The Dork Dot

I just realized this afternoon that today marks my TWENTIETH anniversary of entering the MTC (Missionary Training Center, for any non-Mormon readers). Whoa! TWENTY YEARS?!? How did that time pass by so fast?

My ward had fast and testimony meeting this morning (rather than last week on the 4th), and one of the full-time missionaries got up to bear his testimony. As he spoke, I thought about how amazing missions are. Here's this young 19-year-old (okay, maybe almost 21) fired up about the Gospel of Jesus Christ, spending all day every day teaching about it and basically living and serving others like Christ did. The part that's most amazing to me is that missions happen right at the point where you're making key life decisions and really figuring out who you are as an adult. Missions are key in shaping that.

Then I started thinking about missionaries from MY mission (lo, so many years ago-- see above) and wondering what they're lives are like now. And of course I started thinking about what my life has turned into in the past 20 years since I entered the MTC. I've come a long, long way from the scared little sister missionary trying to find her new companion in a sea of white shirts and ties.

So back to the title of this entry: I'm not sure if they still do this, but when I entered the MTC, someone greeted me at the door and put a little dot on my shirt collar (I was wearing a floral jumper-- stylin', no?). That way everyone who saw me would know I was a brand-new missionary and go out of their way to help me. We called the sticker the dork dot. It found its way to the back of my mission name tag, and that tag is in a box somewhere now.

After I got my dork dot, my family and I got ushered into a huge auditorium. I don't remember what we did, mainly because I was really nervous and emotional, but I'm pretty sure we listened to the MTC president welcome us, and I'm pretty sure we sang "Called to Serve" (later known, thanks to a mission companion, as "The Missionary Fight Song"-- we clapped it sometimes instead of singing it). I do know that a few years later, when I was dropping off one of my BYU roommates at the MTC, we all sang "Called to Serve" before the missionaries left out one door and families left out the other. My other friends who were there all spoke a different language-- Spanish (Miriam), French (me), Dutch (Felix)-- so we sang the hymn in our languages. The new missionary sang in English. A poor, scared elder sitting right in front of us turned and looked at us in horror. I could read his thoughts on his face: "Oh NO! Everybody else already knows their mission language! I'm behind and it's only day one!"

Back on track with my story: When all the new missionaries left the auditorium, I remember filing through some lines, picking up my name tag, picking up some books and my Missionary Guide, things like that. Mostly I remember seeing nothing but white shirts. My thought, "What if I'm the only sister missionary in the entire building? Where's my companion? What if I can't find her?"

Fortunately, I found Soeur Tollestrup just fine, and we had a fabulous MTC experience, leading into the best mission ever.

One last thought: a couple of months into my mission, when things weren't going as amazingly as I'd hoped, a sister missionary who was just getting ready to go back home was staying overnight in our apartment. Here's the comment that stayed with me: "I had a perfect mission. Not perfect in the sense that nothing bad happened, but perfect in the sense that it was exactly what I needed to have happen for me." I think that describes life pretty well, too.

Lessons from knitting socks

I've been knitting since I was 10 (thanks for teaching me, Mom!), but socks have always seemed mysterious and impossibly difficult. At the same time, there's always been this wish of mine to learn to make them. Kind of a "if I can knit this, I can knit anything" mentality.

So two years ago, Mom and I got matching sock pattern books for Christmas and I started to knit. Last Christmas, I had maybe an inch worth of sock cuff done. Here's where I'm at now. First on my foot (I promise those knitting needles aren't puncturing any foot tissue):

Then off the foot so you can see the pattern:

As I was working on the main part of the sock, I kept looking ahead to the pattern directions and thinking, "How in the world am I going to figure out how to do the heel? That part of the pattern makes absolutely NO SENSE!" Mom couldn't remember how to turn a heel, so I looked online for some help. The main message I got from every sock site was "trust the pattern, even if you don't see how it can work."

So I got to the heel and started following the pattern directions. I had to take out a whole section and try again after I realized after the fact what part of the directions were really saying, but it worked. I knit and knit and thought, "Nope, this won't work," and then all of a sudden, it did! Who woulda thunk it? Those crazy pattern designers know what they're doing after all.

Then I thought bigger. How many times does the pattern make absolutely no sense to me and I try to make my own version that I think will work even though I don't know what I'm doing? I see something happening in my life and think, "Nope, this won't work" or "Why would I move in that direction instead of this one?" It comes back to trusting the pattern. Or rather, trusting the pattern designer. My job is to knit and follow the directions.

I can do that. And maybe next Christmas I'll have one sock done of the pair.