There is a photo I have been thinking of, lost in my parents' files somewhere, of me at twenty-one holding a child with butterscotch hair, our eyes red from crying and full of uncertainty. I was leaving to serve a mission in Montreal, and our parting was a terrible one.
It is with emotions so complicated that they have surprised me that I sent that same baby sister off on a mission of her own this past week. I know she will love it. She has a good heart and a sincerity that has always led her to serve others. At the same time, a mission is a complicated thing. Anyone who has served a mission of their own will tell you that they have a recurring nightmare of finding themselves on another one. It is a monastic existence in the face of bustling regular life, the most completely "in the world but not of it" that one will ever likely be. It was one of the oddest times of my life, and the purest. Even motherhood, which in many ways resembles the trials and joys of a mission, has been unable to completely subsume my selfish desires the way my mission did. The love, though, is similar, and the driving desire to add to the happiness of others is the same.
Ten years after coming home, the specifics of who I knew and what I did are fading. I have to be reminded of miracles I witnessed and people that I knew and cared for. I will occasionally be transported by a scent that takes me back to an apartment building I could no longer locate, or snapshots of memory that pass through my mind as disjointed images. There were powerful experiences--of danger, of discouragement, of intense emotional connection, of overwhelming clarity and light--that now exist only as anecdotes, if they are remembered at all. Companions with whom I shared some of the most formative moments of my life are now living their own lives, as I am, and we have only the past between us.
What truly remains is not detail, it is the person it made me, the desire to understand others that was nurtured there, and the ability to regard my own beliefs with skepticism, and my own progress and that of others with a temperate eye. I came home with a more mature basis for compassion than I went away with, one that I may not have acquired any other way. My sister will return from this heightened time a different person, too, and it is impossible to tell from the outset how she will be changed. But she will be older and wiser, and not the doe-eyed innocent that I am parting with now.
"Isn't it such a lovely day outside?"
