THE REST OF THE STORY

Recently, during a conversation with Sister Sommerfeldt, Eileen was reporting on a number of health challenges that she was dealing with the young missionaries on. After listening for a while to the long list of issues, Sister Sommerfeldt noted something that Eileen and I often forget.  She said the problem with our roles is that we usually only get to see the problems of the missionaries and that we rarely are in a position to see all the good things that are transpiring in the mission.  We don’t see very many of the good things that are taking place in the mission among the 80-90 percent of the missionaries that don’t have significant medical or driving issues.   

 

But occasionally we do see things that bring a smile to our faces, two situations come immediately to mind.  In mid-September, we found ourselves at a hospital one evening with a young sister missionary.  The recommendation from Missionary Medical in SLC and our Area Medical Advisor was that the sister should return home.  President Sommerfeldt and Eileen felt that perhaps there was more to the story and that trying to resolve the underlying problem here was the right approach.  Well, now it is two months later.  The underlying problem seems to have been resolved simply by the young sister taking an inexpensive over-the-counter medicine.  Had the sister never come on the mission and ended up in the emergency room, she probably could have gone on for years suffering with a health problem that once properly diagnosed was easy to treat.

 

The second situation involves the sister who was bit by a dog when she and her companion were trying to deliver a requested Book of Mormon.  About a month has gone by since then.  The sister has had the prescribed rabies shots, and her arm is healing from the bites.  Eileen was talking to the sister the other night and learned that they are now teaching the man to whom they were taking the Book of Mormon (and who owned the dog).  They haven’t gone back to the house; they meet and teach in a nearby park and the dog's fate, which was decided by a judge two weeks ago is never discussed.

 

The missionaries in these two situations mean a lot to Eileen and me, as we have seen more of the story with them than we usually do.  My guess is that there are many such situations going on all the time, we just don’t see them.  There was a radio program years ago by Paul Harvey titled, The Rest of the Story.  Paul Harvey would tell a story, take a commercial break, and then come back and tell an interesting additional fact or two that made the story far more interesting.  I realize I need to spend more time trying to get to know the missionaries better, to see them more than as just someone suffering a medical issue or a driver of one of the mission cars.

Our Elder getting casted for a broken radius and ulna. I was grateful he didn't need surgery.  Maybe there should be a rule that missionaries can not play capture the flag in the dark with glow in the dark flags!

Eileen went with our missionary to concussion physical therapy.  The physical therapist wanted him to do visual exercises to the tick of a metronome using a metronome app. Since missionaries are limited on what kind of apps they can use, Eileen bought the missionary an actual metronome on Amazon and Russell hand delivered it to him. 

We found this garlic press in our kitchen and didn't need it. Our friends from the MTC who are serving in Kenya had told us that their predecessors asked them to bring a garlic press which they thought was ridiculous. We were going to mail this one to them, but were shocked to find out that the minimal shipping would be over $200.  They will have to settle for a photo instead.