Week 52 - Happiness is . . . | Mission Life in Milan

District Meeting - chairs represent the number of mission transfers

Anziano Thompson and Lilly

I made it! ;) I didn't burn a shirt or anything for hitting my one year, but it definitely was a memorable day. I had to wake up at 4 am to help escort the departing missionaries to the airport and later that night, Sister Hoopes made us a Thanksgiving feast to celebrate my time here in the mission.

As for my responsibilities here in the office, it seems like everyday I have a different objective I'm working toward. My main priorities our car maintenance and repair, iPad support, and mission orders (ordering new church materials and re-stocking missionary's when they are low). We stay in the mission office until 5 and then go out and do normal missionary work until 9:30 (as long as our office work is taken care of). It's been a weird position because there's always work to be done in the office, but the level of importance for some things that I end up doing seems really low. That being said, there has been a couple days where the work priority has been really high and we couldn't leave to do normal missionary work (and since we sleep on the floor above the mission office, that means staying inside all day).

As for my companion, he's the only member of his family and has an insane conversion story. Fun fact: his dad is a producer (John Thompson) and he's been in a couple low-budget films as a kid!

The stress of office life really hit me during the past couple days...We just got through transfer week! It's not a small planning process getting missionaries to their new city while welcoming in the new greenies and sending out the departing missionaries. It's been a ton of fun! Sister Hoopes (the senior missionary that works in the office) has been keeping us fed with some pretty heavy duty lunches and an endless supply of muffins and cookies throughout the day as we all run on very little sleep.

Mission Companionship Board

It felt strange walking into an airport again earlier this week to pickup the arriving greenies. I don't know what giving birth feels like, but I imagine the anticipation waiting for the arriving greenies outside of the baggage claim room rivals the feeling. On the first night of being in Italy, all the new missionaries had a testimony at the mission home and there was a really cool Spirit that was there as they all shared why they decided to serve a mission.

On the opposite side of things, on the night before the departing missionaries left, it was eye-opening listening to all their mission highs and lows. What really surprised me was the difference in maturity between all the missionaries who are now reunited with their families. Some of the elders were men and others reminded me of my peers in a high-school locker room (only dressed in blue Boggi suits and fancy brown shoes). I know it sounds stupid, but I totally know what kind of missions they served by my brief time spent with them. They were all great people, but it was apparent which missionaries got the most out of their missionary service. It kind of worried me as I analyzed them because a year from now, I'm going to be on the other end of things and I want to be different person than I was before the mission.

On an un-transfer-week related note, I got a really cool opportunity seeing a stark difference between two kinds of happiness this past week. I saw the first "happiness" in an investigator who went through a really rough childhood and grew to drown out the negativity in his life. Currently, he says he is at a state of tranquility and experiences very little intense emotion because of the numbness that has formed from stifling them; it's hard for him to experience an overwhelming joy, but also doesn't let feelings of anger phase him. He's very logical and seems to be living a really good life.

The second happiness looked a little different- I saw it when Anziano Thompson and I did a member visit to a lady who wanted more copies of the Book of Mormon to give away to her friends. She was literally the happiest woman I ever met. Her name is Lilly and is a Peruvian spiritual giant! We thought we were doing a 10 minute Book of Mormon drop off, but we spent five hours with her. She fed us and then proceeded to take us around her tiny town introducing us to EVERYONE (friends, business owners, strangers on the street) with a permanent smile plastered on her face. After our afternoon of salutations, we went back to her house and decided to give her a little spiritual thought. The spiritual thought from Anziano Thompson and I lasted 5 minutes, Her post-spiritual-thought testimony baring lasted 40 minutes. She told us story after story of the cruddy situations that she was in and then the miracles that followed as she kept her faith in God. Before we could leave, she gave us two phone numbers of people she met on the street that could be interested in the gospel.

There is not words to describe the difference between these two happiness-es in the English language that I know. I can say this: to outside eyes, I met two happy people. However, the happiness is NOT the same; Lilly, our devout member, had a happiness so much more deep and encompassing. Why? The investigator bore through his trials with brute force, while Lilly turned to Jesus Christ when life felt unbearable.