Guest Blog: [Weight]ing for a Mission Call by Teach

So as all of you likely know I’m preparing to leave on a mission here shortly. It has been quite a hefty process and has been a long time coming. I made this huge decision back in June when I turned 21, and was shortly followed with a huge struggle to lose enough weight to reach the weight limit for the mission. I’ve learned a lot through this process and six months and 2 days later I finally hit my goal.

I met with my stake president and submitted my paperwork on December 18. Now here’s the thing. In the past it would take about 10 days for a call to come after the paperwork had been submitted. If you do quick math, you will realize that my call should have been here quite a while ago. A couple factors have played into this delay in my call coming. First, it was the holidays. I knew that it would be hard for the church headquarters to make the assignment so I wasn’t planning on my call coming until the first Wednesday in January. But Wednesday came and went and the mailbox was empty. 

Taken 7.22.12 

So we looked into the second factor. With the new age change (elders can leave at 18 and sisters can leave at 19) there has been an influx of new missionary applications coming in and it’d be very busy in the downtown offices. So I waited. And hoped. And prayed. I was very anxious that my call would come January 9^th, but once again it wasn’t in the mail.

Taken 1.5.13 36 lbs (ish) later 

Thursday while I was at work I got a call from my bishop.  I couldn’t call him back but I texted my mom and freaked out for a good solid 20 minutes via texts. Finally my wonderful mother called my bishop and discovered the problem. Simple, but necessary to solve. They’d lost my doctor’s note which verified that I’d reached the weight limit. Thank goodness my mom was inspired to make a copy of the note from the doctor before we gave the original to the bishop. She scanned and emailed the note to the Bishop and he hand delivered it to the Brethren who processed it today. My Ward Clerk texted me and said that my status in the system has gone from “In Progress” to “Ready for Assignment.” We are finally almost there!! If the call is made tomorrow, then I will receive it in the mail either next Wednesday or Thursday.  Pray that they make the decision tomorrow, because I may not hold out for another week!

And so…the question of the year is where?? Where will I serve this mission?? 

I’m taking guesses starting now! You’re allowed one state side guess and one foreign guess. We’ll write your name on the map.

Thanks for all of your support

~ Sister Teach