I was in the process of moving and found the box of my mission letters from almost 40 years ago. Reading them brought back a flood of memories and affection for the guys I served with and a few girls I wrote to.

While I have not been a involved with the Church or Mormonism for 30 years or more, I am thinking of reaching out to several people who meant a lot to me back in the day to find out how they are doing.

Has anyone done anything like that?

I've thought about it, but never gotten around to it. I know how to reach my last senior comp and my first junior comp, but they're both still TBM, per their social media postings, so I think to myself, what would be the point? There's no way we'd be anything more than acquaintances.

I got Dear John'ed and Saucie looked her up and decided that I got very lucky in that regard...

I'd gladly 'take a lunch' with anyone who remembered me from the mission. There's one guy I'd really love to find out what became of him: Michael Smith. How generic, huh?

He was from Long Beach, CA and he was a surfer and he brought his skateboard on his mission! First time I met him, a bunch of elders met up at the mission home on D-day and I watched, in stunned amazement, as he rode it there in Mexico City. This was in 1965! Then we served in nearby towns in Guanajuato and my comp and I spent a lot of time with the elders there in Leon.

I have no idea what became of him. Elder Smith, email me!

In the LTM, there was an elder with a very good sense of humor, Robert something, from Snowflake, AZ. He served in Honduras. We exchanged a few letters after the LTM...

Oh, yeah! Kerry D., from my home ward, who was called to the Southwest Indian Mission, and whose 'you need to bring' list included a saddle! And Huey M., who served in the Raratonga mission, and had to get a paddleboard. And someone from my ward served in Australia... Ronnie B.?

Wow, you opened a bit of flood gate!

But I'll calm down and everything will go back to the way things are now by the morning.

Maybe you'll do it and get something out of it! Let us know!

When I find it, I'll try looking up all the crazies and missionary brown-nosers that were in a race to kiss the MP's rump. I would like to think that some of my comps have moved on from mormonism. All those promises of glory for doing the church BS failed miserably. One of my companions wrote to me after he went home (must have been awkward as hell for him) that his temple marriage ended in divorce. The wife ran off with another guy. Another companion returned home and passed on due to pancreatic cancer.

I've kept in contact with some of my missionary friends just with facebook, mostly political posts though.

I got along with all my comps. and saw a few during my time at BYU. One that got along with really well was rather disenchanted with the church and by the time we were finishing up our degrees, we were enjoying a beer or two together.

I graduated BYU, so did he and his wife from another college to the north, don't recall which one. About 15 years go by and I got an email from him. He was fully active, I wasn't. We exchanged a couple emails, and when I told him I had quit church years ago......I never heard from him again.

Oh, yeah! My first companion in the mission field, Gary S., went on to be an AP! A couple of months after he went home, the word came down to us in the field that he and his twin brother had quit the church. Years later I heard that he'd written a book about his mission and had included details about me, his only Lamanite companion. He said he'd tried to reach me to get feedback on his recollection of our time together and to ask if he could use my real name. When he couldn't contact me (way pre-internet!) he just used a fake name and published it.

It went on to be a hit movie, probably because of the sex and violence...

Nah... The only way I could get it was to have one of my sons, then working at the CSULB library, order it from another college. When I read about me, it seemed to me that I came across as fairly pious! I was impressed by what a good missionary he thought I was!

plz reach out OPie ~




in b 4 ~ plz respon OPie ~

Elder Fell, with whom I spent some months in the Transvaal beating on doors of the Boers, began a pattern of calling me, an ex-companion who had flown the cultish Mormon coop some years ago.

"Come out to our ranch in Alberta!"

At first, I thought this a fine, sincere invitation.

But things began to hint that the calls might be a Priesthood Quorum program to bring back wandering sheep to the fold.

Have any other former laborers in harvests, white or not, get hit with calls, from out of the blue, from old companions?

Have talked about yearly with my favorite companion. I’m in sac to, he’s from Ogden, last time I asked him some basic questions about the church and BOM. I asked him if why there wasn’t any archeological evidence for the bom, the problems with the pearl of no price etc, he said he had never even thought about those things, DONE DONE, I value our relationship to go any further and wreck it. Most tbm’s Just don’t know what they don’t know, you have to remember that.

So far I have reached out to the girl (woman) who wrote to me during my mission. She was "the one" in her mind, but once I returned home, she didn't seem right to me, and I broke her heart. She was 7 years older than me - a TBM from a broken family. She wrote me love letters (Mormon love letters) faithfully.
I found her on Facebook and messaged her. She friended me, but didn't reply to my messages. She looks to married now.

My very limited Facebook timeline mostly shows me drinking with buddies . . . so that may have something to do with her lack of response.

I also reached out to a Sister missionary, but no response.

I loved the relationships I cultivated on my mission - At the time, I was a recent convert and was an AP on the mission. The AP part was by far the most miserable part of my mission.

After I left the church (about 3 years after I returned home) I dropped almost all of my church relationships because I felt so awkward trying to either hide my status or avoid discussing it. I left many people hanging, and frankly didn't want to disappoint the TBMs who would be hurt or shocked.

It has been over 30 years and now I want to reconnect with a dozen people or more. I'm not why, or what I will say - but I am naturally curious about others and wonder how their lives have turned out.

Didn’t serve a mission but I was a convert and a couple of years ago I reached out to the missionary who baptised me, I saw him on LinkedIn. He asked me to explain what had made me leave, saying he was very interested and it might help him understand why others he knew had done the same.
So I did just that.
He didn’t respond to anything I said, other than he hoped we could remain on good terms. It was hugely disappointing after the effort of writing a really good essay. I then felt his question had been manipulative and dishonest. That’s mormons for you I guess. I wish I hadn’t bothered. Trying to talk to TBMs is like talking to a brick wall.
I know of a couple of other missionaries who taught my brother and I who fell away from the church. I’d love to talk to them, but these people tend to completely disappear.

One of the guys in my MTC group friended me on Facebook. I think this is because he knew my cousin and found me that way. Other than that, I haven't had any contact with people from the mission since the time I was at BYU.

I sometimes wonder how many of them are on our side of the street today.

I would love to reconnect after all these years. But I got the hell out of Dodge two years after my mission and threw my journal out because it kind of made sick. Wish I hadn't. Now I barely remember a few names of companions and have no way to connect.

The thing is, whether you stayed active or figured out the lie, we all went through something intense and unnatural and that shared experience leaves a connection. I wish I could connect to at least a couple of my favorites. Like, the maverick, and, the one hot one that we could barely keep our hands off each other, haha. When you can resist that, you know you were indoctrinated beyond the pale. BKP would have been proud of us. If I could turn back time . . . haha

I keep in touch with several people from my mission. We have good relationships. I am lucky because they are good, reasonable people. I’d actually be sad to be out of contact. The mission was awful so much of the time but it was a huge event in my life. I feel like my mission friends are like comrades in arms. Only we can understand what we all went through.