Farewell (Again)

One of the things that I was most eager to learn in the MTC was a date. Not a date in church history or anything like that, but a date just a few weeks in the future, the date that I would be leaving for Michigan. This was a critical date for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that when I leaned what it was I could then inform my family and friends of the date. This was a pre-9/11 world, and in this world things were very different at the airport on the mornings that missionaries left for the mission field. Family and friends were welcome to come to the airport, go through security, and spend a final few minutes at the gate with their missionaries. It was something missionaries  and family looked forward to. Another chance to say goodbye, because saying goodbye at the MTC wasn’t enough. This made sense and was a huge part of the ritual of departing missionaries.

The date I would be departing was Wednesday, December 15th. Early that morning I boarded a bus with a large group of missionaries from the MTC, and we drove to the Salt Lake City Airport. When I eventually made my way to the departure gate, I found my mom and dad, my sister Kristin and her daughter, Hayley, my younger brother, Mark, and a group of friends: Aaron, Spencer, Mikey (the three I had just hung out with two nights before at the MTC), Brad and his mom, Beth, Becca, Yvonne, Jessica Bentley, Weed, Matt, and JB. We talked and laughed, took pictures, laughed some more, and then said goodbye. I walked through the gate psyched out for the coming experience of flying to Michigan, meeting my mission president, and beginning the two year experience of a lifetime. I found my seat on the plane, noted that the seats were listed on the overhead compartments as “CBA,” and smiled at this, sat down and waited. Twenty minutes passed and nothing happened, when the captain came over the intercom informing us that there was a problem with the plane which they were trying to fix. Ten minutes later another announcement, this time informing us that the problem could not be fixed and we would not be leaving on this particular plane, but we would be sent to our destinations via another plane.

Everybody got up, gathered together their carry on luggage, and made their way off the plane. There was a part of me that hoped that some of my family and friends had stuck around to watch the plane take off, and when it didn’t, would still be there when I walked off. To my great delight, almost everybody had stayed, and many of my friends had quickly made “Welcome Home” signs that they were holding up for me when I walked off the plane. “Welcome home Elder Holdaway!” they shouted as I came back through the gate, smiling and waving, and waiting to use a brilliant line that I had come up with a few minutes before. “That was the shortest two years of my l-uuuiiife!” The last word came out like an extended grunt because as I said it I was being lifted up off the ground by someone from behind. My friend, Jake, who had not been to see me board the first plane, had arrived later and was hiding behind the gate doors to give me this surprise.

Family and friends stayed for another hour or two and then, sort of unceremoniously, after more goodbyes, left to go back to their lives. I still had a seven hour wait at the airport while they re-routed the flight. I studied my scriptures a little, wrote in my journal a little, but mostly sat and watched people come and go from Salt Lake City, Utah, a place I was very familiar with, but would be leaving so soon to an unfamiliar place. We finally boarded a late afternoon flight that went directly to Detroit, and arrived in Michigan in the late evening, close to 10:00.

We were greeted with friendly hugs from our mission president, President Church, a hearty handshake from Sister Church, and hugs from the assistants to the president. We gathered together our luggage and made our way to a large white Ford passenger van. As we left the airport, nine new missionaries total, we listened eagerly as the veteran assistants told us whatever pieces of information they felt were important for us to know. They talked and laughed and drove, until they saw a sign indicating that Toronto, and therefore the Canadian border, were only a few miles ahead.

Toronto is the opposite direction from Lansing when leaving Detroit.

They pulled the van off the freeway, righted the course, and made the trip, now just a little longer than anticipated, out to East Lansing and the mission home. We arrived sometime after midnight. In my brand new missionary naivete, I thought we would just go in and go to bed, then maybe be allowed to sleep in the next morning, since we had such a long day. However, once we got to the mission home, President Church interviewed each of us individually, so he could know how to pair us up with our companions the next day. And then in the morning, at 6:00, we were waked up and informed that we needed to get ready for the day, because this was transfer day, and it needed to get started right away so that all the transfers could happen in time. I felt pretty bad for myself, being as tired as I was.

What I didn’t realize was that President Church and the assistants were up much later than us, praying and discussing who to pair us up with, and also dealing with the aftermath of a car accident that some missionaries, known as the assistants’ companions, had got in while driving President Church’s car the night before. But I was nineteen and only thinking about me. Well, and the guy whose picture I now had sitting in front of me. We were each given a piece of paper with a picture and a name, the name of our new companions, our trainers. I looked down at the picture of Elder Staker, and wondered what he was like. We were to be serving in the Lansing South area. I was eager to meet him and to see our apartment and to find out what life was going to be like.

But Elder Staker hadn’t been serving in Lansing most recently; he had been in Muskegon, which was on the far west side of the state, and he wouldn’t be arriving in Lansing until that evening, when the transfer van that had picked him up made its way back from a trip around the entire state. So I waited for him at the East Lansing Stake Center. There was not a lot to do there, except hang out and watch all the missionaries that were coming and going throughout the day.

At one point I was in the kitchen where some snacks had been set out, and there were two other missionaries in there eating the snacks and talking with each other. They were on their way home, and were waiting for the van to pick them up and take them to the mission home for their last night in the field. I was extremely interested in their conversation, so I hung around and listened as they talked. They talked about areas they had both served in and the members in those areas, but, to my surprise, their conversation was all very negative. When they talked about members of the church, they discussed how much they were annoyed by them, and how they couldn’t wait to get back home and not have to deal with all the things that missionaries deal with.

Their conversation continued for a long time with this kind of tone, so I left the room. I don’t think they even knew I was in there. I felt devastated. All my life I had looked forward to becoming a missionary, and now I was finally here on my mission, and I was so excited to get started preaching the gospel and doing all the wonderful things that missionaries do… But according to these two, missionaries didn’t do any of those things, and I found myself thinking that if that’s what mission life was really like, I wanted no part of it, and I would just go home.

The seemingly unending hours of waiting, coupled with the conversation of the two departing missionaries, killed my enthusiasm, and by the time the transfer van finally arrived at the stake center, sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 that evening, I was feeling pretty crappy. I watched as a few missionaries filed into the stake center, and watched for Elder Staker, when suddenly a tall young man, in a trench coat that looked like it went on forever, approached me. He smiled and when he smiled his eyes nearly disappeared from the squinting, and he spoke in a deep voice, “Elder Holdaway.” I was about to extend my hand to shake his, but he pulled me into an affectionate hug before I could do anything else.

That moment calmed me, and I knew instinctively that here was a missionary who was very different from those others I had encountered; here was a missionary who was a servant of Jesus Christ, and I was lucky enough to be his companion.

Mom, Hayley, Kristin, Dad, me, and Mark at the airport.

Probably the last picture taken of Cute Band Alert!