I was released as a Church Service Missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints a month ago and have put off writing about my experience because I felt I needed a little time to process it all. The last week of service was very emotional as I said goodbye to many friends and I needed to get some distance before I did some blogging.
The last week of October 2013 I was called to serve for one year at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. I was assigned to the US/Canada Zone of the Family and Church History Headquarters Mission and the US/Canada Zone is the largest zone in the FHL. It is responsible for three of the five floors in the Library so there are lots of missionaries assigned to our zone. Church Service and full-time missionaries spend most of their time assisting guests in the Library to search for their ancestors and learn the features of familysearch.org. I began my mission with a week of training in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building and then classes and self-guided training in my zone. Because of my years of experience with family history, my zone leader asked me to hurry through the training so I could quickly move on to working with guests. To accomplish that goal, I went up to the Library extra days to finish the training by the beginning of December. Turns out that was a bit of a record for a CSM who was not there every day of the week.
I spent December and January helping guests on the floors and had some really neat experiences with people who were awed and amazed to find information about their ancestors. But in February my mission experience changed. I was assigned to completely revamp the training curriculum for our zone and spent the rest of my mission working on that project. It turned out to be a major task that involved lots of extra days at the Library plus a lot of work at home to get it done before my release date at the end of October. I wrote a 200 page training manual to train new missionaries to the zone and then a 100 page advanced training manual for experienced missionaries. It used sound educational techniques like application of principles to real-world research, shadowing, mentoring, and role-playing. The concept of the training was so different that it required changes to our classes and other training protocols, so I also established new procedures and wrote many documents to ensure that future missionaries could oversee the program after my release. Many missionaries started through the new program beginning in the summer and I used their experience to refine the manuals and procedures, but everyone felt like there was immediate improvement. I was finalizing things on my last day so it was a real race to the finish.
Most missionaries have a different experience and spend their entire mission helping guests. Many of them were sad for me that I spent most of my mission in the office pounding away on the computer, but I feel that my work helps missionaries be more successful and do better at helping guests, so it was a very rewarding mission. Good training helps everyone.
I also made many friends there and it was very sad to leave them, but it was time. It was hard for me physically to go up there week after week. I was only supposed to be there two days a week but I worked long days to get the work done and had to rest up the day before and after. And sometimes the next day, too. In order to be chipper on my days at the Library, Scott mostly saw me in recovery mode and he deserves to see me chipper once in a while. So even though there was a pressure to extend my mission, we decided to stick to the original plan of serving one year. I feel like I was called for a reason to that mission and I served my purpose. My zone leader is fond of telling people that I was prayed into the mission because he was praying for someone to be called to fix the training and then I arrived. It feels good to know there was a reason that I felt inspired to serve a mission, and that the Lord took my talents and expanded them for His purposes. And I was blessed for my service.
The view on my last day as I left the Family History Library.
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