I felt pretty inspired as a missionary. At times, it seemed that ideas would come to me as if from on high. I thought these ideas were so amazing, so earth-shattering, that they would revolutionize the face of missionary work itself and, in so doing, the entire world. Most of the time, I forgot about these epiphanies within a day or so, once reality brought be back to earth.
Nevertheless, despite the would-be revolutions which were born and died in my own head, there were a few lessons I learned which, to this day, strike me as profound. While they pertain to missionary work, many of them are also applicable to life in general.
I should also note that these moments of “seeing the light” were not solely creations of my own understanding. In fact, they came as lessons that I heard repeated over and over again. In most cases, it simply took a while for them to finally penetrate my skull.
The first of these delayed revelations came from a phrase I heard repeated annoyingly often. The most common variation of the phrase is this: “Missionary work is the Lord's work.”
In the MTC, one evening upon returning to my dorm, I overheard another missionary making an audiotape for his girlfriend. “I know that missionary work is the Lord's work,” he said fervently into the tape recorder. My own silent mental response went something like this: “That's the obvious yet lame attempt at sounding spiritual that I've ever heard. Of course missionary work is the Lord's work! That's like saying 'I know that running the country is the president's work' or 'I know that raising pigs is a farmer's work.'”
Many months later, after nearly a mission's worth of trying to figure out what being a missionary meant, it hit me. Missionary work very literally is the Lord's work. My entire mission, I had been operating under the assumption that MY mission was MY work, and therefore depended on my own efforts, knowledge, skills, and abilities. I saw the Lord simply as the boss, and if I worked hard and figured out how to be the best missionary I could, He would give me a good performance evaluation at the end of the fiscal year. (It's a joke – if you work for the government then you understand).
What I was missing was the actual meaning of that phrase. I had been taking it to mean that missionary work is something that the Lord wants us to do. In fact, it means “missionary work is something the Lord is doing” (See Moses 1:39). Our role is that we can help Him out, if we so desire.
Recognizing this changed how I mentally viewed my role as a missionary, and even, as a human being. Rather than feeling fully dependent on my own abilities, it helped me see the interconnected nature of humanity. Furthermore, it helped me understand the necessity of our interconnectedness, or “oneness” as Jesus calls it, with our Father in Heaven (See John 17:11). He does have a plan for us, and He is in the middle of implementing that plan.
I thought my own bright ideas were so creative and profound. And perhaps they were, relative to my peers. But relative to God's wisdom and planning ability, they were but shadows of theories of good ideas (See Isaiah 55:8-9).
Especially in Western culture, we have instilled into us from childhood that individual effort and success are most important in life. We are taught that we should reach for the stars, and that anything we put our mind to doing, we can accomplish. This may be true, but for which stars we should be reaching? To what we should be putting our minds? We use our abilities to find success in the best way we know how, but at the end of the day, we are left asking “what's the purpose of life?”
From the simple phrase I once thought was so cliché, I felt my mind finally wrapped itself around the greatest question humanity has ever considered, at least in some small measure. The Lord's plan is real and it is taking place. Somewhere in that plan, we all have a distinct role. Discovering that role and being part of it brings clarity and purpose to life. And for me, it has also brought more happiness than I ever thought possible.
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