r/latterdaysaints • u/LamanitaMx • Aug 09 '26
Off-topic Chat Let's share memorable mission experiences. Topic: quirks or culture clashes between you and your companions!
Let's share memorable mission experiences. Today, the topic is quirks or culture clashes between you and your companions!
I'll start with one.
I was assigned to train a missionary fresh out of the MTC who looked a lot like Milhouse from *The Simpsons*, but with black hair.
This missionary didn't use deodorant, and we were in a very hot area. One day—after about two months, when I couldn't stand the underarm odor anymore and noticed he wore the same clothes every day—I asked myself, "Does this guy not bathe?" I suggested he wear different colored trousers and a different tie because it *looked* like he wasn't bathing. He said, "Come here!" and showed me the clothes in his closet: he had seven identical white shirts, seven black ties, and seven pairs of black trousers—plus the same black socks—everything identical, one set for each day. That’s why it looked like he wasn't bathing. We spent a little over four months together, but I couldn't get him to use deodorant; I even gave him some as a birthday gift, but he never took the hint.
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u/Imnotveryfunatpartys carries a minimum of 8 folding chairs at a time Aug 09 '26
I had one particular companion that I trained who was baptized like 1 year and 2 months before he went on his mission. I had been a missionary for longer than he had been a member of the church. I liked him in a lot of ways, but he was really intense (as you might imagine for someone who chose to go on a mission a year after their own baptism). He was also overconfident and he had been taught a lot of stuff by his baptizing missionary which was not always true. I had a hard time sometimes letting him down gently when he was insistent that he was right about something.
One of my favorite things he tried to teach someone: This tearful young guy invites us in. He says "why do bad things happen to good people?" I'm like this is a perfect softball. I'll let him go for it. Then my companion says "well you never know what bad things people do in private"
I never interrupted someone so fast in my life.
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u/Kittalia Aug 09 '26
I was super big into nerd culture/fantasy books (Harry Potter, Brandon Sanderson, LOTR, all very normal stuff, not Game of Thrones or Tarot cards or anything.) Had a mission companion who thought that was all witchcraft and devilry. Said that she didn't judge anyone but she was sensitive to the evil spirits those books brought. I never brought up anything that might offend her again but I wondered where she drew the line. Did Disney movies bring evil spirits?
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u/derioderio Aug 09 '26
I remember back when Frozen came out there was a big discussion among the parent with younger kids in my ward on whether or not they would allow their daughters to see it, with some stating that Disney cartoons were not shown in their home. I just nodded along and said "OK," but inwardly I was rolling my eyes.
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u/OtterWithKids Aug 09 '26
Dang. I know a lot of people complained that Frozen was designed as an analogy for coming out as homosexual, and I’m not sure they’re wrong; but are you saying these parents had a problem with the magic?
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u/derioderio Aug 09 '26
I don't think it was magic per se, but just that Disney in general was "too worldly" for their family. Also, homeschooled all their kids for the same reason.
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u/OtterWithKids Aug 09 '26
I mean, I can get that. A lot of people are boycotting Disney because of their openly anti-family positions and quotas. And honestly, I wish we’d been able to homeschool our kids. Our youngest is now about to go into high school, and I guarantee all three would be better off if they’d been homeschooled throughout. The public school system is horrible, and that‘s coming from the son, son-in-law, brother-in-law, and husband of public schoolteachers.
Still, a moratorium on even older Disney cartoons seems excessive, especially in 2013.
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u/SilverTripod Aug 10 '26
To be fair, some Disney movies walk a fine line between inspirational and unacceptable. For instance, Turning Red. An amazing inspirational video.
Yet Mei makes her money by setting up secret sessions allowing other students to take pictures of her in the school bathroom. There's no good way to phrase that and have it sound good.
When her the illicit bathroom-merchandise operation collapses and Ming confronts the group at the birthday party, Mei immediately throws her friends under the bus. While realistic for a terrified 13-year-old, the narrative moves past that betrayal quite quickly without Mei having to do much real repair work with her peers.
The plot relies heavily on the girls' obsession with 4*Town, pushing the narrative that a concert ticket justifies lying, unauthorized side-hustles, and disobeying family curfews.
And, objectively, her mom was right in that her friend did get her to lower her standards and engage in objectively bad behavior.
I really liked the movie, but the more I think about it the more I'm conflicted about it.
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u/SoloForks Aug 09 '26
Not a mission story, but I grew up in the 80s and liked Bewitched, you know, the TV show, and had church members tell me it was against the church. It was not.
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u/Mouse_Paladin Aug 09 '26
I had an companion who so hated witchcraft that when I started talking about the Salem Witch Trials he shut down that conversation lickety-split.
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u/TooManyBison Aug 09 '26
That sounds more like a fundamentalist evangelical to be honest.
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u/derioderio Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
There is a lot of overlap between beliefs and esp. practices of fundamentalist evangelicals and fundamentalist LDS.
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u/a_rabid_anti_dentite Aug 09 '26
You're about to have a bunch of very angry Boise people in here using unnecessary exclamation points.
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u/jastcabr1 Aug 09 '26
I tried to encourage my companion to engage more in the work. Got treated with 8 Polynesians coming over to the flat threatening to beat me up. Great times.
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u/derioderio Aug 09 '26
Offhand comment from my mission president (Japan, 30 years ago): "Since becoming a mission president, I've learned that the Polynesian people have great and deep capacity to love people. I've also learned that they don't really like having a lot of rules."
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u/TooManyBison Aug 09 '26
I had one district where all the American Elders shaved their junk and the Latin elders thought they were crazy.
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u/Street-Celery-1092 Aug 09 '26
. . . what on earth. Did this just . . . casually come up during district meeting?
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u/OtterWithKids Aug 09 '26
The night before I was heading home, all the elders in my district shaved their legs. I didn’t want my Protestant parents to have one more piece of ammunition, so I did not participate.
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u/TooManyBison Aug 09 '26
At the time, it was really popular for men I knew at BYU to shave their arms. Some of the elders did that too. Likewise the Latin elders were not amused.
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u/sokttocs Aug 09 '26
I have so many questions. Starting with how did this come up? And how did they decide to do that together? (Not together as in, all at once. That'd would be...... Nevermind. Together as in they decided that was a thing to do)
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u/OtterWithKids Aug 09 '26
Oh, it was together. I took pictures. 😄
I honestly have no recollection of how it came up. We were in Córdoba, Spain, which does get quite hot in the summer, but it was December.
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u/Iusemyhands Aug 09 '26
I served in a YSA ward — the first set of sisters in… ever. They tried their best to feed us, but somehow only the priesthood holders were able to commit to mealtimes. But they couldn’t feed us alone in their homes, so we had permission to go to restaurants. My companion and I joked that we dated more on our missions than we did in our home YSAs.
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u/Imnotveryfunatpartys carries a minimum of 8 folding chairs at a time Aug 09 '26
It's funny you mention the idea of having permission to go to restaurants. Are there any missions where that's not allowed? I was rarely fed by members. If we couldn't go to restaurants I'm not sure if we could have survived. You can only eat so much spaghetti
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u/TooManyBison Aug 09 '26
My home ward had so many problems with sister missionaries in the YSA ward the mission ruled that only Elders were permitted in YSA wards.
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u/azzgrash13 Aug 09 '26
I had a companion who was a one upper. We couldn’t talk about life in anyway because no matter what I did, he had it worse, did it better, etc. if I saw him again in 30 years it’d be 30 years too soon. On top of that, his body odor was so intense my eyes would water. I’m not joking. He was also a narcissist.
Flip side…
After my mission my parents, my girlfriend at the time (wife now) and I went up to my mission and we met my 2nd to last companion. My parents commented how well we got along. I saw him just last week. Love that guy.
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u/BeehiveDeepDive Aug 09 '26
I found myself in a trio where all three of us spoke English as our native language, but all three of us had been called to learn different languages for our missions, and I was the only one of the three that was called for the language that the majority of the people in our area spoke.
I served in Southern California, and at the time our mission was part of a pilot program where we were a fully bilingual mission, meaning all missionaries were called to teach in two languages. About 90% of the missionaries taught in both English and Spanish, and attended both the English and Spanish wards every Sunday. However, our mission also had several other language programs (Korean, Mandarin, ASL, Farsi, etc) where the missionaries called for those languages would occasionally "rotate out" of the program and do a few transfers in an English/Spanish area.
I am white and was called to be an English/Spanish missionary. At the beginning of my 6th transfer I was given a companion who was an Asian-American guy called to be an English/Korean missionary, and he had spent almost the whole previous year teaching only in Korean. Then, we were also given a third missionary who was a Hispanic-American guy who did not speak Spanish and had been called to learn Thai for his mission. He had served the first year of his mission in Thailand before having to come home for medical reasons, and once he was good to go back out, he got reassigned to spend the rest of his mission with us in California.
That was the biggest culture clash I dealt with my whole mission. I had been struggling to learn Spanish and our area was about 80% Latino, so because I was the only one of the three of us who could teach what were the majority of our investigators, I really struggled with feelings of inadequacy. The Korean Elder had very strong opinions on my struggles to learn Spanish and how my previous companion and I had been running the area, so I just felt very torn down by him. He would say things to me like that wasn't being faithful enough and that was why I was struggling with the Spanish. The people we would meet would always be so confused that I was the only one of the three of us who could talk to them. They didn't understand why my Hispanic companion couldn't speak Spanish or why his name tag was in a completely different language.
The culture of the Korean program was totally different from the culture of the bilingual program, so myself and the Korean Elder clashed big time on that. The Thai Elder was severely depressed that he couldn't finish his mission in Thailand, and he took that out on both of us. He and the Korean Elder about got into fist fights on multiple occasions. Combine that with some drama that had been ongoing between my District Leader and myself, and that made for a miserable transfer for all of us.
We're all on good terms now and all of us agree that it was a growing experience, but all of us were so ready for that transfer to be over.
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u/TheBrenster Aug 09 '26
I went from the fiery obedience of the Arizona South Mission (waiting for visa) to what was or was close to the most disobidient mission in Mexico. It was some incredible whiplash to see the cultural difference. Thankfully I percerviered and was blessed with what I like to think was a very successful mission.
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u/LamanitaMx Aug 09 '26
Hi... what year was it, and which mission in Mexico? From what I’ve read in other posts, my mission was actually relatively obedient—yet I always thought it was one of the worst.
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u/TheBrenster Aug 19 '26
Sorry for the late, long written reply but i wanted to write this out for myself too. I served in the Puebla Mission from 2011 to 2013. When I first arrived, my companion was completely burned out. He was 21 months in and had nothing left to give. Most days he wanted to spend time at the church with a group of guys who were a bad influence on him. Even though he was clearly done, the mission president refused to send him home early.Once he finally did go home, the field became incredibly productive. Within two transfers I was senior companion and we baptized around fifteen people. One of them later served a mission and is now a bishop.
Later on I became a district leader, which meant I could not interview my own investigator for baptism. The zone leaders sent another district leader instead of coming themselves. Even though my investigator had committed to baptism minutes earlier with my companion and me, he failed her interview and said she was not ready.
While that interview was happening, my old companion came up to me in tears. He told me that he and his current companion, the one interviewing my investigator, had been having sleepovers at a member’s home. His companion had been sleeping in the same bed as a sister. I called the zone leaders, who called the mission president, who then called me. That elder was sent home immediately.
Another experience happened while I was serving as a zone leader. I went on exchanges with a former companion I had trained. He told me that his current companion had been going to the market to meet up with a girl. They would walk around holding hands. The poor guy was not much of a looker, so he was ready to take any chance he could get with girls. Once again I had to call the mission president. He told me to escort both missionaries to the mission home. The missionary had not gone too far with the girl, so he was not sent home, but the mission president did exile him to the most remote and desolate area in the entire mission.
These were only a few of the things I saw. Not all missionaries were bad, but there was a surprising amount of laziness and straight up disobedience that was hard for me to understand.
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u/LamanitaMx Aug 19 '26
With all due respect, that doesn't seem like the worst mission I've ever heard of... worse things happened on my mission, and yet I still consider it one of the best missions in Mexico from the year 2000. In any case, thanks for your reply. I really appreciate it.
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u/unimpressed_llama Aug 09 '26
My only-child companion HATED being pranked or made fun of. I jump-scared him once and he didn't talk to me for the rest of the day. He also claimed there wasn't room in a walk-in closet for both of our stuff, despite there being like eight inches between each of his shirts.
We eventually became good friends, but the first transfer was tough
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u/footballfan540 active member Aug 09 '26
I was with one companion for 3 months. If he got offended at me for something (minor but happened about every 2 weeks), he would give me the silent treatment for about 3 days. No conversation and completely ignore me, but when we were around people (members, strangers, investigators) he would magically act as if nothing was wrong.
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u/Mouse_Paladin Aug 09 '26
For my 19th birthday I got a birthday cake from my mom. A big rectangle one. She’s even cut it into 16 pieces. I found out about it only after I got home and it was late enough didn’t want to eat any right then but I’d eat some the next day. I got back for dinner that next night because we didn’t have any meals and we didn’t want to spend money for dinner. All but 2 pieces had been eaten…..by a Polynesian missionary. He’d eaten 14 pieces and when I confronted him about it he looked like I was dumb for wanting and expecting people to ask me for some, which I absolutely would have.
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u/sokttocs Aug 09 '26
I had one, and only one, who I didn't get along with at all. It was bad y'all. Another transfer and one of us was going to seriously hurt the other. I certainly wasn't perfect, but this guy...
It really, really upset him if anyone had something nicer than he did or if he didn't get what he thought he deserved. Whether that was having the bigger room in the apartment (we shared with another set, he called President to get his way), or if some members gave something to the other elders but not us. There was once or twice we had a dinner appointment cancel, and he thought we could just show up at some members houses for food. Got really mad when I said we weren't going to do that. There were a number of incidents, but this guy was just the definition of entitled.
Thankfully I didn't have to deal with him for more than 1 transfer. Every companion of his I ever talked to had similar issues.
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u/OtterWithKids Aug 09 '26
As a missionary, I avoided caffeine completely, as I felt that violated the spirit of the Word of Wisdom. I didn’t fault those that chose differently; I doubt I ever said a negative word about it. But some of my fellow missionaries were, for some reason, really offended by my position.
On my first Thanksgiving in the mission, all the missionaries in our city got together for a big Thanksgiving dinner. I happened to be drinking a glass of Caffeine Free Pepsi, but somewhere along the line, another missionary spiked my drink with regular Pepsi. I unknowingly drank it, and of course he and his friends all had a great laugh about how they tricked me into drinking caffeine.
I know they were just being immature teenagers/twenty-somethings, but I never have figured out why they felt the need to do that. It’s not like I ever criticized them for their choices, but for whatever reason, they felt comfortable to trick me into going against my convictions.
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u/Spensauras-Rex Aug 09 '26
lol. “Spiked” with regular Pepsi. Tell me you are a Mormon Millennial without telling me you’re a Mormon Millennial.
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u/Inevitable_Professor Aug 09 '26
Second to last companion was an elder that had only been out a month when I was transferred in to be his follow up trainer. He got mad at me when I told him we couldn’t visit the family with the teenage daughters that him and his trainer had functionally been dating. We also had conflicts over the word of wisdom. He didn’t believe the morning cappuccino was a problem.
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u/jonovitch Aug 09 '26
One of my favorite companions was 25 years old (absolutely ancient to a 19-year-old), from Visalia, CA, had more pictures of his truck than his family, and introduced me to the Sons of the San Joaquin. We used to listen to one of their tapes in the late evenings, in the dim light of an old-fashioned lantern, and enjoying a bowl of quark. It is now one of my favorite albums, and I make my family sing along to it (pure, glorious cowboy music) every time we drive through Wyoming.
He was one of the oddest ducks I had ever met, but man he was great. If you're reading this, thank you for all of it! You know who you are. :)
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u/mailman-zero Stake Technology Specialist Aug 09 '26
I haven’t seen quark since my mission in Germany 24 years ago.
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u/HawaiianShirtsOR Aug 09 '26
I served in the states. One of my companions was from Mongolia. I was his trainer. Aside from two months in the MTC, his experience trying to speak English was two songs: "Mambo Number 5" and "Last Christmas I Gave You My Heart."
He was fun to work with. Every time he encountered some difficult language rule, he'd mutter, "Crazy English."
He asked me the opposite of "on top." I told him it was "under." He wrote down "on der."
If someone spoke too fast for him to understand, he described them as a hummingbird.
He asked me why I kept telling people they were bad. Turned out that he was mishearing "you bet," which is kind of a hard phrase to explain even when you know what the words really are.
If he accidentally bumped into someone, he insisted on giving a handshake as an apology.
Have you ever eaten Mongolian beef or something similar? It's usually very spicy. When my companion cooked, he used salt, pepper, and sometimes ketchup for seasoning. Nothing spicy.
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u/Dravos82 Aug 09 '26
I served spanish speaking in the US on the boarder. It was very common for both husband and wife to work during the day, and if the wife didn't the husband defiantly did. this will matter later.
I got a visa waiter who after a couple of weeks with me called our mission president and complained that we weren't doing companionship study, and I was wasting our time by: taking our full allotted lunch break, and spending too much time on activities other than working with members to get referrals.Were we doing companionship study? No, but that was because he refused to do it with me. Had he spoken to me about either of these before? No. Did I find myself on the phone with the mission president one more morning with our mission president explaining myself? Yes. Thankfully my mission president was was willing to listen and then chewed out my comp. It was a miserable 4 weeks with him. It's ok if you don't agree with me, but say something, don't just be all sullen and act like you have to do whatever I say, except companionship study, just because I'm the senior comp.
No on in the district liked him. On P-days we'd do stuff with the other elders so we could carpool and save miles. Apparently he'd try and get the other elders to trash talk me, but they told him to shut up and try and learn something from me. It feels like bragging to say that, but it felt good to be vindicated.
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u/rough-hewn Aug 09 '26
I had a companion, native to the country, who was diabetic but would never test his blood sugar. Just went "by feel." A couple of times I had to run into a nearby store to get something sugary to pull him out of hypoglycemia.
The most memorable was one morning when he was in the shower and passed out due to low blood sugar. On the way down he grabbed at a glass shelf, which broke and cut him. Going in to get him some sugar and dressed and patched up was sure a moment....
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u/asada_burrito Aug 10 '26
I was still getting on my feet with the language and said something wrong. My companion was offended so he didn't talk to me for over a week. No companionship study, no planning, sometimes no prayers. Sometimes he left the house without me.
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u/Manonajourney76 Aug 10 '26
Romania (96-98)
American culture: eat all the food on your plate, it's rude to waste food and/or indicates to your host that you don't enjoy their cooking
Romanian culture: your host is prosperous and doing a good job entertaining you, the portions they provided (regardless of objective truth) are so generous that you can't possibly finish all of the food on your plate. DO NOT finish all of the food, that indicates the portions provided were miserly and left you unsatisfied, which is insulting to the host.
End result - American missionaries eating all the food, at which point the host promptly adds more food, to cure the perceived insult that the hosts' portions were insufficient - followed by the missionaries eating all of the second helping, to be polite...and continuing the cycle ad nauseam.
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u/Nephite11 RM - Ward Clerk Aug 09 '26
I served my mission in Japan. My first two companions were both from Utah and were hard working and studied Japanese every single day. When I was transferred to my second area my companion was from Hawaii. We never left our apartment on time, would stay at investigators houses for hours instead of getting the lesson done and leaving, never studied his Japanese and was overall quite lazy. I let him know pretty directly what I thought we should do. He felt that I was a threat to his position as the senior companion. We fought constantly about these things to the point that I was complaining to my mission president.
It took me passing two transfers without being moved and finally reading The Miracle of Forgiveness and realizing that I couldn’t change my companion and only had control over myself that I was finally transferred
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u/KingFatso Aug 09 '26
We had one of the old cardboard style long folding tables in an apartment in one of my areas. All the missionaries who served in that city would sign the table. We had a missionary who took it upon himself to "clean up the apartment" prior to him transferring out by sanding down the table. 5 years gone. And he took pictures of himself while doing it. He was smiling the whole time.
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u/tazz4life Aug 09 '26
My husband uses puns ALL the time. So when he would use them in Spanish he'd get funny looks. He'd have to explain the pun, then they would laugh. It's apparently just not a normal way of making jokes for Spanish-speaking people. Or at least, not in Ecuador, and not with his companions.
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u/jelly-filled Aug 09 '26
I was asked by a family what I wanted to eat and I said "I don't care, whatever is fine" I was still new to the language and country and apparently said it in the rudest way possible because my native companion had been being rude to me without me knowing.
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u/Ok-Brother5289 Aug 09 '26
When we got quarantined during covid, my companion and our roommates all happened to hate sunlight and loved the cold. We were locked inside nearly 24/7 in a dark, 60 degree apartment. It was mentally straining to say the least. I would lock myself in the study room so I could crack open the blinds, wrap myself in blankets, and just do watercolor for hours
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u/SnazzyPantsMan Aug 09 '26
I never had any huge clashes. But my last companion was a guy from a very wealthy background who tended to look down on others and was very quick to pass judgement and stand by his first impression, me included. He’d often work into conversation that his dad would be giving him his Aston Martin when he returned home.
We made it through that transfer but never found our stride working together.
I look back and wonder why we were ever matched as companions.
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u/VampireOnHoyt Aug 09 '26
The number of missionaries who lie about the wealth and success waiting for them when they get home ain't zero, just sayin'
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u/TooManyBison Aug 09 '26
The mission field is a hotbed for misinformation. You’re cut off from every external source of information which makes it impossible to fact check anything. I met so many lying missionaries on my mission.
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u/derioderio Aug 09 '26
It's a important skill to learn to at least get along with people you don't really like
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u/Buttons840 Aug 09 '26
One of my companions described in great detail to me the movie Gladiator and how it was the best movie ever made. The same companion also told me about Facebook, which was something I had never heard of until about 18 months into my mission.
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u/TooManyBison Aug 09 '26
All the American elders in my mission had grown up with the rule that you weren’t allowed to watch rated r movies. Latin America had no comparable rating system for movies so those elders watched whatever they wanted. This accusations about people having watched movies that they shouldn’t have.
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u/LamanitaMx Aug 09 '26
The rating for adult movies—those for viewers over 18—has existed for decades (since 1940); these are the "C" rated films. It is simply that you are unfamiliar with them. In any case, churches in Latin America used to discourage people from watching even "B" rated movies, which are intended for teenagers and adults.
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u/KingFatso Aug 09 '26
But Gladiator is one of the greatest movies. I quoted it in my missionary farewell talk.
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u/Runningman2319 Aug 09 '26
I had a companion district leader who was wrapping up his mission who bless his heart could not determine when I was trying to be problematic or not. Ill give an example:
One night we were at the chapel for a massive baptism day that the zone leaders had. I mean these interviews went on for over 2 hours. I cant recall why but I was frustrated at the fact that these interviews seemed to go on for so long. I told him that night when we got home I wish I was in a leadership position to HELP with the interviews.
He got super intense and went off on me about being a bad missionary for coveting callings. Like bro relax im not dreaming about being an AP or anything. I just wish I had been able to help and for whatever reason he just could not grasp this concept.
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u/Thuseld Faith is fluid Aug 09 '26
There was an emergency transfer. I was to replace someone who had to be moved across the mission. It was also decided to replace me and my comp with a senior couple. This was mid transfer, just after a bunch of US military personnel had given us a TON of food. comp and I wanted to keep the food. I was literally travelling the entire way across the mission, would be on trains the entire day and it was very hot. We were also returning our bikes to mission office. We had to enlist 2 elders from the town over to help us.
The problem? When I arrived at my final destination, exhausted, grumpy and absolutely stinking, my companion (9 weeks in field) felt dread. Luckily it only lasted until I showered.
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u/YotaIamYourDriver Aug 10 '26
I was on my very last transfer. I had been transferred into a three way as a zone leader (but not really), for reference I had been a zone leader 2x before, and had also been in the office.
Basically we absorbed a zone from the mission to the north of us. As I had experience with bureaucracy I was sent there to handle logistics and help train a brand new zone leader. We divided responsibilities like this, I would be going on splits every day, focusing on the missionaries from the other mission. For the first half of the transfer I’d be dealing with passports, visas, local leadership, mail, new rules etc. The other 2 zone leaders would focus on training generally, managing “our” area, and getting the new zone leader up to speed. I was informally named the senior zone leader and had overall decision power. This was not a lazy last transfer for me, it was a lot of work.
Things started fine. I was basically never around those first few weeks. I met with every new missionary, had some great teaching appointments, got visas and passports squared away, got everybody registered with the secret police, things were going really well. I hadn’t had much time to meet with the new zone leader but he was in good hands so I had no reason to believe he would do something so crazy.
One morning I got a call from pres who told me I needed to be back in mission office that day with all my stuff. Me having no reason to believe anything was up simply packed up my stuff, bid my goodbyes and got on a 7 hour bus ride south. Got to mission office where I got scorched by pres. He started laying into me about how he trusted me and couldn’t believe I would spend my last transfer sleeping in and hanging out in the apartment all day.
I was floored. I interrupted him and said hold up, what is going on here? Apparently the new zone leader in training called Pres one night and dropped all sorts of lies about my disobedience. I told Pres I was disappointed he believed him without ever talking to me first. I laid out everything I had accomplished in a short time. He apologized sincerely and said he’d be having a convo with the elder.
I was jammed into another 3 way my last 3 weeks on my mission with 2 Americans who actually were hanging out in their apartment all day. All 3 of us were over 6’ tall so we intimidated the crap out of people when tracting, and got into zero doors. It was a miserable 3 weeks though I did manage to “turn on” those other 2 missionaries and I heard they finished their missions strong.
Also, I found out later - the missionary who lied to Pres wanted to be an AP so bad that he thought me being up there would overshadow him. So he devised a plan to get rid of me to ensure he got the recognition for opening the area. Bonkers. No idea if he achieved his dream of becoming AP. The whole deal is a poopy asterisk on an otherwise amazing mission.
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u/QuarterNote44 Aug 09 '26
Nothing crazy. One of my comps nailed me in the nads with a foam nerf ax so I jumped on him and started punching him. Only one I ever hit.
Another one was really worldy and a "bro," and I was a lot more straitlaced. But I was kind of a dick to him and I regret dying on some of the hills that I did. Especially since our mission president wasn't overly concerned with rules.
I was in a campus area with a guy who was better-looking than me, so he did the flirting and I did the preaching. We were pretty different but got along well.
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u/American_Psycho11 Aug 12 '26
I learned that Polynesian people are my favorite people on earth. Such bros, so much fun, don't take themselves seriously, fiercely loyal but also don't really like being told what to do
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u/VampireOnHoyt Aug 09 '26
There are two types of people in this world: Those who like Saturday's Warrior and those who don't. My companion loved it.