Looking Back Over the Years

This week was another great week, typical of the past weeks we have experienced serving as Senior Missionaries in Hong Kong. I look back over the years and reflect upon how Karen and I would talk about someday serving a mission together and what I thought we would experience together as Missionaries. I naively thought we would experience a lot of the same of what I experienced as a nineteen-year-old Elder. After all, up until the time of my release, my Missionary service was the best two years for (not of) my life that I had lived.

I am embarrassed, now that we have served together close to a year, to admit that I could have thought it would have been the same in any way.

My first Mission is the time in my life when I developed the beginnings of a Testimony or the, “Light of Christ within us”. I gained a greater knowledge of the Gospel through learning, memorizing, and teaching lessons, reading the scriptures every day, and praying for help for things I knew I could not accomplish by myself. These things brought new light and understanding to me early in my mission. As my mission progressed I began participating in the conversion process of others, this exposed me to the Atonement of Christ, repentance, and forgiveness. Witnessing the physical, emotional, and spiritual change in someone embracing the Gospel by giving up old habits and committing to new concepts of obedience and sacrifice, brought into my soul even a greater and brighter light. These experiences with the lessons and feelings that came with them were an obvious model to me of a way of life that I could see would bring me and all those I love peace, comfort, and happiness in this life and the life to come.

A second mission as a Senior Missionary with a handpicked companion and a life full of blessings predicated upon a life consistent with lessons learned as a young Missionary cannot begin and end in the same place as the first mission. The lessons to be learned and the blessings in store today are not the same, our life’s dynamics are different, and so it is logical that our necessary experience’s will be different as well.

We have learned so much on our mission, beginning with the opportunity to be together twenty-four-seven. I think this is the first obstacle to a celestial marriage. How can we be together for time and all eternity if we can’t be together for eighteen months?  We have learned to love being together as days turn to weeks,  weeks to months,  and now  I liken the end of our mission to being expelled from the Garden of Eden. I am not sure that when we return that I will be ready to share Karen with others. Our mission has taught us to love each other in a way that we would never have known had we not served.

While serving here in Hong Kong we have had the opportunity to see each of our children and grandchildren through a special spiritual lens. A blessing that comes to those that are willing to serve.

We have received inspired thoughts and ideas of how we should spend our time and talents to bless the lives of our family that may have never been as clear to us as they are today while we are away. We have been blessed with the synergistic effect of receiving more Gospel knowledge, a clearer path to Heavenly Father in prayer, and all blessings predicated to the principle of obedience.


In looking forward to serving a mission together we could have only underestimated the experience. It just seems rather disingenuous on my part to think it was going be a similar experience to my first mission. It is so much better!!!!!!