Posted by:
WarInGifs
(
)
Date: April 09, 2021 03:16PM
Thought I'd share a fun little story about a missionary encounter with ya'll:
I live in a 4-unit apartment building with my girlfriend of 4.5 years. The local Sales-Kiddos visit our upstairs neighbors pretty frequently, but we've somehow managed to not have to really interact with them other than very briefly in passing. When we do run into them, I'm pretty cold and straightforward and make sure to leave no real opening for conversation because I 'know.'
She is a bit more willing to entertain the small-talk and sales-pitching out of politeness.
She was raised Catholic, but is not religious. My own exit from the Church happened relatively unceremoniously about a decade ago, so Mormonism has never really had much of an influence in her life or on our relationship, though she is in the loop about my story/experience with Mormonism and my general thoughts about it.
Last Tuesday when I came home from work, my girlfriend suddenly asked me: "Why are Mormons so WEIRD!?"
I just laughed and told her that there probably was not an easy answer to that question, and she proceeded to tell me the following story:
With the nice Spring weather we had last week, my girlfriend decided to go outside to repot some of our house plants while I was at work. While she was doing that, the missionaries wrapped up an appointment with the upstairs neighbor. I guess they saw this as a good opportunity to stop and finally try to make the full pitch to my girlfriend on the way out.
They did pretty good, made lots of small talk, talked about the weather, talked about the neighborhood and the community, etc. She said they were really nice and it was a pleasant interaction for a solid 10-15 minutes, plus she didn't mind the company while she was outside working on the plants. Eventually they finally popped 'the question' (Do you mind if we share a spiritual message with you?)
She politely declined and said she really wasn't interested in their religion. So they shifted their strategy a little, made some more small talk to see if they could could make some other in-roads.
They started asking about me, if I'd be home soon, or if I'd maybe be interested in talking to them and they could schedule a time to come back when I was there. (They didn't otherwise know me or anything about me, they only knew that she lived with her boyfriend.)
At this point, she said politely and innocently, "You could ask him, but honestly, he's probably not really interested either because he *used* to be Mormon."
When she told them that, she said that they totally changed and completely shut down. They said "oh, I see, he probably knows the whole spiel then.. haha" then they literally just turned around and walked away.
No "nice talking to you!", no "have a nice day", no "bye", no "see ya later", no "wave", no nothing.
Just a weird awkward fake-laugh, then walked away without another word while she just kind of stood there shocked and confused about what just happened.
She said it was one of the weirdest things she's ever experienced, because she had just spent the last 15 minutes having a perfectly normal, reasonable, and pleasant conversation with these people, only to have them suddenly just check out and abandon ship out of nowhere without a word, and she had no idea why.
I told her it is probably because I'm an 'Apostate' and once they found that out, they probably just didn't want to risk having me show up while they were still within range of the inevitable, impending lightning strike.
She said she didn't really know what that meant, and just sort reiterated her original question to me: "Seriously though, I don't understand why Mormons are so weird...It was really weird...WHy are Mormons so weird??"
All I could really do was shrug.