Chapter 8: The Schedule Did Not Know What Had Happened

Like many returned missionaries, I still sometimes dream I am a missionary again. 0

The feeling is mostly dread. Not terror. Something flatter: the dread of impending boredom, of long days already assigned to me, of rules multiplying around ordinary life until the whole world feels made of permission. I am back in the white shirt, back inside the schedule, back inside the moral weather where every hour has to justify itself. 0

But the dream is not only dread. Sometimes there is a flicker of excitement. In the dream I know I am older. I know more. I imagine I would be good at it this time, not in the old obedient way, but because I have lived enough to understand people better than I did at twenty. I would listen differently. I would be less scripted, less anxious to make another person's life fit the lesson plan. Some part of me still wants to take the best of the mission and do it better. 0

Then comes the feeling that was not available the first time: relief. I know I can ignore the worthless rules. I know I can refuse the small humiliations that once felt holy. If the whole thing becomes absurd, I can pack up and go home. In the dream, the mission still has power, but it no longer has the same metaphysical lock. 0

There were probably always more options than I could feel. I could have asked for help differently. I could have treated pain as information instead of weakness. I could have disappointed authority and survived. But an option is not fully real just because it exists. It has to be imaginable. Mormonism formed me so that many exits looked like failures of righteousness. 0

One afternoon in Honolulu, three of us were working the sidewalks, drumming up conversations with strangers, when the mission office called. Were we near the big hospital? We were fifteen minutes away. A blessing was needed. Hurry. 0

We did not understand what we were walking into. In the room, a small team of nurses and a doctor were performing CPR on a little body, quietly and urgently. Two of them stepped back to make room for us while another kept on. One of my companions, with enormous emotion, commanded the child in the name of Jesus Christ to live. 0

We stepped out and did not know what to say to one another, so we said almost nothing and waited. After a few minutes a doctor came to tell us she had died. Then he asked — because we were, ostensibly, clergy — whether we wanted to be the ones to tell her mother. We looked at each other, three boys in ties, and the fear must have been legible, because he said he would do it. 0

We walked back out into the sun. The companion who had not spoken the blessing had tears in his eyes. "What just happened?" he asked. Nobody ever answered him. There was no debrief, no call from a leader, no hour set aside. I think we got lunch and rested a little. Then we went back out to chat up strangers about the restored gospel, because that was the schedule, and the schedule did not know what had happened. 0

There were options in that corridor that none of us could feel. We could have sat down. We could have wept. We could have telephoned the mission office and said: we are done for today, a child died in front of us. Nobody forbade any of that. It was simply not real — not because the rules were cruel, but because we had been formed so thoroughly that the alternatives had no shape. The strongest wall an institution builds is never written down. It is the set of things its people cannot imagine doing. 0

My mission gave me real things. I learned discipline. I learned to talk to strangers. I learned, slowly, that other people's interior lives were not props in my spiritual drama. But the mission also taught me how unfree compliance can feel. Not because every rule was cruel or every leader abusive, but because obedience became the atmosphere. When the rule is always holier than the question, a person can become serious and still underdeveloped. 0

Sometimes the dream takes me back to that hallway. The adult I am now knows what to do there: cancel the afternoon, feed those boys, sit with them while they cry, find the mother later and say something human. The schedule could have waited. Grief was allowed. That is the freedom I could not feel at twenty — not the freedom to break rules, but the freedom to know which ones had stopped mattering. 0

That is why the dream stays with me. Some old rooms remain in the mind after you leave the building. The difference is that now another part of me enters too: the adult who knows the door is a door. 0