#72785 Influencing mission calls

[S.A.M.]

http://theboard.byu.edu/questions/72785/

I have a friend that grew up in Salt Lake City. He had a very controlling, manipulative family. He received a call to the Boise, ID mission, and actually rejected it, because he knew his family would be up in his business being that close. In the letter he sent, he explained the situation, and asked to be sent farther away from Utah. He received a new call for the Florida, Fort Lauderdale Mission. He didn't ask for a specific place, but he very much influenced the call.

[NerdGirl]

I have probably told this story before, but I'll tell it again because I like it. There was a senior couple in my home ward who went on a mission to Texas. They came back, and decided they wanted to go on another mission to the same place, so they put their papers in again, but they got called somewhere else. They were so angry. They were at church ranting about this to everyone who got with 10 feet of them, and how dare the church not call them where they wanted to go, etc. I was hanging out in the hallway with my mom and the sarcastic older ladies that I like to hang out with when I go home. One of the sarcastic old ladies said to the missionary couple, "When I was a teenager, there was a boy in my ward who got called to go to the States on his mission. He was really upset and thought that he was spiritual enough that he should have gotten to go overseas. So he sent his mission call back and told them he wanted to go overseas. They sent him a new mission call, this time to England. He fell overboard in a storm on the ship on way over and drowned." The look on their faces was absolutely priceless.

[S.A.M.]

Great story. This guy's life hasn't been easy since, but not quite to the point of being dead. Divorced twice, lost most of a mult-million dollar inheritance, no longer active in any religion. Not that we know that either of these guys would have had a vastly different outcome if they had accepted the first call, though.

[thatonemom]

I had a friend with a lot of Spanish-language experience get called English speaking in the US. Her mission had a lot of Spanish speaking missionaries, so she wrote the mission president before she got out there and asked if he would switch her to Spanish. And he did. Not really the same thing, but I'm sure it affected which areas she was in/which companions she got.
As far as I know nothing terrible has happened to her since.