Where it all began.

A mission can be one of the greatest things in your life. It is the only thing in your life that no one but God can decide. He knows exactly who needs you in the amount of time you've been given. We put our entire trust in Him to send us exactly where we need to be.

When praying about my mission call, where I would go, who I would serve, I had a request that I could serve near a temple of God (and that I could teach the most people in the shortest amount of time). It was a small request, I thought. I already knew I would go wherever the Lord wanted me to go, and be happy about it, but little did I know that a prophet of the Church would go on to say this about the temple that He has placed me next to for the last 18 months:

"I regard this temple as perhaps the most significant, in one respect, in the entire Church," President Hinckley said. "It was right here in the Sacred Grove where it all began."

When I got my call to serve in the New York Rochester Mission, I felt something soft come over me, almost like Heavenly Father himself was wrapping his arms around me. I could almost hear Him telling me, "Here is the place where you will flourish in preaching my gospel. This is where you will bring the light of the gospel to others for the rest of their lives. Here is where you will build my Church." I put my hand over my mouth in disbelief that I had an actual call come straight from God, and not only just a call, but this call. Tears didn't stop flowing as I kept reading the letter from The First Presidency. I realized I was doing exactly the opposite of what my ancestors did--I hitched up my wagon back to the place where it all began. I was going to return to the place they deliberately left. 

So why in the world would I do that? Why only could it be one of the greatest things of my life? Well, it was all about my attitude. It could have been the most horrific experience of my life, as it obviously was for Joseph Smith and my ancestors that followed him from New York all the way to Nauvoo. So why even try to serve a mission in the first place? I'm getting yelled at while freezing, then the next moment I think I'm going into a heat coma, I haven't heard my own mother's voice in over seven months, and we saw one of our best investigators hiding when we came to the door (for the fifth time.) So, with that being said...

I am overwhelmed with the love I have for the people in New York. My heart explodes, and I kinda even start shaking on the inside when I talk about it. I could have totally been miserable for those approximately 545 days I spent on the battlefield. But, couldn't have hand-picked a better place to serve Him. 

Not in a million years.