Called to serve Him!

The timeline for turn-around of calls for youth missionaries was always pretty predictable. But for senior missionaries, it's very not predictable. There must be a more complicated review process involving doctors, assignment specialists, etc. before the actual mission assignment is made by a member of the Quorum of Twelve.

Our application was finalized and submitted in mid-March. We knew it would take several weeks to go through the system. Meanwhile, we went on with our plans, that included a "celebrate Bonnie's retirement" trip to China from April 9-19. We knew there was a chance the call would come while we were traveling; fortunately, since mission calls are now delivered electronically instead of by paper, that would not necessarily present a problem. I had arranged to have my phone set up with international access, and with a VPN client that would allow me to bypass the very restrictive firewalls in China.

We were enjoying our trip to China, having a very fascinating experience.  But then early on the morning of April 17 (China is 13 hours ahead of the US), in our hotel in Shanghai, I opened my email to find this message:

Date: 04/16/2019, 10:09 AM
From: donotreply@ldschurch.org
Subject: Your Missionary Call Letter Is Ready!

Dear Elder,
Thank you for your desire to serve. You can view your mission call by signing into missionary.lds.org with your LDS Account. After reading your call letter, it is important that you scroll to the bottom of the screen and select "Continue" to see additional critical information.
Do not reply to this message. For questions or concerns, please contact your bishop or branch president.

OH MY GOODNESS!! What to do? Bonnie and I resisted the urge to peek, wanting to share the "opening" of the call with our family. We were scheduled to catch a flight later in the morning from Shanghai to Xi'an. Our Wednesday morning hour was still Tuesday evening in Utah, so I hurriedly messaged our children to see if we could set up a time to Skype with them. It turned out that there was a window of about half an hour, if we got to the airport on time, while we were waiting for our flight to depart, that would work for everyone.

We got to the airport as quickly as we could, got through security and checked in, found our gate, and then went off to a quiet corner. We were fortunate to have pretty good Internet access. Then the miracle of modern technology blessed us, as we were able to connect with our children and grandchildren from halfway around the world:

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What a joy to hear their voices and see their faces on the little screen of my phone! Unfortunately, we had to temporarily put the Skype video into the background (they could still see us, but we could not see them) in order to open the mission call.

Then came the dramatic moment.  I clicked on the link, opened the call letter, and Bonnie read the words to us and our loved ones:

I often commented to young missionaries that at the moment they read their mission call, suddenly some obscure place in the world that they maybe knew very little of, becomes critically important to them and their family, and their perceptions of that corner of the world are never the same again. That's what happened to us. We had not really expected the call to Argentina; it came as quite a surprise. We had included it as the last of our six potential assignments that interested us, and we had put that little note in the comments: "We have some proficiency in Spanish and at some point would like to develop those skills further." Thinking about it, "proficiency" was probably not the right word⁠—something more like "introduction" would have been more accurate. Oh well. It appears the Lord needs us in Argentina, so the time to develop the skills is now! There was almost immediately a sense of joy and anticipation that filled our hearts.

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So now we begin to prepare! (At least, as soon as we get home from China!) We have 5 months to make all the arrangements, prepare our home and other affairs, study Spanish, learn about the Church's efforts in humanitarian service, and be ready to go forth with joy and enthusiasm.