Homecoming Talk

Hello! For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Sarah Hawkes and I returned this week from a full-time mission serving the Spanish-speakers of Southern California in the San Bernardino Mission. It’s hard to put how I feel about my mission into words, but I loved it. It meant everything to me, and it was such a privilege. I learned so much about the love that God has for each of his children. On my mission I served among first- and second-generation immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries, and learned so much from them. I learned the importance of not taking yourself too seriously, loving with your whole heart, hard work, and family, and it doesn’t matter what you wear during the week but the weekend is time for bold eyebrows and bright lipstick. The most incredible part was that each and every person I met had a deep faith and love for God.

          Spanish was NOT easy for me, because a "pedacito" is a little piece, a "paracito" is a little parasite, and a "payacito" is a clown. Not to mention that a "pancita" is a little tummy and a "pancito" is a little loaf of bread. We're not even going to talk about a “papita’ and a “papito, other than you can pretty easily be talking about little popes or little potatoes and not realize it. Not to mention I told several people Christ could save them from their “fish” and asked one patient brother if he had a crush on the Apostle Paul. I learned pretty quickly to laugh at myself!

I served in three areas: Fontana—a little concrete city full of good-hearted people, smoke, and traffic; Yucca Valley—a true desert where tumbleweeds blew across the road and we listened to coyotes at night; and Palm Desert—where I served almost 8 months among the migrant workers of the California Desert.

They sacrificed a lot. The landscape and climate in Palm Desert is very similar to the Middle East, which makes it one of the few places in the world where date palms can be grown. My mission president told me “no dates on the mission,” but I told him “Hey, President, I had more dates on my mission than I’ve ever had in my life! I have one every day of the week.” Luckily, he had the same sense of humor so the last night of my mission I brought a big box and we all had a date right there in the mission home!

          In all seriousness, I will be grateful every day I had the opportunity to serve the way I did, and am so grateful to all the other missionaries I know. I’d actually like to say thanks formally, so could all the missionaries in the congregation please stand?

That’s really what I want to talk about today. We are ALL missionaries, because we are all God’s children and part of His work, whether we recognize it or not. As it says in the scriptures, God’s “work and glory is to bring to pass the eternal life and immortality of man.” Put simply, everything that our all-powerful Creator and Heavenly Father does is to help his children get back home to Him. That is His work, and that is His glory. He wants us back, each one of us, and the most incredible part is that each of us, individually, can be part of God’s work. As brothers and sisters, we have the responsibility to help and lift one another in that difficult trip back home.

Sometimes we compartmentalize the things we do each day--family history, serving in the temple, and going to church on Sunday. We visit our neighbors and spend time with family, we donate to charity and work at soup kitchens, we go on missions, we care for our families---and we think of those as separate activities but really, it’s all just one work. God’s work. Whether we are full-time proselyting missionaries with a little black tag or not, we are all part of the work of salvation and exaltation.

A talk that really impacted me during my mission is “The Summer of the Lambs” by Jayne Malan. She tells the story of a summer during her childhood where her father assigned her and her brother to care for over 350 orphaned lambs. The problem was, the lambs hadn’t been taught to eat from a trough and couldn’t be forced to. The only way to keep them alive was to carefully and individually feed each one like a baby. All too soon, and despite her and her brother’s best efforts, the lambs began to get lost and die from cold, coyotes, and starvation. Finally, Jayne, in exhaustion and desperation, went to her father and, tears streaming down her face, asked “Dad, isn’t there someone who can help us feed our lambs?” He replied, “a long, long time ago, someone else said almost those same words. He said, ‘Feed my lambs…Feed my sheep…Feed my sheep.’”

Later in life, as Jayne pondered about the Savior and his mission as the Good Shepherd, she wrote, “I remembered the summer of the lambs, and, for a few brief moments, I thought I could sense how the Savior must feel with so many lambs to feed, so many souls to save. And I knew in my heart that he needed my help.”

During my time in Southern California, I was a missionary with a very specific assignment and role: my primary responsibility was to help those who had never had to opportunity to learn about Jesus Christ, His gospel, and His church, to learn about Him, and prepare themselves to make covenants with God, such as baptism.

Almost every day we would recite a little anthem about our purpose as missionaries that began with, “Our purpose is to invite others to come unto Christ.” That’s what it’s all about. Coming unto Christ. Anything we do to help ourselves, and our brothers and sisters get home, is missionary work. Each person we meet is on a journey towards Christ. We’re at different places in our journey, and some take two steps forward and one back, but it’s the same journey, and we all need help.  

One of the most incredible missionaries I know is my mom. She’s never worn a little black nametag, but I know she has taught me, each day for 21 years, about my Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, and was a big part of my decision to serve a full-time mission. God knows exactly where each of us is at in this incredible journey, and He is constantly and carefully reaching out to each one of us. We once went through a total of 6 new tires in about 2 weeks just so that the man behind the Pepboy’s desk could get up the courage to ask us who we were! We don’t know where people are on their journey, our job is just to invite, to lift, and to help, and to continue to do so no matter what and as long as it takes.

A good example of this was Jesse, whom I met at the beginning of my mission. Jesse is a Zapotec Indian, and through his stories, music, and dance, he is keeping his culture alive. He taught me a lot about ancient Mexico, but even more about missionary work. It took Jesse four years to really pay attention to the missionaries. They’d stop by, he’d half listen, then send them on their way. When the time was right, God would send another set, and finally Jesse says his heart began to open and he started to pray differently.

He later told us, "Just a few days after I really started to talk to God… I was doing an excavation project at work. I was fasting, I was exhausted and hot and miserable and I didn't know if I could keep going. Suddenly I started to feel this great big feeling that I was loved, and I just started digging like crazy. I dug the hole several feet too deep and my boss yelled at me but I didn't even care! I couldn't stop smiling! 'That's ok boss, Jesus loves me!!" Since that day, Jesse never looked back. “In that moment,” he told us, “I realized I wasn’t just a grain of sand.” Jesse has since then dedicated himself wholeheartedly to helping others realize just how precious they are to God.  

In the time that’s left, I’d like to share a few more stories from my mission that truly taught me what it means to be a missionary.

One of my biggest wakeup-calls actually happened when I was waist deep in someone else’s fridge, scrubbing it out. We cleaned each week for Candy, an elderly black woman who lived in our complex. She had been through a whole lot, even been resuscitated several times, which had affected every aspect of her life. She couldn’t understand many things anymore, but had the sweetest, simplest faith I've ever come across. Her voice was high, froggy, and weak from surgeries, and she had to be constantly on oxygen, but that didn’t stop her from telling us, each week, how much God had blessed her and how much He loved her. As I cleaned that day, I thought about how, seconds before I opened my mission call, I said a short and desperate little prayer (I was scared!); "Heavenly Father, please send me somewhere where I can serve!"

I don't know what I thought service was, but I think it probably involved building an orphanage in a tribal village or carrying fresh water into a jungle or something ... something heroic! California, where I'd visited many times, came as a surprise. 

Deep in that fridge, I got the strongest impression (in a fridge--the Holy Ghost is weird) that "loving your neighbor" is phrased that way for a reason. I don't want to undermine those who do serve worldwide or far away, that is SO important, but sometimes we are so anxious to go "across the world" we forget to go "across the street." I asked God to send me to serve, and He did, but not in the way or to the place I expected. We are called to serve, and called to love, and sometimes it's a little harder with the people nearest to us or in the unglamorous ways. At the end of our visit that day, Candy piped up and told us, "Thank you for helping me clean. It's so hard for me! I can't do things like that anymore, but I still help people. I can love people, and I can tell them about God."

I gained many friends on my mission—and even another grandma. Her name was Juana, and from the moment we turned up on her porch she told us, “I know God sent you.” Her trailer always smelled of red rice and chile peppers, and you couldn’t leave without getting fed. She loved and believed all the lessons, but went through a very difficult time while we were teaching her. On Christmas Eve, all the local missionaries stopped by Juana’s home and we caroled to her. I’ll never forget little Juana, with shining eyes and wrapped in a blanket, standing on the porch as we sang “Silent Night” in Spanish as best we could.

She hugged us and quietly told us, "No one has ever done anything like that for me. No one has ever sung for me ... not in this country. You've surprised me.” It was something so simple, but it meant the world to Juana.

Believe it or not, one of the greatest missionaries of this dispensation lives in Southern California, and drives a mint-blue bubble van that can’t go over 40mph. His name is Hermano Esteves, and he has been ward mission leader for as long as anyone can remember. He learned to read from the Book of Mormon, never had the best penmanship, and couldn’t conduct a meeting or organize activities, but the man was a missionary down to the tips of his cowboy boots. No day was too hot, no lesson too far, no person too hardened. As we walked down the dusty streets, he’d sing, “We are all enlisted,” and greet everyone like an old friend. He’d take us all over the valley, visiting people who were taught by missionaries years and years before. He had forgotten their names, but he never forgot their stories. Everyone got a second chance. I wouldn’t say he was particularly well spoken or persuasive, and often he’d interrupt us as we taught with, “As a boy I had a hunger to know the truth…” but he’d get down on his tired knees every morning and plead with Heavenly Father to give him the words to say, and then share what was in his heart with everything that moved. “The gospel,” he told me, “is hot chocolate and fresh bread. No one gets offended if you share hot chocolate and fresh bread!! We can’t be selfish!”

One of the last lessons of my mission is that what we expect to share may not be what a person needs. A convert of many years who we were visiting started to battle us about whether Joseph Smith was important. We just listened.

After a moment, she just began to cry and I put my hand on hers and we really talked--and not about Joseph Smith. We talked about what really mattered: faith and truth and how to find both. In that moment, we both knew why we call each other "sister" in this church. It's the little tiny moments like that that made my mission. 

I had a hard time at the end of my mission because I was so afraid of it all being over. I had loved being part of God’s work, being His missionary, and watching people take steps towards Jesus Christ. Why, if I was just starting to figure this whole thing out, was it time to go home? Luckily, we had the opportunity to go to the temple, and standing there in the quiet an answer came, "Little one, you are the one who decides whether this is an ending or a beginning."

As Elder Uchtdorf says, “How grateful I am to my Heavenly Father that in His plan there are no true ending, only everlasting beginnings.” I know a mission is so much more than a black tag or a call letter—so much more than a short 18 months or two years. I am grateful for this new beginning. The scriptures teach us that “if ye have desires to serve God, ye are called to the work,” and I can testify that the Lord qualifies the called, no matter how small and weak we may feel. I know that continuing my mission is a decision I can make each day. I know that this is Jesus Christ’s restored church. I know the heavens are open, and that Heavenly Father speaks to His children. I know that because of Jesus Christ, death is not the end and our mistakes don’t have to be either. I know that our Heavenly Father loves us, and longs to guide us if we’ll only reach out to Him.