination of socialized behavior and behaviors that we take from categories we consciously choose. A Mormon version of this idea might come from a verse in the New Testament: “If any man will do [God’s] will, he shall know of the doctrine” (John 7:17). In other words, by following the commandments we internalize our knowledge of their truthfulness and become Latter-day Saints. In seminary I learned that acting on Heavenly Father’s commands would endear me to Him. Obedience would foster love until reciprocity flowered between the two and they became indistinguishable. At that point, I thought, I would truly become Christ’s child with His image in my countenance—because I had done everything He asked.
Coming home from my mission significantly complicated my understanding of the relationship between our actions and God’s transformative power. I knew how to be a missionary by acting like one. I had followed the rules with Pharisee-like rectitude and had sincerely served the DeLeons with love. Somehow, though, my actions—and even the sanctification my love lent those actions—hadn’t adequately served to make me fully a missionary. I could not become what I wanted to through sheer force of will. I didn’t know how to play the part of a missionary who has come home early. Since I desperately wanted to return to Texas once my medical problems vanished—and I thought they would if I simply showed enough faith—I refused to consider release. I still wore my nametag on my chest, but the Spanish text made little sense in my overwhelmingly gringo hometown.
I had tracted with the sister missionaries in my ward but I lived with my parents and ate my mom’s home-cooked meals rather than frijoles and ramen. As a missionary, I felt sure that God had called me to heal others, but I spent the majority of my time watching needles pucker the surface of my skin and listening to various doctors ruminate on my baffling symptoms. I don’t know if I acted it, but I felt the part of a monumental failure. No matter how much I prayed, the blood tests always came back abnormal. No matter how many doors I knocked on, fully expecting to find and convert a high school classmate, no one in Port Angeles seemed to need my special presence to come to God. As many times as I pleaded for Heavenly Father to tell me what to do, He never, never would.
“You should understand that failure is unacceptable to me,” I wrote in my journal. “I need to excel to feel acceptable. My portrait of Christ bores holes in me. I think God loves me. I feel, however, like I am a rubber ball for the gods. “Let’s see how high this one will bounce!’” Maybe if I “bounced” high enough, jumped a tall enough bar, refused to take off my tag despite pain, my sacrifice would become acceptable. At some point, my mental pain rivaled the physical.
I’d been home three months when Sister Papreck’s anxious voice begged me through the telephone wire to come as quickly as I could. My parents lived just a few blocks from the sisters, so I threw on my badge and one of my practically new dresses, flung a loaf of bread and some cookies into a basket—I am a Mormon woman, so I face uncertainty with food—and hurried up the hill. The fog blurred my view of the ocean to the north and clouds scudded over the mountains just to the south.
When I arrived at their apartment, Sister Papreck greeted me without her usual dimples. Her blonde, farm-girl gorgeousness had dulled, like milk that has skimmed over during the night. “I don’t feel well,” she said.
I’m going to go tracting while my mom stays here and tends to Sister Hancock’s cold, I thought. No, her companion clarified. Sister Hancock wanted me to stay with her. I don’t remember where Sister Papreck went, with whom or for how long, but I remember sitting in that dark bedroom next to the still form on the single bed. She told me that her head hurt— really hurt—and that she could not move at all or tolerate any light. I’d think she was asleep, except that the muscles of her arms never relaxed and the crease in her brow never relaxed. We sat silently for a long while in the half-light of a Northwestern early spring. I moved her hair off of her forehead and wished, as desperately as I’ve wished anything, that I could erase her pain and promise her that things would be all right.
A few days passed, and Sister Hancock asked me to come and sit with her again. People become pale enough just from the Olympic Peninsula’s famously overcast skies, but my pseudo-companion looked positively ashen. This time, we talked. The radiologists at the local hospital hadn’t found any shadows on her CAT scan, any more than the techs at Virginia Mason hospital in Seattle had found on my MRI. At least mine had shown definite spinal degeneration, she pointed out—at least there was something I could point to!
While my blood tests kept coming back abnormal, keeping me from the field, hers always returned normal and kept her from home. Brunette to my reddish blonde and introverted to my extroversion, Sister Hancock and I became mirror images for each other in more ways than one. When we were alone after an evening of follow-up visits, she would echo the anguished sentiments I’d written in my journal. She scuffed her heavy black shoes across my parents’ ancient green carpet, put one hand lightly on the stereo speaker, and told me that she knew she was failing God. She didn’t know how to prove her love to Him. Her head simply hurt too much to go on. What would we do? I wondered. What did God want from us? Why wasn’t our faith enough? Instead of answering, I hugged her and we held each other tight while I repeated these questions back to her.
Like any culture, Mormon society clings tenaciously to certain truisms. Amongst our favorites—and certainly one I heard frequently while growing up—is Nephi’s counsel that “it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do” (2 Nephi 25:23). I’m not sure if it’s our inherited Protestant work ethic or a subconscious guilt that we don’t have to trudge through blizzard and heat while pulling handcarts in our wake, but our culture and our testimonies often occlude the first part of Nephi’s counsel.
I felt like a failure as I boarded the plane for Seattle because I thought I hadn’t done everything I could. I thought the fact that I was still conscious and physically capable of walking meant I had literally turned my back on Jesus. Sister Hancock thought the same. Elder Green felt that his susceptibility to meningitis and the tears he wept over his grandmother meant he had not tried hard enough, that he wasn’t “strong” like the other elders. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine that the elder whose psychological illness resulted in corner-prophesying felt that if he’d only tried harder, been better, listened closer, that the prophesies would have been real and he’d have stayed the course. And it’s good that we wanted to serve with our whole hearts, that we weren’t terribly happy to go home. But we did not understand that scripture at all. At least I didn’t. I ignored the true miracle of grace. And without grace, the rest is ashes.
I thought God would help me transform myself, and that my face would shine like Jesus’ because I worked hard. Sure—hard work is important. But watching Sister Hancock and remembering Elder Green, I knew that “all you can do” doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. It doesn’t mean, “all you can do on your best day, when conditions are right and all things are equal.” It means—or I hope it means—“all you can do when you are broken and weak and scared out of your twenty-one-year-old mind. All you can do when you think God is telling you one thing, and you simply do not have the strength to do it. After that—in that, even—you are saved by grace.” Of course, I still don’t know if my little game of scriptural “grab and stab” served as a message from Heavenly Father the morning President Jolly told me that he thought that I should go home. Was it a dark coincidence? But that morning, when my dizziness in the shower forced me onto the spinning tile, all I could do was agree with him. It shattered me. I fell to pieces on the plane, during my Dallas layover and through the whole ride home. All confidence left and the bits of my soul lay open.
Eventually, I realized that I needed to be broken. If it hadn’t happened on my mission, some other event would have someday forced me to face the reality—doctrinal and physical—that “all we can do” is sometimes small and that the groundwork for understanding the Atonement is often laid in desolation. Elisabeth Elliot, who served as a missionary to the Quichua and Waorani Indians of Ecuador and whose missionary husband was slaughtered by the latter, wrote of her life’s tragedy:
“Faith begins . . . in the wilderness, when you are alone and afraid, when things don’t make sense. . . . In the wilderness of loneliness, we are terribly vulnerable. . . . But we may be missing the fact that it is here . . . that we may learn to love Him—here where it seems He is not at work, where His will seems obscure or frightening, where He is not doing what we expected Him to do. . . . If faith does not go to work here, it will not go to work at all. . . . God’s answer is always Trust Me.” 3343
Simply put, heartbreak teaches us about grace. Heartbreak even brings grace. When we are broken, we are open to God. I still believe in obedience. I still believe that we should push ourselves and fight, sometimes until we bleed. But I no longer believe that we must earn God’s love or wrest grace from Him like a prize.
One night as I sobbed, I admitted my loneliness and instead of expecting Him to fix it or tell me how to fix it, I allowed God to keep watch with me as I had done with Sister Hancock. I let Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father push my hair back and look into my eyes when I felt agony, rather than assuming that they would hate me for my weakness. I realized that the real miracles of Jesus’ ministry weren’t the healed lepers so much as the healed souls they may symbolically represent. Like Daniel, I said, “There remain[s] no strength in me, neither is there breath left in me.” The Lord answered Daniel with these words: “Oh [child] greatly beloved, fear not: peace be unto thee, be strong, yea, be strong.” Apparently, though, this isn’t the same as telling Daniel to “buck up” and exercise his own power, for Daniel wrote, “And when [the Lord] had spoken unto me, I was strengthened, and said, Let my lord speak; for thou has strengthened me” (Daniel 10:17”“19). It doesn’t say, “I found my strength and put my faith in it,” but that the strength came from God. And it came when Daniel admitted that he could no longer stand.
Within a month after the advent of her headaches, the mission president decided to send Sister Hancock home. Soon afterward, my stake president called me into his office and gently suggested that I agree to an honorable release and resume school in the fall.
A few days before Sister Hancock left, I went out with her and her companion and we tried to trace a media contact. The Peninsula isn’t like Salt Lake, where the streets are mostly flat and on a grid; finding one or two contacts could take all day. First, we trudged up one muddy road only to encounter fresh bear tracks and return hastily to the car. Before the hour was out, yet another dirt road terminated in a sheer drop-off to the ocean. We stood on the precipice’s edge and stared down at the whitecaps, breathing in salt. Sister Hancock pointed up at a golden eagle and we watched it glide and dip over the evergreens behind us until its cry faded into the mountains.
Our last attempt finally resulted in locating a house where nobody answered the door and the dark windows held little promise. Too exhausted to schlep back to town, we surreptitiously looked around the property. We were muddy and lost and sleepy; we’d done what we could, even though we never found the contact. One of us located a long rope swing tied to a gigantic branch overhanging a ravine. We looked at each other mischievously: it seemed like a gift. I ran over, glanced around quickly, seized the rope and launched into the open air. Ten feet, twenty feet out from the branch, I looked down. The wind whipped my hair behind me like a banner and my dress blew up. I soared over that ravine and closed my eyes, feeling the world rush past in a blur. Worry and pain fell away as I flew and flew, laughing like I hadn’t done in months. We took turns on the swing until dusk settled in and hurried us back to the car for a quiet—and unusually peaceful—ride back home.
When Christ came to the people of Zarahemla, He proved His identity by showing His scars and by letting people touch them. Surely descending out of heaven and piercing the suffocating darkness should have been enough. Surely they believed Him. Why then did scores of people come forward and handle the physical evidence of His suffering? Why would a perfect body—the body of a God—carry scars? And why would that God use those scars, rather than His power, to immediately comfort His people? I think it is because while working miracles tells us Jesus is divine, His scars tell us that He is also like us—at least a bit. I think we love Him not only because He saves us but also just because He suffered. We find comfort in knowing that He has felt pain and still offers hope and grace. In fact, it is because He has felt pain—our pain, both what He saves us from knowingly and the pain that we feel in our private wilderness—that He can offer salvation at all. His scars are manifestations of the Atonement—of becoming one with our terrible mortal weakness.
When I began my mission, I thought that my countenance could mirror Christ’s only when I’d come close to replicating His perfection. Instead, I saw my face in the faces of other people in pain, and slowly I came to realize that my weakness, not my strength, engendered my compassion. Christ didn’t have to suffer weakness, but He willingly did because He wanted to understand and empathize with us. So I guess if we truly want to be Christ-like, if we truly want to bear His countenance, then we must use our scars the same way He did—as a means of bridging the distance between ourselves and those who are still desperately looking for grace and light. I hope I stood vicariously for Jesus Christ as I silently bore witness to Sister Hancock’s suffering and I hope I did the same for Elder Green. I know others did for me.
I’m still sad that my dream of serving a full-time, nametag-sporting mission did not work out the way I’d wanted. I do have happy memories of Dikki, Ezekial, and the girls: everyone in the family who was old enough entered the baptismal font a week after I returned home. I remember the compassion and comfort they offered when I told them I was sick and had to leave; Sena cried for me and buried her little dark head into the folds of my skirt until I lifted and held her against my shoulder. Their love held out, in the light of all our pain, and linked me to my Savior. Now I take Romans, chapter 8, verse 28 to heart: “[I] know that all things work together for good to them that love God.”
Maybe I did fail when I said, “yes” to President Jolly, but in my failure I found out how amazing grace really is. God’s grace has made me a better missionary for my sorrows. I try to use my scars as a means for healing others as Christ did, simultaneously offering hard-earned compassion and also recognizing the limitations that make compassion necessary. When we see each person’s wounds as the wounds of Jesus, when we act like Jesus did in response to those wounds, then we are truly His messengers. “All we can do” depends on circumstance. Grace transforms the rest, whether we wear a nametag or not.
Janet Garard -Willis served in the Texas Corpus Christi Mission from 1993 to 1994. She holds an honors English bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University and a master’s degree in literature from Saint Louis University. She currently spends her time cooking, playing with other people’s adorable kiddos, and plugging away at her dissertation on nineteenth century American literature. She lives in a funky hundred-year-old Salt Lake City home with her fantastic husband, David, and she’ll happily feed you dinner if you decide to stop by.
Book Information
Eighteen Months: Sister Missionaries in the Latter Days
Collection edited by Melissa Baird Carpenter
Publisher: Millennial Press 2007, 171 pages
Reviewed by Segullah in our Fall/Winter 2007 issue.