When I was first called to serve a mission as a young man of not quite 19, I looked forward to the experience as an adventure, a challenge, and a lot of work. I threw myself into the daily routine, the work and the lives of those we met such that I recall walking down a side street in Saigon one evening, and thinking to myself, "Gee, I can't remember what I did before I came." And it felt good to be so wrapped up in something meaningful and so much bigger than myself. The fact that we were eight or ten missionaries responsible for a city of then about 8 million facing a daunting task didn't seem to register with me. But when we were asked to leave precipitously, and in many respects miraculously, some months later, it was perhaps understandable that one felt as though there was a lot left undone. Somewhere in the next few confusing days and weeks as we watched the political situation unravel from our new post in Hong Kong, the mission president's words (promise?) to us that "you'll all have the opportunity to go back" seemed like a vain hope, at least in the immediate term.
I'd only had a few months of the language, and though I could converse, I was far from proficient. But after a few months in Hong Kong, the presence of some refugees who needed to be ministered to out near Fan Ling on the Chinese border, prompted my re-assignment to that area where for the next several months so until the camp closed my companion and I taught in Vietnamese two days a week, plus held Sunday Services there, and worked the remainder of the week in Cantonese. It pre-saged a pattern that would continue for almost four decades through my life. The obscure language I had thought I was going to learn as a missionary, became a highly sought skill, or at least enough of a novelty, that with surprising predictability, opportunities arose every so often to refresh my skills, and now and then learn a few new phrases. At first they were teaching chances with immigrant or refugee families being resettled in the US. After we were married, we were invited to provide mentoring and support to the newly formed Vietnamese congregation in SLC until I graduated from medical school and the branch moved to Taylorsville. When we lived in Boston, the opportunities were fewer, but not unknown. And when we took our first job in California, one of the assistants who helped me in the lab was a Chinese Vietnamese person. There we also eventually connected with a young man (Hung) whose family had been taught the gospel of Jesus Christ in Saigon, accepted and been baptized just before we had to abandon that outpost. Amazingly, he had made it to California, met LDS missionaries at his door one day and, because they could not find his member records anywhere, chosen to be re-baptized. Ultimately the rest of his family, including his father, were reunited there, each having had a tough path of their own.
The story became more poignant when I got an invitation to join a veteran's group doing humanitarian work in Vietnam on an exploratory visit in 1989. That first sojourn back to Vietnam was remarkable in many ways, including the experience of holding a worship service with Bro. Que, the father of Hung, with members of our host group and representatives of state security looking on. We sat together with members of the provincial People's Committee and I spoke on behalf of the group in Vietnamese to these "victors" who had obviously eyed other Americans a couple of decades earlier across the boundaries of a war, and yet we felt a great desire on their part of move on, to metabolize the pains of war and build a more positive future, which they seemed to feel included more such contacts with the west.
There followed more visits, some more successful than others, some setbacks, and some triumphs where what we tried to do to help seemed to strike a resonant chord in their harmonies. We made many friends, and ultimately some of them came to visit us as well, staying for a few days up to several months in our home, first in Maine and later in Oklahoma.
These friendships ultimately led me to consider the possibility of working with a lab partner there to develop a first rate lab that could be a model for the country, and the region. We held several exploratory conversations, going so far as to begin to develop a business plan, but I ultimately realized that doing so would significantly shift my perspective on the country from a labor done from a selfless motive of service to one where I was also trying to achieve a financial return, even though the social merits might be great. I felt I didn't want that to color my interactions, rather like the admonition to avoid loaning money to people you love and wish to retain in friendship.
After many of my trips I would return home with countless ideas of how to make things better there, and how to extend the good we were trying to do. These often became quickly swallowed in the demands of life at home, the needs of my employer, my other church duties, and the needs of a growing family. Each of our children became a part of the adventure there in some manner, through visiting along with me, or meeting the people that came into our home, or traveling together with others on a project. Some learned a few phrases in the language, though I was a poor teacher. And they probably breathed a sigh of relief when they left for college without having been asked to live and attend school there!
But, having been called by prophecy and set apart by those in authority today, now the purposes in all of this preparation begin to fall into place, like lost pieces of a puzzle, as one friend recently phrased it. The separate strands of effort, the endowment of understanding, of cultural savvy, the language skills (enough to be dangerous), and most of all, the knowledge of what the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ can do for people, as well as a healthy appreciation for how God wishes to govern his affairs on earth and in the church, we stand as tools in his hand, not so much interested in our selves, as in the growth of goodness in a world dearly in need of more good. And that, interestingly, is what "Mormon" means. www.mormon.org
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