Thoughts for a monday.

In Response to another person's post about serving missions.

Perhaps I just one of those smiley-eyed fools who blindly forged ahead in total self-deception and delusion. I was humiliated time and again and perhaps I just pretended that it didn’t matter. The mission life was tough; sometimes excruciating, and I made some pretty big mistakes. Perhaps it was my stubborn nature, but I charged forward in vigorous rebellion against it all. I ignored the consequences of mission life on my body, mind and soul. I spent myself there on the soil in Central America, and if I was going to spend myself in that land of poverty and nameless towns frozen in the 1800s, then I would spend dearly.

I left a part of myself in that land. I don’t know if I will ever regain that part that was so brutally ripped from my soul. I returned to a family that was bankrupt, to parents who were divorced, and to a mother who was struggling through church and government welfare to feed, clothe and shelter my four younger siblings. Some kind members of the ward chipped in to help buy me some clothes that weren’t tattered from having been hung on rusty barbed wire. I felt I had lost everything.

The poignancy of those moments burned deep into my heart. I faltered, and just when I was about to fail; when I was about to forsake myself to bleak nothingness; I saw.

There was no other way, and there is no such thing as cheap grace.