He has sung this song since he was a little boy. My son always had a desire to serve a mission
and believed he would.
As he reached his Senior year, however he began to experience some health issues of anxiety/depression.
The huge announcement of the mission age change was in effect but we began to realize that for him, he would be best to experience a little time away from home. We needed to see how he would adjust to living on his own.
There were pretty good days and a few days I'm so glad we don't have to relive, but
he overall did well and we started his mission papers in October with an availability
date of Dec 20th. This would be just as his BYU semester was ending and we thought
he may even leave before Christmas!
Little did we know, that we would be in for a LOT of patience and waiting, hoping
and praying...
There were questions about his medical (which we expected) but after a month of waiting we now found out he would need an evaluation to see if he was even fit for a mission.
This evaluation took place in December
So no mission call before Christmas!
January was evaluation and counseling again even though he had been cleared as
OK to serve by the BYU counseling evaluation.
Finally the approval was given that he could submit his papers.
We were happy and now knew we would need to wait for the call because with
a medical history a mission call usually takes several weeks to get through the missionary
department system.
we knew from our Bishop that a call had been issued on the missionary tracking system.
What we didn't know was that we would not receive one of these!
With my other sons we had a big white envelope waiting on the counter. Anticipating
when friends and family could gather and together we could guess where he might serve and everyone could rejoice together as they found out his missionary destination.
This wasn't how it happened........It's a disappointment. It's not the big opening parties everyone else has. My son was brave to continue to attend a few opening parties of his friends after this. But I won't lie. It was tough.
The week when we thought the call would arrive in the mail we kept checking the mailbox. Then we received a message from the Stake President-- that he wanted to
meet with us (my son, husband and I) that night. That was the moment I knew we would be having a little bit of a different experience.
This is where the call letter was read to us and explained. My son accepted the call.
I was so humbled when he said he would go where he was asked to go. He said the place didn't matter.
It still was hard though. He felt different. But we all decided to trust in the Lord,
lean not unto our own understanding.
He now had a call to...........
PROVO, UT
(you know the place where you kind of joke about where you will be called to serve)
But it's OK. It was OK for him. Looking back it was GOOD for him.
No comments:
Post a Comment