Why We Decided To Serve A Mission

Ever since returning from a mission in my youth (1964-1966 in Peru), I've dreamed of returning to Latin America to serve another mission there with my wife. At the same time, even before my wife married me, she had a goal to serve a mission. Her patriarchal blessing (a special recorded, personal priesthood blessing) spoke of her serving as a missionary abroad. She had planned to go on a mission in her youth, but I convinced her to marry me instead. (She has since forgiven me, I hope.) So the question of whether or not my wife and I would go on a mission was never considered. The only question was when. About a year ago, as I was having some heart problems, we decided that now was the time to retire and go on a mission. We notified our respective department chairs and the administration at Brigham Young University, where we were both professors, that we were going to retire early--I at age 63½ and she at age 63--on July 1, 2008. We talked a lot about the kind of mission that we wanted to serve, and we soon narrowed our choices to a temple mission (where we would be full-time temple workers) or a proselyting mission (where we would preach and teach the gospel). We finally decided to request to serve a Spanish-speaking proselyting mission. My wife was apprehensive of this type of mission, because she doesn't yet speak Spanish, but she supported me in this request. After making that decision, we just needed to get the ball rolling to start the missionary recommendation process. I'll talk about that process in the next post on this blog.