opening your mission call
 

Am I the only one who opened it on my own, with no one around, without fanfare?

Looking back, maybe I should have waited an hour or two.

I very much remember my reaction and where I was when I opened it. I don't remember how or when I told my parents.

It's my personality for such things to be done privately, I guess.

We were set to leave on vacation for England and it was my missionary farewell the Sunday before and I still hadn't received my mission call, even though the papers had been sent in weeks before. My Stake President had to call Salt Lake and shake the info out of them. He called me at 6:30 in the morning and told me I was going to London. At first (since I was groggy from the early phone call) I thought he was talking about our vacation plans, so I said that yes, we were going to London on vacation next week. He then repeated that my mission call was to London.

So that's how I got my mission call. I went to London on vacation and then returned 6 weeks later as a missionary.

why would you have a farewell scheduled before you knew when you were to report to the MTC?

Because we lived in Saudi Arabia and we had our lengthy annual vacation to the US scheduled. Even if I ended up having to report much later to the MTC, I would have remained in the US at my grandparent's until that time. That was the last time I was going to be in my home ward.

I got mine in the mail on Saturday. My entire family was at a school fair. I opened it alone, then biked over to the school and told my mother. It never occurred to me to wait and have a big "opening" ceremony.

I don't think I had ever heard of an opening ceremony when I opened mine.

I opened my call with my parents there because I had been water skiing with friends when it arrived in the mail. Nobody made a big deal about it. I can't think of anyone who had some sort of "open the mission call in front of everyone" party.

I woke up from a nap on the couch around noon. I walked out to the mailbox in my boxers and noticed my call. I was about to open it when my sister said, you better wait until mom and dad are here. So I waited and we had a "ceremony", which consisted of me opening it and reading it in front of my parents and a couple of siblings. My dad was pretty excited, he had the world atlas out and was ready to learn all about my new exciting adventure. When I read "Washington Seattle Mission" there was a bit of a pause and a "hmmm, Seattle, that's...nice". It was all pretty anticlimactic. No short brown people to talk about...

Getting that mission call is like the one "Mission Impossible" moment in our lives.

The moment where we find out what our destiny over the next two years is going to be.

I had a friend who was called to the SLC mission. I laughed when he told me. I was to find out years later, that I had hurt his feelings. I laughed some more.