harmony wrote:#1 son's mission experience has been an overall plus. He learned a difficult foreign language and learned to manuever successfully within that culture. His knowledge of the foreign language and culture (Japanese) has helped him in his business (as a consultant with an international computer business). His MP was an almost complete SOB, but my son didn't spend much time with him, because he was never in a leadership position (the MP wouldn't have known an inspiration if it bit him in the butt). Overall, I'd give it a thumb's up.
Just for everyone's gee-whiz files: Harmony's son and I were in the same mission and had the same mission president as mentioned above.
Small world, eh?
Son #?
Son #1. Sorry, I didn't see Shades had already posted.
#1 son went to Japan, Nagoya.
#2 son went to New Jersey Morristown Spanish speaking
#4 son went to Costa Rica
#5 son went to North Carolina, Charlotte.
ajax18 wrote:I still don't regret my mission. I think I did a lot of good. Like it or not, the mission did teach me a lot of Christ like principles and gave me an oppurtunity to put the gospel into practice as I would never have been able to do in any other way. I still think what I did was important to the Lord and for the next life.
Yet I'll admit that the mission showed me a side of the Church, or the people that run it, that I didn't like. President Hinckley asked us to let the Church be like a good old friend. Yet it really was anything but that. It was more like an insatiable task master, and honestly what I hear in Church does little more than drag me down. Hence I understand why missionaries often come home and keep their distance from the Church. And sadly the mission kind of showed me where a lot of their reasoning on salvation and the purpose of life was either ridiculously vague with no central doctrine, or simply didn't add up and was wrong.
Sound like a contradiction? That's just the way I saw it.
That's an excellent way of putting it: "an insatiable task master." When I finally looked at the church dispassionately, I realized that it was like a bad marriage: you gave and gave and gave but got very little in return other than the promise of a deferred happiness.
There's kind of a weird psychological positioning in the church in that you're never good enough, so you need the church to make you better, but you're also better than the rest of the world, which you also need the church to maintain.
I don't begrudge people for whom the church works. It doesn't for me. But I'd be willing to live something that didn't quite work if I knew it was true.