Proxy

I do wish to see the world. I want to go to Antarctica and see a land that no one sees. Even if it's really boring. If I could wish for anything, I'd wish to travel back in time and see the world before anyone walked on it. See the Utah valley before the Pioneers came down. See the jungles in Asia before they got cut down. I know it's getting to be too late now to see any of that, but I have high hopes that some day in the next life, we'll get a field trip and get to see what the world was like before it was our planet. When it was just a beautiful rock in the sky.

I can wish, right?

I look forward to the opportunity to some day travel the world with my family to be. Experience new places. Right now I've been living through Joe. Experiencing the world by proxy.

I've been asking him about his mission.

I asked him what it was like his first day in the MTC, and what his companion was like. They were the same person, down to the camera and everything.

I asked him what he liked best about the MTC. He liked a lot of it, but his favorite was calling people.

I asked him what he'd do on P-Days. He'd shop and do laundry. His favorite thing to buy in all of Germany were these things... Nougat Bites or something. Cereal with Nutella in the middle. He was excited when his sister came back from a study in England, and let him know that we kinda have something like that in America.

I asked him what the towns were like. How the buildings were too tall to really see the mountains.

I asked him what his first day was like. The assistants picked him up.
"Were the assistants scary?"
"No... they were like super heroes!"
"I always imagined them like death eaters.... You're a death eater too, but they're the ones closest to Voldemort, so they'll get you in trouble...."

They're not like death eaters.

I asked him what his last day was like. How he was sad to be the only one going home that day. How he didn't want to spend all day training the assistant replacing him. I learned that you don't call them AP's, you call them Assistants. He went out tracting. It was great, because you got used to rejection quick and you started to crave it. It was great because sometimes you'd run into people and you'd talk to them. And maybe those people had never said a word of prayer in their life before. But now they had. And they felt something. So even if you never saw them again, you touched their life, by helping them let God touch their life.

I asked him what one of his favorite things was. Christmas. Christmas was essentially born in Germany, and the country was alive that time of year.

I asked him if he could go back, would he do it again. "Yeah." He said, without even blinking or waiting a moment. "But I'd take you with me."