Posted by:
CA girl
(
)
Date: February 18, 2012 02:39PM
My friend's son just went in the MTC after Christmas to serve an English speaking mission in the Connecticut area. He's been in the field a few weeks and today we got a letter from him. I assumed it was a typical gung-ho, love the church type letter but it wasn't. He said they had a family they were teaching about a certain gospel principle but the family didn't speak much English because they were native Spanish speakers. He didn't speak any Spanish and his companion only spoke a little, he needed my help. They'd been able to teach them other things with his companions broken Spanish but this particular concept was beyond them. He didn't want to ask the Spanish-speaking missionaries for help because they were too busy and wanted to know if I'd help him. He wrote out his testimony of this principle and asked me to translate it for him and send it back.
This makes me suspicious on a couple of levels. First of all, why aren't the Spanish-speaking missionaries teaching this family in the first place? Maybe my little friend and his comp are desperate for a baptism and don't want to let it go. Second, by the time his letter gets all the way across the U.S. to me and I translate it and send it back, hasn't an awful lot of time passed? Can't some Spanish-speaking RM in his wards in Connecticut translate this for him? Sorry, but this sounds like a ploy to get me to bear my testimony in my favorite other language, bringing back warm feelings of my mission.
Nevertheless, I'll probably do it for him. He's a really good kid and his parents are some of the very few people who acted like nothing changed when we left the church and we were still worth having as friends. If I had to name a list people who've behaved nicely, they'd be on the list, even though it would be a very short list. And even though this missionary is a couple years older than my kids, he's been super nice to them even when we were TBM. He's an all-around good kid.
But I was wondering if he's just trying in his creative way to do a bit of reactivation long distance. Anyone had anything like this happen to them?
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/18/2012 02:41PM by CA girl.