"I don't have depression... or medication"

Quote of the week explanation

So... This week has been very interesting. "An emotional roller coaster" as one wise missionary put it. The majority of my ramblings today will be found in the main text (see below), but , for now, suffice to say that they were going to send an elder in our zone home because of his depression, and then when the nurse called him to ask about his medication he informed them that not only does he not have depression, but he is not on any medication of any kind. So that must've been awkward...

Wow.

An emotional roller coaster indeed.

I'll start at the beginning.

Everybody knew that it was coming. We all were aware that they were going to be sending a large group of missionaries home for medical conditions, probably sooner rather than later. The announcement came on Saturday. While we're all quarantined, we've been having a mission wide conference call every day, so that President Durham can keep us posted on updates from the church on a daily basis. On Saturday, he made the dreaded announcement: all missionaries with preexisting health conditions (both physical and mental) would be honorably released and sent home. He started to read a list…

"Elder Evans... Elder Tribe... Elder Rivera…"

And then everything was blurry. I never had considered myself as having a chronic health condition. Inwardly, I acknowledged the fact that I had asthma that started in the dark ages and persisted up through the industrial revolution, but since then has been pretty tame. When the nurse called earlier in the week to ask about "my condition" I told her that I didn't have anything. 

But, 'twas not enough. I was going home.

Moments after the mission call ended, I received a call from President Durham. He told me that he had fought with the church, in my case specifically, for them to let me stay (because, among other things, how long it had been since asthma has given me anything close to a problem), but the church had gotten back and told him that the change was final. Nothing to be done. I was going home.

And then... Yesterday. I had just accepted the fact that I was leaving, just embraced it. I was still sad about it, but for some things there was even a bit of excitement. I was finding the positives in the situation. And then President called again. At first I thought that he was going to confirm my travel arrangements, but his tone of voice said something different. He told me that his pleas to the missionary department had been heard. He and the area medical advisor had continued to lobby in my favor, and the church came back to them saying that since it had been more than five years since I've had any... Episodes... They would give me the choice.

Oh man. For a moment my resolve wavered. President said I could take some time to come to a deduction and then get back from them. "If you err, best to do it on the safe side" he had said, meaning going home. I had the thought come into my head that I could leave. I could end it, right here and right now. I could call it quits and nobody would bat an eye. After all, my records do show that I have asthma. A bunch of other missionaries worldwide are getting sent home early. I've already told everyone that I'm coming back. I could just go. But then... The voice of one Jeffery Roy Holland came to my mind. Do you want to know what he said?

"Elders and sisters... Don't you ever quit. Don't you ever give up, don't ever talk to me about going home. I've said from this pulpit before I am manifestly the wrong man to talk to about going home, you wanna go home you'd better talk to somebody else. Because I am absolutely, totally and completely biased, I am insufferable on that subject. I would wrestle you to the ground, I would grapple with you all the way to the airplane terminal, I'd get in your backpack and go with you... You will never get rid of me, you look up in the middle of the night in your bedroom window, I'll be there. I'll be there, and I might scratch on the window pane. I might make sounds. Just don't you ever turn away from this greatest experience of your life."

And my choice was made. The moment of fear was gone, and I was back on my feet. I called President back. "Cancel my flight" I told him. And I'm back. In here to stay, at least until they close the mission down (interestingly, in my call with President I learned that there is a 50/50 chance of that happening here…)

So no. I won't be coming home. I won't get to sit next to Elder Tribe and Elder Spackman on the airplane. We'll have to postpone the teary-eyed reunion. I'm here, and I will be staying here come hell or high water (or a bad case of corona).

And so that's that. One thing that has come to my mind recently is another quote from Elder Holland. Us bay area missionaries being sequestered in our apartment like we are, have to be kind of creative, at times, to keep busy. It seems that we have some limitations. But here's what then Brother Holland has to say about limitations (It's a rather long quotation, so please forgive me):

"In discussing limitations of birth and circumstance, I remember the very famous story which Elder Marion D. Hanks told me as a missionary a dozen years ago and which I’m pleased to see recorded in his recently published book. With his permission, I repeat that little story for you because it’s a favorite of mine and I really believe in the principle that it teaches:

The famed naturalist of the last century, Louis Agassiz, was lecturing in London and had done a marvelous job. An obviously bright little old lady, but one who did not seem to have all the advantages in life, came up and was spiteful. She was resentful and said that she had never had the chances that he had had and she hoped he appreciated it. He took that bit of lacing very pleasantly and turned to the lady and, when she was through, said, “What do you do?” 

She said, “I run a boarding house with my sister. I’m unmarried.” 

“What do you do at the boarding house?” 

“Well, I skin potatoes and chop onions for the stew. We have stew every day.” 

“Where do you sit when you do that interesting but homely task?”

“I sit on the bottom step of the kitchen stairs.”

“Where do your feet rest when you sit there on the bottom step?”

“On a glazed brick.”

“What’s a glazed brick?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long have you been sitting there?”

“Fifteen years.”

Agassiz concluded, “Here’s my card. Would you write me a note when you get a moment about what a glazed brick is?”

Well, that made her mad enough to go home and do it. She went home and got the dictionary out and found out that a brick was a piece of baked clay. That didn’t seem enough to send to a Harvard professor, so she went to the encyclopedia and found out that a brick was made of vitrified kaolin and hydrous aluminum silicate, which didn’t mean a thing to her. She went to work and visited a brick factory and a tile maker. Then she went back in history and studied a little bit about geology and learned something about clay and clay beds and what hydrous meant and what vitrified meant. She began to soar out of the basement of a boarding house on the wings of words like vitrified kaolin and hydrous aluminum silicate. She finally decided that there were about 120 different kinds of glazed bricks and tiles. She could tell Agassiz that, so she wrote him a little note of thirty-six pages and said, “Here’s your glazed brick.”

He wrote back, “This is a fine piece of work. If you change this and that and the other, I’ll prepare it for publication and send you that which is due you from the publication.” She thought no more of it, made the changes, sent it back, and almost by return mail came a check for 250 dollars. His letter said, “I’ve published your piece. What was under the brick?”

And she said, “Ants.”

He replied (all of this by mail), “What is an ant?”

She went to work and this time she was excited. She found 1825 different kinds of ants. She found that there were ants that you could put three to the head of a pin and still have standing room left over. She found that there were ants an inch long that moved in armies half a mile wide and destroyed everything in their path. She found that some ants were blind; some ants lost their wings on the afternoon they died; some milked cows and took the milk to the aristocrats up the street. She found more ants than anybody had ever found, so she wrote Mr. Agassiz something of a treatise, numbering 360 pages. He published it and sent her the money and royalties, which continued to come in. She saw the lands and places of her dreams on a little carpet of vitrified kaolin and on the wings of flying ants that may lose their wings on the afternoon they die."

Even when we may seem to be limited by the situation that we're in, we can still come to soar, and to make more of our lives then we ever thought possible. And thats my mission's philosophy right there.

-Ben

P.S. Don't worry, I would never end a letter on so serious a note. 

P.P.S. Even though I'm staying, I'm still getting transferred to a different ward, which is kind of disappointing. Our ward mission leader seems to have told basically everybody in the ward that I'm going home, but he doesn't seem to have gotten around to telling them all that I'm not actually going home any more, so we've been getting all these calls of members just being like "So sorry that you have to go home" and saying thank you for your service in the ward like they're obligated to do and talking about the talk that I gave and yadda yadda yadda and I'm just like hold the phone folds, I'm not going home! So yeah, that's been fun.

P.P.P.S. Courtesy of Elder Holland, this is the longest email that I've written in a while.