"This is the official letter of my mission call to Germany in 1975. I remember the thrill of opening the letter and reading the words "dear elder *****". Within this next week, ***** will be receiving his letter calling him on a mission. Keep your ears open. Everyone will be invited to the opening of his mission call later."
This guy's son is a super talented athlete who assuredly will lose his edge and maybe a shot the Olympics or professional sports over the course of two years.
Reading the letter from 1975 is actually a little chilling where it says "Your presiding officers have recommended you as one worthy...as an effective advocate and messenger of the Truth. The Lord will reward the goodness of your life, and greater blessings and more happiness than you have yet experienced await you...."
Sometimes I start watching those mission call opening videos on YouTube. It's like a trainwreck that you can't look away from. These cute kids being all excited and the big letter opening party where they are the star. Then you think of them a few months later, living in a dump, feeling like they're living an Orwellian life, lonely, homesick, hungry, depressed, and beating themselves up because they just must not be good enough if they're feeling that way. It is all just very sad. I get more excited for the ones who will learn a language that will give them an edge in the real world when they come home. But for most of them I just feel a lot of sorrow and disgust at the moneygrubbing organization that is using them.
A mission call is perhaps the first and often last time in someone's waning adolescence when they're The Star. Family and friends gather, maybe others phone in on Skype, there's a table full of snacks and then the envelope that is addressed to The Star is opened and the mission site revealed, and the applause erupts and everybody ooohs and aaahs and smiles all around and selfies with The Star and dozens of Facebook likes and their sad little teenage ego that likely got passed over for Homecoming Queen or Starting Quarterback or Valedictorian finally gets its just desserts and they feel that special feeling that won't truly fade away into nothing until weeks later when they're in the middle of Bumfudge Toiletstan getting doors slammed in their face and it dawns on them that they're still no more special than anyone else, they're just shuffling through this life like the rest of us, that they've been scammed.
Which is really sad, although not as sad as never realizing they've been scammed, in which case they've returned to the Morridor and slipped right back into that heavy-lidded faux-opiated TBM haze, like cattle lined up at their feedlots, getting fat on antibiotic-laced industrial-strength carbohydrates.
I had a friend in the seventies who got call from SWK to serve in the Navajo mission. It said he was to bring the gospel to the lamanites. (He is now a professor at BYU, and I think NOM, living under the radar until he retires in few years.) The letters in the seventies were still form letters signed with a mechanical pen, but someone embellished them a little bit. Mine mentioned about serving in the country where I was sent and it was a little embellished with two sentences about the country. Later when I got on my mission my friend who was a secretary in the mission office, said the MPs sent a form letter to Church HQ saying what should be in the inital letter and the attachment, that told us what kind of cold weather clothing we should bring, and no musical instruments underlined... I remember that part well.
I remember the #10 envelope, thick, thick thick! I was working 6am to 2:30pm so I was the first one to get the mail. So I was alone when I opened it. Besides the letter 'personally' signed by David O. McKay, there were pages of instructions, with lists.
Nothing about no musical instruments. I'm hoping that my mission was part of the impetus for the genesis of that instruction, in that 70% of the elders in my mission bought guitars and learned to play. Why waste valuable time doing personal study out of a sacred text when you could work on getting your fret finger calluses built up?
I wonder if the 'theater' that now accompanies receipt of the mission call is in response to how dreary the actual mission is. You get grand theater at both ends: the call and the homecoming. But the in the middle...
And it wasn't always that way.
An RM friend who was in Japan (an incredibly tough place to get adult, thinking, converts) opined that if the missionaries were allowed to be themselves, and allowed to develop personal relationships with the Japanese people they met, including drinking tea, they might come home with better language skills, and some baptisms, not to mention a better feeling about themselves and the church.
My grandson in Argentina is NOT going to have the personal growth and good times that I had in Mexico 50 years ago, unless he goes rogue. I know what I'm hoping for!
"I wonder if the 'theater' that now accompanies receipt of the mission call is in response to how dreary the actual mission is."
I suspect that it's in response to how dreary mormon life is in general. It's a tribal rite of passage; instead of tattooing the side of an elder's face or shaving the head of a sister, they put on garments and go on a mission.
And they still think it's from "God".
"How are missionaries called?
Every missionary who is called and assigned or reassigned to a particular mission is called by revelation through the Lord's servants, the prophets. A member of the Quorum of the Twelve assigns prospective missionaries to one of more than three hundred missions of the Church. Learn more by reading “The Divine Call of a Missionary,” Elder Ronald A. Rasband's April 2010 general conference address."