A personal essay by Austin Wattenbarger
My unique experience with serving a mission during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Elder Rivera and I knew each other since I was in Escarcega, he was from Ecuador and I was from Idaho, but with that one difference, we were practically the same. We could have been twins.
We got along right from the get-go, and things were going well in both missionary work and the friendship we were creating. We were leading a large group of missionaries in the southern portion of our mission, and our little zone was having much success. Even to this day, I consider those six weeks to be some of the happiest times of my life.
As my twin from Ecuador and I walked down the dusty road under the ruthless Mexican sun which hung above the ocean, our phone started to buzz.
I felt drawn to the Atonement. In a very dark moment in my existence in Seattle, I felt something I will never forget. It was not an earth-shattering spiritual experience, it’s not that I saw angels or even heard an audible voice, I just remember feeling warm and peaceful, like someone was giving me a warm and reassuring hug. I remember understanding that Christ knew what I was going through, and that He would forever be able to empathize with my situation. Being in Seattle may have hurt me, but it also hurt him. How reassuring it was to know that someone else understood completely and fully what I was going through, and He agreed with me when I told him time after time in my far from heavenly way, “This sucks.”
The beauty of that to me was sublime, that Christ could overlook my hang ups and shortcomings and just empathize with me. He just sat at the bottom of the hole, in the mud, and mourned with me until I was ready to get back up, and when I was, He was right there to help.
A few months later I got transferred to a new area with a new companion fresh out of the home MTC. He was a great companion, I loved him a lot, and we worked our tails off to find the few who would accept our message. One night, while we were visiting some of the members looking for referrals, I saw another tender mercy from heaven that I won’t soon forget. We saw a little blue point on our map that said The Solis Family. I didn’t know them, so we decided to stop by and see how they were doing.
We rolled up to the door in the nonstop and incessant Seattle rain and knocked with our wet and cold hands. It was nighttime by now, and we could see the rushing headlights from the interstate right behind their house blinding us as we waited for an answer at the door. As the door creaked open, and I saw someone who would become a great friend, Brother Solis.
He was short. Really short. He had an almost whimsical smile on his face as he asked us what he could do for us. But as I heard him speak Spanish, something sounded very familiar, a slight accent. I asked him where he was from and my suspicions were confirmed, the Yucatan Peninsula, exactly where I was in Mexico. The dead batteries in my brain got charged up in an instant and we immediately started reminiscing on what we both considered home. I met his wife, and she as well was from the same state where I served. We talked for not long enough about the food, people, and culture down there, and everything in between.
I became great friends with that family. I ate many dinners in their house afterwards. I always expressed to them how grateful I was that I met them, because they truly were heaven sent to help me feel a little more at home. I remember the deep humility I felt as I was able to express my gratitude to them and to heaven for giving me them. God knew that I was frustrated and even angry at Him, but he never stopped showing me how much I mean to Him.
God continued to love me, help me, mold me, and uplift me when I needed it most, despite my feelings towards Him. I agree with Elder Jeffrey R. Holland when he states “My deepest convictions and feelings of the Savior and Redeemer were born during my hours of greatest affliction. When I wondered if the sun would ever come back up.” Many of the important lessons of my mission and in my life have come by sweet spiritual experiences, many others have come by deep heartache and tears. I think both are necessary for us to achieve our full potential. Difficult as it was, I was able to accept "a cannon wound where my heart should be," because heavenly pain will only bring forth heavenly results.
We got along right from the get-go, and things were going well in both missionary work and the friendship we were creating. We were leading a large group of missionaries in the southern portion of our mission, and our little zone was having much success. Even to this day, I consider those six weeks to be some of the happiest times of my life.
As my twin from Ecuador and I walked down the dusty road under the ruthless Mexican sun which hung above the ocean, our phone started to buzz.
I reached my hand down into my sweaty pocket to pull it out. As the screen snapped alive, we read something that we and no member of the church could have ever imagined, all meetings were suspended until further notice. Stupor came first, then confusion, followed by fear, and then finally reason. Apparently, something called the coronavirus was taking over the world one country at a time. Like ants returning to a kicked anthill, we worked and bustled around for a purpose. A few days later we heard the news from our mission president, a day I will never forget. “All foreign missionaries will be sent back to their native countries to finish their missionary service.”
Without permission, deep confusion, denial, and pain invaded every corner of my unsuspecting and unguarded heart, corners that had long housed Mexico and its amazing people. Mexico and I had become so intertwined that I did not know where one stopped and the other began, but this new trial was ripping us apart like sackcloth.
Things moved so fast we almost didn’t have time to keep up. In an impressive show of organization and logistics, the church we all loved bought us plane tickets and gave us our marching orders. We were to leave in precisely one week. One week to say goodbye. We tried to move the work forward despite our “tristeza”. Nights were a mixture of fun and sadness as we all knew these were the last moments we would see many of our dear friends from other countries in this life.
And just like that, our one week was up.
I hugged my dear mission president one last time as we got on the travel bus.
He told me that he loved me, and I replied with the same. We boarded in a cloud of white shirts, luggage, and teary eyes, and we headed for the Cancun international airport, waving goodbye to our mission president, his wife, and our mission for what we hoped wouldn’t be the last time. For many of us it would be. I later wrote in my journal “I feel as if there is a giant cannon wound where my heart should be.” As the days of our departure during that week drew ever nearer, I felt myself shutting down emotionally and spiritually, like a defense system to postpone the wrenching pain that would inevitably come.
Things moved so fast we almost didn’t have time to keep up. In an impressive show of organization and logistics, the church we all loved bought us plane tickets and gave us our marching orders. We were to leave in precisely one week. One week to say goodbye. We tried to move the work forward despite our “tristeza”. Nights were a mixture of fun and sadness as we all knew these were the last moments we would see many of our dear friends from other countries in this life.
And just like that, our one week was up.
I hugged my dear mission president one last time as we got on the travel bus.
I had prayed for charity and love for the people I served, and by the grace of God that prayer was answered tenfold, and I saw what seems like innumerable blessing from that love, but now it seemed like that charity was more of a curse than a blessing, for it would have been much easier to leave Mexico behind if I did not feel so great an affection towards its people. How are we to react when the cause of our pain is precisely because we kept the commandments? What do we do when we must pray for strength to overcome trials undeserved, when the one Person that could have spared us this throbbing pain is the very Being we petition?
These are questions that do not have an immediate answer, at least not for a 20-year-old missionary trailblazing the way in this unique, unexpected, and somewhat strange trial. There are no primary songs, no pamphlets, and no study guides of what to do when we are angry with God. Over the next several months I came to know in part the meaning of the phrase “The Refiner’s Fire”. Although no one on earth had adequate answers to my questions, the One who did slowly yet surely gave me the answers that I had so impatiently waited for.
The airport in Idaho was cold. That is the biggest thing I remember. Chilly. Waking up in southern Mexico in the morning, it was hot. And not a “Summers-day-in-Utah” kind of hot, I’m talking about a relentless sky-monster (down there they call it “el sol”) that rises at seven in the morning and sleeps at 8 at night. This monster will not stop shining until you have sweat every ounce of fluid you thought you had in your body, and then a little extra. The heat in Mexico was at times unbearable, but the cold in Idaho was just as disheartening.
The airport in Idaho was cold. That is the biggest thing I remember. Chilly. Waking up in southern Mexico in the morning, it was hot. And not a “Summers-day-in-Utah” kind of hot, I’m talking about a relentless sky-monster (down there they call it “el sol”) that rises at seven in the morning and sleeps at 8 at night. This monster will not stop shining until you have sweat every ounce of fluid you thought you had in your body, and then a little extra. The heat in Mexico was at times unbearable, but the cold in Idaho was just as disheartening.
It was a frigid day in March when I landed in Idaho Falls. Snow was on the ground. It had been a while since I’d seen snow. It had also been a long time since I had seen so many white people in the same room. They seemed strange, almost alien. The way they moved and talked and interacted one with another seemed like a distant reality but was far out of my ordinary. Home never felt so foreign. As I stepped off the plane, I sat just outside the terminal, attempting to soak in what was happening and if I could believe it yet. With more bravery than one expects to have to muster as he returns home, I went down the stairs to see my family. I gave my parents a hug, and we drove towards home into the silent and snowy void.
As I spent time at home my parents tried to make it as comfortable as possible given the circumstance, which I am grateful for. I tried to adjust to the weird and bizarre conditions, and right in the middle of it I found out I would be re-assigned to the Washington Seattle mission. It’s funny, the second time opening a mission call isn’t as fun as the first. I got ready and said goodbye to my family for a second time as I boarded another plane headed to another alien place.
I had a lot of experiences in Seattle, most of which I had complex reactions to. One day, a few months into my time in Washington, and during a particularly rough week, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I slumped out of my sheets and tried to get moving for the day but let’s just say I was sluggish at best. I showered and put on the shirt and tie. All this was muscle memory at this point, my brain was somewhere else. I started planning with my companion and we were able to get a rough outline of the day, though I wasn’t really excited for it. That's something you don’t hear too much out of a missionary, that they weren’t excited to start the day. I know a lot of missionaries during the COVID pandemic thought that, but few said it. After planning and getting something that tasted like a missionary made it for breakfast, I knelt down beside my desk ready to start my personal study with a prayer.
The abandonment I felt from heaven, being away from Mexico, and the pressure of not strangling this particular companion, was starting to add up. I needed some help, and that’s what I told God in a not-so-humble way. Shakespeare summed up my prayer well when he said “Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth) Or at least that’s what the core of my prayer to my Maker was at that time. As I got up and sat my broken self in my broken chair at my scratched-up study desk, I plopped open my scriptures and began to read.
As I spent time at home my parents tried to make it as comfortable as possible given the circumstance, which I am grateful for. I tried to adjust to the weird and bizarre conditions, and right in the middle of it I found out I would be re-assigned to the Washington Seattle mission. It’s funny, the second time opening a mission call isn’t as fun as the first. I got ready and said goodbye to my family for a second time as I boarded another plane headed to another alien place.
I had a lot of experiences in Seattle, most of which I had complex reactions to. One day, a few months into my time in Washington, and during a particularly rough week, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I slumped out of my sheets and tried to get moving for the day but let’s just say I was sluggish at best. I showered and put on the shirt and tie. All this was muscle memory at this point, my brain was somewhere else. I started planning with my companion and we were able to get a rough outline of the day, though I wasn’t really excited for it. That's something you don’t hear too much out of a missionary, that they weren’t excited to start the day. I know a lot of missionaries during the COVID pandemic thought that, but few said it. After planning and getting something that tasted like a missionary made it for breakfast, I knelt down beside my desk ready to start my personal study with a prayer.
The abandonment I felt from heaven, being away from Mexico, and the pressure of not strangling this particular companion, was starting to add up. I needed some help, and that’s what I told God in a not-so-humble way. Shakespeare summed up my prayer well when he said “Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth) Or at least that’s what the core of my prayer to my Maker was at that time. As I got up and sat my broken self in my broken chair at my scratched-up study desk, I plopped open my scriptures and began to read.
The beauty of that to me was sublime, that Christ could overlook my hang ups and shortcomings and just empathize with me. He just sat at the bottom of the hole, in the mud, and mourned with me until I was ready to get back up, and when I was, He was right there to help.
A few months later I got transferred to a new area with a new companion fresh out of the home MTC. He was a great companion, I loved him a lot, and we worked our tails off to find the few who would accept our message. One night, while we were visiting some of the members looking for referrals, I saw another tender mercy from heaven that I won’t soon forget. We saw a little blue point on our map that said The Solis Family. I didn’t know them, so we decided to stop by and see how they were doing.
We rolled up to the door in the nonstop and incessant Seattle rain and knocked with our wet and cold hands. It was nighttime by now, and we could see the rushing headlights from the interstate right behind their house blinding us as we waited for an answer at the door. As the door creaked open, and I saw someone who would become a great friend, Brother Solis.
He was short. Really short. He had an almost whimsical smile on his face as he asked us what he could do for us. But as I heard him speak Spanish, something sounded very familiar, a slight accent. I asked him where he was from and my suspicions were confirmed, the Yucatan Peninsula, exactly where I was in Mexico. The dead batteries in my brain got charged up in an instant and we immediately started reminiscing on what we both considered home. I met his wife, and she as well was from the same state where I served. We talked for not long enough about the food, people, and culture down there, and everything in between.
I became great friends with that family. I ate many dinners in their house afterwards. I always expressed to them how grateful I was that I met them, because they truly were heaven sent to help me feel a little more at home. I remember the deep humility I felt as I was able to express my gratitude to them and to heaven for giving me them. God knew that I was frustrated and even angry at Him, but he never stopped showing me how much I mean to Him.
God continued to love me, help me, mold me, and uplift me when I needed it most, despite my feelings towards Him. I agree with Elder Jeffrey R. Holland when he states “My deepest convictions and feelings of the Savior and Redeemer were born during my hours of greatest affliction. When I wondered if the sun would ever come back up.” Many of the important lessons of my mission and in my life have come by sweet spiritual experiences, many others have come by deep heartache and tears. I think both are necessary for us to achieve our full potential. Difficult as it was, I was able to accept "a cannon wound where my heart should be," because heavenly pain will only bring forth heavenly results.
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