My more-than-friend Jared is right now facing the decision of his life. Later in life he may be faced with even more momentous choices, but for the present, this is about as life-impacting as it gets. No, he's not deciding whether or not to pop any pertinent question to me. We may both be young and stupid, but our stupidity has its limits. Education needs to be a priority for both of us for a few years, and while we're on academic scholarships, neither set of mommies and daddies would be all that thrilled about keeping a roof over our heads while we simultaneously played house and attended college.
Jared's monumental decision concerns whether or not to serve a two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The obvious answer would be just say no. In going, he would be throwing more than ten thousand dollars of his parents' money away (at least his parents are willing to foot the bill; some families expect-- even demand-- of their sons that they fulfill missions, but then the parents expect the sons to earn their own way, starting their savings as young as elementary school with paper routes, mowing lawns, and such, and working their way up to more substantial employment. (Other families build a family mission fund with individual and group supplemental employment, all of which lnds in a joint fund from which the missinaries draw to pay their expenses. The problem with ths is that in the families I've known that employ this tactic, the girls are expected to contribute every bit as heavily as are the boys, yet girls are no required as are boys to serve missions.) In Jared's case, his parents have done well enough financially that they are willing to pay for both missions and bachelor's degrees for their six children. Thus, Jared's personal finances are not impacted in a very direct way.
Jared's issues with serving a mission are mostly concerned with essentially isolating himself from the outside world for two years and with freedom to make choices for himself for two years being nonexistent. Two years may not seem like a terribly long period of time to some, but to a person who's eighteen, it's more than ten per cent of that person's life. It's a substantial chunk of time to give up when one is unsure as to just how much he wants to do it.
When one agrees to serve a mission for the LDS Church, one fills out papers an submits them to Salt lake City. Depending upon whom one chooses to believe, each individual application is prayed and pondered over before a decision is made as to where a prospective missionary will be sent, or applications are randomly placed into stacks, and the stack into which a prospective missionary's application is placed determines where he or she is assigned to serve. The reported exception (heavily denied by spokespersons within the LDS church) is that offspring of prominent Mormons are often sent to safer, "cushier," or otherwise preferential mission sites. (Mitt Romney, for example, served in France. My father served in Argentina,where the water was not safe to drink.) No one would argue that it is universally true that the children of wealthy or influential Mormons always end up in the more desired locations. Token children of Mormon leadership are sent to the more remote and less civilized locations just often enough that it can be stated that preferential treatment does not exist.
A Mormon missionary receives no financial compensation for his service (or for her service ; women are allowed, though not required to serve, although they are not allowed to go until they reach the age of nineteen. The minimum age for women to serve had been twenty-one until October of 2012. At that time, the minimum age for men to serve missions was lowered from nineteen to eighteen ). On the contrary, the parents, or in some cases the local congregations, are required to send an amount of money that I believe is four hundred dollars each month to the Church. From this money, rent is paid, a small allowance for food is given, and an even smaller allowance for incidentals is provided. Depending upon where the missionary is stationed, the living quarters are often slums into which no parent in his or her right mind would allow a young adult child to live if he or she actually laid eyes on the place. (By contrast, the Mission President and his wife, who are the couple who preside over all aspect of the mission with some degree of delegation, live in typically comfortable conditions in the "Mission Home." Also sometimes living in the Mission Home are privileged missionaries, known as assistants to the president. These young men (always men; females are not permitted to fill these positions) sometimes are elevated to the positions because of success in the mission field. Sometimes the positions go to them because they descend from LDS royalty.
One reason missionaries are given comparatively small food stipends is because they are expected to be invited to homes of local Mormons to partake of meals. Sometimes this happens, and sometimes it does not. Sometimes even when an invitation is issued, the young missionaries show up for the dinner invitation only to find no one home. Missionaries, depending upon where they serve, sometimes have a great deal of difficulty maintaining weight while on missions.
Medical care while on missions has been a major bone of contention. Often medical care is unavailable or is substandard. Depending upon where the missionary serves, insurance may or may not be provided by the church. If a missionary becomes seriously ill or injured while on a mission, the LDS Church tries to persuade the parents to pay the cost of the medical treatment. If the parents refuse, they church has no recourse but to pay it. Sanitation conditions, among other things, often cause missionaries living in third-world conditions to become ill. Persuading those in charge to seek medical care for such missionaries has been known to be very difficult.
A cousin of mine came home from South America before the scheduled completion of his mission last spring because of a severe case of amoebic dysentery. He ended up losing a large section of (I think) his ileum. As ill as he was, he was given no assistance to get to a hospital or to travel home. My uncle (not the missionary's father; the father had wanted his son to stick it out in South America despite his life-threatening illness, but the missionary's mother's brother, himself an active member of the LDS Church and an MD as well) traveled to South America, located my cousin, traveled with my cousin to the Mission Home and demanded his passport, which had been denied when my cousin asked for it earlier. My uncle gave the Mission Home staff a deadline of twenty-four hours before he would travel to the U.S, Embassy if the passport was not handed over. It took almost the full twenty-four hours for the Mission President to return to the Mission Home and open the safe to retrieve the passport.
The Mission President still did not want my cousin to leave. My uncle, concerned before he even left for South America about the condition of my cousin's health, took four units of safe A+ blood (my cousin's type) for a worst-case scenario. The Mission President tried to talk my uncle into admitting my cousin in a hospital located in the city of the Mission Home. My uncle was very concerned about the integrity of the blood supply there. He transfused my cousin with two pints of the blood and saved the rest in the event of a bleedout or other emergency. It ended up being needed before they were able to make it out of South America.
My cousin was flown to a hospital in Miami, where he was stabilized until he could be flown to California for surgery. My cousin's father had stopped paying insurance premiums on him, so the surgery, if possible, needed to happen in California because our family had enough connections that most of the services would be comped.
About eight months later, my cousin has regained forty of the sixty pounds he lost while on his mission. He was far from overweight when he left. Because he left before completing his mission honorably, he is not eligible for the BYU missionary scholarship on which he had counted to complete his education. He lives with my aunt and uncle in California and attends a university here. My parents and two other aunts and uncles who live here split the cost of his tuition. His parents refuse to help him in any way because he left his mission before its completion.
My cousin's case is extreme. Jared's parents would not expect him to remain in a foreign country receiving no or substandard medical care, and if he needed to come home, they would still pay for his college tuition. Still, Jared is weighing the pluses and minuses very heavily. If he goes, he'll be two years behind in college when he returns, He plans to go to medical or dental school. If he doesn't go on a mission, he will be 22 when he earns his B.S. If he serves a mission, depending upon the timing of the mission, he'll be between 24 and 25 by the time he ears his B.S.. That would have him finishing dental school at 27 or 28, or completing medical school at 28 or 29. The age of twenty-nine doesn't exactly qualify one for an AARP card, but if he didn't go on a mission, he'd be out of medical school and starting a residency at 26. It's a pretty substantial difference.
Jared then needs to consider reasons why he should serve a mission. The first reason is that it would please his father. Sorry, Jared's dad, my dad, or anyone else's dad, but two years of one's life is a whole lot to give up just to please one's father. Were the depth of Jared's religious convictions such that he felt compelled, that, along with the desire to please his father, would be sufficient reason. Without the religious call, however, the reason is flimsy at best.
Another reason Jared might benefit from serving a mission is to learn another language. My father learned to speak Spanish fluently while on a mission in Argentina. He has found the skill invaluable. My Uncle Scott learned fluent Spanish in Colombia. He, too, says he'd do the mission over again even though he's no longer a believing Mormon if only for the acquisition of Spanish.
On the other hand, here;'s no guarantee Jared will be sent to a Spanish-speaking country. The forms that prospective missionaries complete ask about previous languages learned and about where one might choose to serve, but far more often than not, the actual assignment does not reflect the missionariy's answers to those questions in any way. Furthermore, not all languages are of equal value for a prospective doctor or dentist in California. Jared's dad served a mission in Norway. While learning any language is a valuable experience and can be a real novelty, Jared's dad used his ability to speak Norwegian six times in his twelve years of practicing medicine in Utah, and used it zero times in practicing medicine in California. Jared could end up spending two years of his life trying to convert people to Mormonism in the Great State of Oklahoma. Or who's to say Jared wouldn't be sent to somewhere in the Great White North where an obscure native Canadian language is spoken. Just how valuable would that be in his future medical or dental practice?
My advice to Jared is that if, for whatever reason, he wants to go on a Mormon mission, he should go. If he doesn't want to go, he should skip out on the whole experience. If he's totally undecided, he should complete the paperwork and submit it. If, when he receives his "call" in the form of a thick white envelope from Salt Lake City, he should open it, look at where it is the church proposes to send him, pay close attention to precisely when they want him to report, as in a lousy reporting date can kill two semesters in addition to the four that he would miss anyway while he's off riding a bicycle and handing out Books of Mormon. He could then either report on the appointed date or say to the big boys in Provo (where the mission Training Center is located), "April Fools! I was only kidding!"
If he goes and ends up in an unhealthful or dangerous situation, he has at least three uncles and a mother who will do whatever it takes to rescue him from whatever jungle in which the church has stowed him away, so he has a tremendous advantage over many prospective missionaries.
Jared's monumental decision concerns whether or not to serve a two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The obvious answer would be just say no. In going, he would be throwing more than ten thousand dollars of his parents' money away (at least his parents are willing to foot the bill; some families expect-- even demand-- of their sons that they fulfill missions, but then the parents expect the sons to earn their own way, starting their savings as young as elementary school with paper routes, mowing lawns, and such, and working their way up to more substantial employment. (Other families build a family mission fund with individual and group supplemental employment, all of which lnds in a joint fund from which the missinaries draw to pay their expenses. The problem with ths is that in the families I've known that employ this tactic, the girls are expected to contribute every bit as heavily as are the boys, yet girls are no required as are boys to serve missions.) In Jared's case, his parents have done well enough financially that they are willing to pay for both missions and bachelor's degrees for their six children. Thus, Jared's personal finances are not impacted in a very direct way.
Jared's issues with serving a mission are mostly concerned with essentially isolating himself from the outside world for two years and with freedom to make choices for himself for two years being nonexistent. Two years may not seem like a terribly long period of time to some, but to a person who's eighteen, it's more than ten per cent of that person's life. It's a substantial chunk of time to give up when one is unsure as to just how much he wants to do it.
When one agrees to serve a mission for the LDS Church, one fills out papers an submits them to Salt lake City. Depending upon whom one chooses to believe, each individual application is prayed and pondered over before a decision is made as to where a prospective missionary will be sent, or applications are randomly placed into stacks, and the stack into which a prospective missionary's application is placed determines where he or she is assigned to serve. The reported exception (heavily denied by spokespersons within the LDS church) is that offspring of prominent Mormons are often sent to safer, "cushier," or otherwise preferential mission sites. (Mitt Romney, for example, served in France. My father served in Argentina,where the water was not safe to drink.) No one would argue that it is universally true that the children of wealthy or influential Mormons always end up in the more desired locations. Token children of Mormon leadership are sent to the more remote and less civilized locations just often enough that it can be stated that preferential treatment does not exist.
A Mormon missionary receives no financial compensation for his service (or for her service ; women are allowed, though not required to serve, although they are not allowed to go until they reach the age of nineteen. The minimum age for women to serve had been twenty-one until October of 2012. At that time, the minimum age for men to serve missions was lowered from nineteen to eighteen ). On the contrary, the parents, or in some cases the local congregations, are required to send an amount of money that I believe is four hundred dollars each month to the Church. From this money, rent is paid, a small allowance for food is given, and an even smaller allowance for incidentals is provided. Depending upon where the missionary is stationed, the living quarters are often slums into which no parent in his or her right mind would allow a young adult child to live if he or she actually laid eyes on the place. (By contrast, the Mission President and his wife, who are the couple who preside over all aspect of the mission with some degree of delegation, live in typically comfortable conditions in the "Mission Home." Also sometimes living in the Mission Home are privileged missionaries, known as assistants to the president. These young men (always men; females are not permitted to fill these positions) sometimes are elevated to the positions because of success in the mission field. Sometimes the positions go to them because they descend from LDS royalty.
One reason missionaries are given comparatively small food stipends is because they are expected to be invited to homes of local Mormons to partake of meals. Sometimes this happens, and sometimes it does not. Sometimes even when an invitation is issued, the young missionaries show up for the dinner invitation only to find no one home. Missionaries, depending upon where they serve, sometimes have a great deal of difficulty maintaining weight while on missions.
Medical care while on missions has been a major bone of contention. Often medical care is unavailable or is substandard. Depending upon where the missionary serves, insurance may or may not be provided by the church. If a missionary becomes seriously ill or injured while on a mission, the LDS Church tries to persuade the parents to pay the cost of the medical treatment. If the parents refuse, they church has no recourse but to pay it. Sanitation conditions, among other things, often cause missionaries living in third-world conditions to become ill. Persuading those in charge to seek medical care for such missionaries has been known to be very difficult.
A cousin of mine came home from South America before the scheduled completion of his mission last spring because of a severe case of amoebic dysentery. He ended up losing a large section of (I think) his ileum. As ill as he was, he was given no assistance to get to a hospital or to travel home. My uncle (not the missionary's father; the father had wanted his son to stick it out in South America despite his life-threatening illness, but the missionary's mother's brother, himself an active member of the LDS Church and an MD as well) traveled to South America, located my cousin, traveled with my cousin to the Mission Home and demanded his passport, which had been denied when my cousin asked for it earlier. My uncle gave the Mission Home staff a deadline of twenty-four hours before he would travel to the U.S, Embassy if the passport was not handed over. It took almost the full twenty-four hours for the Mission President to return to the Mission Home and open the safe to retrieve the passport.
The Mission President still did not want my cousin to leave. My uncle, concerned before he even left for South America about the condition of my cousin's health, took four units of safe A+ blood (my cousin's type) for a worst-case scenario. The Mission President tried to talk my uncle into admitting my cousin in a hospital located in the city of the Mission Home. My uncle was very concerned about the integrity of the blood supply there. He transfused my cousin with two pints of the blood and saved the rest in the event of a bleedout or other emergency. It ended up being needed before they were able to make it out of South America.
My cousin was flown to a hospital in Miami, where he was stabilized until he could be flown to California for surgery. My cousin's father had stopped paying insurance premiums on him, so the surgery, if possible, needed to happen in California because our family had enough connections that most of the services would be comped.
About eight months later, my cousin has regained forty of the sixty pounds he lost while on his mission. He was far from overweight when he left. Because he left before completing his mission honorably, he is not eligible for the BYU missionary scholarship on which he had counted to complete his education. He lives with my aunt and uncle in California and attends a university here. My parents and two other aunts and uncles who live here split the cost of his tuition. His parents refuse to help him in any way because he left his mission before its completion.
My cousin's case is extreme. Jared's parents would not expect him to remain in a foreign country receiving no or substandard medical care, and if he needed to come home, they would still pay for his college tuition. Still, Jared is weighing the pluses and minuses very heavily. If he goes, he'll be two years behind in college when he returns, He plans to go to medical or dental school. If he doesn't go on a mission, he will be 22 when he earns his B.S. If he serves a mission, depending upon the timing of the mission, he'll be between 24 and 25 by the time he ears his B.S.. That would have him finishing dental school at 27 or 28, or completing medical school at 28 or 29. The age of twenty-nine doesn't exactly qualify one for an AARP card, but if he didn't go on a mission, he'd be out of medical school and starting a residency at 26. It's a pretty substantial difference.
Jared then needs to consider reasons why he should serve a mission. The first reason is that it would please his father. Sorry, Jared's dad, my dad, or anyone else's dad, but two years of one's life is a whole lot to give up just to please one's father. Were the depth of Jared's religious convictions such that he felt compelled, that, along with the desire to please his father, would be sufficient reason. Without the religious call, however, the reason is flimsy at best.
Another reason Jared might benefit from serving a mission is to learn another language. My father learned to speak Spanish fluently while on a mission in Argentina. He has found the skill invaluable. My Uncle Scott learned fluent Spanish in Colombia. He, too, says he'd do the mission over again even though he's no longer a believing Mormon if only for the acquisition of Spanish.
On the other hand, here;'s no guarantee Jared will be sent to a Spanish-speaking country. The forms that prospective missionaries complete ask about previous languages learned and about where one might choose to serve, but far more often than not, the actual assignment does not reflect the missionariy's answers to those questions in any way. Furthermore, not all languages are of equal value for a prospective doctor or dentist in California. Jared's dad served a mission in Norway. While learning any language is a valuable experience and can be a real novelty, Jared's dad used his ability to speak Norwegian six times in his twelve years of practicing medicine in Utah, and used it zero times in practicing medicine in California. Jared could end up spending two years of his life trying to convert people to Mormonism in the Great State of Oklahoma. Or who's to say Jared wouldn't be sent to somewhere in the Great White North where an obscure native Canadian language is spoken. Just how valuable would that be in his future medical or dental practice?
My advice to Jared is that if, for whatever reason, he wants to go on a Mormon mission, he should go. If he doesn't want to go, he should skip out on the whole experience. If he's totally undecided, he should complete the paperwork and submit it. If, when he receives his "call" in the form of a thick white envelope from Salt Lake City, he should open it, look at where it is the church proposes to send him, pay close attention to precisely when they want him to report, as in a lousy reporting date can kill two semesters in addition to the four that he would miss anyway while he's off riding a bicycle and handing out Books of Mormon. He could then either report on the appointed date or say to the big boys in Provo (where the mission Training Center is located), "April Fools! I was only kidding!"
If he goes and ends up in an unhealthful or dangerous situation, he has at least three uncles and a mother who will do whatever it takes to rescue him from whatever jungle in which the church has stowed him away, so he has a tremendous advantage over many prospective missionaries.
