Pray to be Filled with Charity and Give it All You Have

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland spoke at a Devotional  Missionary Training Center on August 24, 2010.  He said that a mission comes once, so "give it all you have."  Missionaries should be dedicated to the work "every hour, every day, every minute, all the way."  Elder Holland made the point that this is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it is His church, His gospel, His work, and HIS MISSION. This is not your mission, it is the Lord's mission, he argued.  Elder Holland also said that a mission is not Burger King, "We don't hold the pickles," making the point that missions are not tailored to the needs of the missionary.  "Don't do this your way," Elder Holland added, "do this the Lord's way."

I agree wholeheartedly with Elder Holland, a mission is not Burger King. Missionaries are there to serve the Lord “every hour, every day, every minute, all the way.” However, I feel that I should point out that missionaries are not machines, and they are not all the same.  In my mission, there were missionaries for whom it took everything they had to get 25 hours of teaching and tracting each week, there were others for whom 25 hours wasn’t really a challenge, and still others who easily did more.

It is that middle group that I would focus on; if 25 hours was not a challenge, they probably should have asked themselves if they could have done more, and then they should have stretched themselves to do more.  In a weekly planning session, one of my companions and I decided to do an extra hour of tracting each day in order to get to 30 hours of teaching and tracting (we didn't have much of a teaching pool at the time).  After reaching that goal we decided to try for 35 hours.

Each week in the mission field is different; some weeks being more difficult than others, they require more of the missionary to do what seemed to be so much easier the week before. Meanwhile, you have all of these other things taking up time, like transit to and from appointments, to and from proselyting areas, then you have to eat which often means going back to your apartment (I didn't have the money to eat a McDonald's every day, few missionaries do), and finally there are other aspects of missionary work that don’t qualify as teaching and tracting.

These are not excuses -- as my mission president would have said, “Excuses are just that, excuses.”  There are, however, realities that each missionary must deal with: realities about himself, about his companions, about his areas, and about life in general.  In these realities are to be found opportunity -- the opportunity to develop charity. With charity we can have compassion and understanding towards those missionaries who at first glance look like buckets (the term in my mission for a lazy missionary), but with another glance might be seen as those who are giving their all even if they are doing less.

“Faith, hope, charity and love, with an eye single to the glory of God, qualify him for the work.”  As Mormon so eloquently argues in Moroni 7, if we are to have faith, then we must have hope, and if we have faith and hope, then we must have charity.  In fact, if we do not have charity, we are nothing; if we do not have one, then we do not have the other two.  Faith is the first principle of the gospel, it is the starting point for everything, so in a sense at least, we must have faith before we have the other two, but if we do not get the other two, then we will lose our faith.

To have charity, as well as faith and hope, we must be meek and lowly of heart, we must be humble, meek and submissive.  Charity encompasses many of the other attributes mentioned in Doctrine and Covenants Section 4: “Remember, faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, brotherly kindness, godliness, charity, humility, diligence.”

I once heard a story about two missionaries, who were experiencing much adversity,  asking each other if they were praying to be blessed with trials.  "Yeah, I'm praying for trials, " said one elder, "are you praying for trials?"  Adversity and trials on a mission are guaranteed, so there is no need to pray for them.  Instead, missionaries should pray that they may be filled with charity as Mormon counsels us to do.

With charity, we may even help the weak to become strong.  As we read in Ether chapter 12, God gives us weaknesses that we may be humble; if we humble ourselves before God, He will turn weaknesses into strengths.  If we have charity, we might be instruments in the hands of the Lord in helping others to become stronger.  In dealing with the realities about ourselves and others, while humbling ourselves before God, and while praying to be filled with the pure love of Christ, we can become powerful tools in the service of the Lord.

In the end, the numbers may not matter as much as the effort that is behind them.  You are on a mission to serve the Lord “all the way.”  What matters is that you are giving it your all, not how many hours you tracted, how many doors you knocked on, or how many people you approached on the street.  You will not be standing before the judgment bar of God auditing your numbers from the mission field.  Instead, In my humble opinion, I think you will be asked a simple question like “could you have done more?” and you will have a perfect knowledge of whether you really could have done more.

[Source for Elder Holland's remarks is my nephew who was in the MTC and present in the audience.]