J'irai Où Tu Me Veux Aller

And Kevin thought he won.. You guessed Brazil, buddy.

If there was one place I never thought I'd go, it's France. I figured it'd be foreign with a language, but France? Fashion-forward, cheese-and-wine-loving, romantic France. Let's be honest: none of you thought I'd go there either. In fact, the closest guess was Gregorious in Italy. Congrats, kiddo. You get a hug. A good one.
I had to adjust to the idea. Not that I was opposed, just shocked.
Let's take a gander at my credentials. I spent a month in Africa, and loved it. I took several years of Spanish in High School and would attend Church meetings in the language when I traveled around the stake with my dad. Then I served a Spanish/Portuguese speaking mini mission in Cambridge last Christmas. On top of that, I collect various phrases in diverse tongues from people I meet. Of all the phrases I'd gathered over the years, I have a single French phrase I learned from Timeline, of all places: Je suis a un espion. Translation: I am a spy. That's gonna come in handy, I'm sure of it. Combine all that with the knowledge I'm going somewhere that's poor and ready for the gospel and, guesses anyone?

Think I pull off the beret?

Here are my main concerns:
1. That I not only have to wear dresses all the time, but I have look fancy. This is France, after all. If anyone knows fashion, it's the French. That's the end of my plan for ponytails and v necks every day.
2.  Never taken an ounce of French in my life. That'll come easily enough; I'm good with languages. But you guys should have hear me the first time I tried to read my Livre de Mormon. It was rough.
3. I am going to get so fat on all that French bread. Anyone know any good therapists?

Called to Serve

So here's the mission call opening. Retrospectively, I regret not taking any French, since I couldn't even pronounce "Lyon" correctly. Woops.

In case you're wondering why I have two people here, it's not, in fact, because I have no friends. On the contrary, I am opposed to large groups and waiting. As soon as my hands touched that envelope, everyone had 30 minutes to get there. Kevin and Lauren won. Everyone else was rapidly informed, never fear.
When Gregorious got his mission call, he waited for almost two days to open it during our Skype session, like a champ. My view is that it's your own thing and it doesn't really affect anyone else, so open it ASAP and let everyone know. None of this 12 cell phones on speaker and 7 lap tops with Skype open nonsense.  Steel took the courtesy of pointing out that if I maintained this stance for all my important life events, that would be dumb. And, well, anyone will tell you, don't do dumb things.

The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways

As I grew up, under the sure knowledge that I would serve a mission, I was extremely jealous that boys could serve three years earlier than girls. Therefore, I would often joke with my dad that he needed to be called as a Mission President so that I could serve early. In high school, I realized that plan would also work better with school. Serving at 21 would require  me to go to school for an extra year beforehand due to my major of Athletic Training that requires two consecutive years of schooling.

Pres Hutch and the Future Missionaries

Anyway, instead of being called as a Mission President, he got Stake President. Needless to say, I was slightly disappointed. However, being the Stake Pres means he gets to deal out all the extra General Conference tickets that people in the RI Stake can't use. Meaning his only daughter out in Utah gets them. Score.

Last October, Gregorious convinced my dad to take him out to Utah to visit me, BYU, and go to conference. We went to the Saturday morning session of General Conference with a few of my close friends. And now, I quote from the words of Thomas S. Monson: 

Today, I am pleased to announce that able, worthy young women who have the desire to serve may be recommended for missionary service beginning at age 19, instead of age 21. 

My jaw dropped. I just wanted to stand up and cheer and do a little dance. Luckily, I was able to control myself. Isn't it awesome how the Lord pulls through for you sometimes? Never in the way you expect, but always in the way that's best.  

Why Not?

Despite my initial motivation to serve, the fact of the matter was that I was set on going-and going willingly. Looking back, I figure I had a good number of boys beat on that point. 

Brad Wilcox

The great Brad Wilcox teaches my Mission Prep class and had us read the ninth chapter of his book, The Continuous Atonement, this week. "Faith Without Works (and Works Without Supervision)" discusses the motivation behind our actions. For example, young men often serve missions in search of extrinsic rewards, in fear of punishments, or to satisfy their friends, family, and Church. While these are decent motivators, they don't always provide lasting results.  

Female missionaries are another story. Until the recent age change, we had to wait until 21 to serve. That puts a serious damper on all plans of college and marriage. Most of the RMs I know will agree that sister missionaries are either really great or really terrible. And it all comes down to motives. Usually these sisters have been dedicated to serving for a while or just didn't end up getting married, so they serve because they have nothing better to do. 

I don't think robots would cut it as missionaries. 

There are lots of goals I have as far as the gospel is concerned. I want to be able to love everyone. I want to be repulsed by sin. I want to increase my testimony and love of the gospel so that I can't help but share it. I want to be more open to sharing the gospel. I want to be like this missionary, found in the book of Brad Wilcox:

President, I've fallen totally in love. Don't worry. It is not with a girl. It is with the work. I love missionary work. I just can't stop. I can't get my brain to think about anything else. I've fallen hopelessly and helplessly in love.

 I do love this gospel. And I do have compassion for people (more than I'd care to admit). But, I want these truths to be more prevalent in my life. 

Field Goal

Things typically don't click for me unless I apply them to sports. Goals, for example. In a game of basketball, you can score a lot of them. But you can also accomplish a lot of them. In High School, we would come up with team goals to accomplish in each game-how many points we'd let them score, how many turnovers we'd have, etc. While completion led to much rejoicing in the land, failure resulted in running endless suicides. You bet your sweet aspercreme we tried our best. Despite the toll that punishment took on my mental stability, it did help me to play smarter and harder during games.
And now, I Naomi, write some of the words of Thomas S. Monson:

"It is necessary to prepare and plan so that we don't fritter away our lives. Without a goal, there can be no real success. One of the best definitions of success I have ever had goes something like this: Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. Someone has said that the trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never crossing the goal line."

Daruma Doll. Cute, right?

 Mr. Pehrson, my Sports Psychology teacher, emphasized in his class that goals must be S.M.A.R.T. I think serving an honorable 18-month mission for the church appropriately fits all those categories. However, the second requirements of goals is that you have to be accountable, otherwise, what would failure matter? I mean, if I didn't have to run sprints for having too many turnovers, I wouldn't have tried quite as hard.
My brother Derek acquired a Daruma doll from one of his Young Men's leaders. The idea behind these things is that you color in the first eye when you decide on a goal, and the other when you finish it. I chose an alternative method of establishing my own accountability. I just told my family. Sometimes that's all you need-just some other people that will be majorly bummed if you decide to wuss out. And also there's no way I'm going to just sit at home and let my brothers have all the fun.

Lucky Number 14

In the days of my youth, my faithful Primary teacher, Sister Briggs would drag me from the car and convince me to go to class with her. Maybe it was because I was the only member of the class that showed up. Or maybe it was because I was the best one (not unlikely). But more likely, it was because she loved me. Anyways, thanks for that, and playing Mad Libs with me all during Singing Time, when they wouldn't let me sing the lower part of "A Child's Prayer" (or any other song for that matter). 

Sister Briggs. What a gem.

Thank you because Primary is where I first decided I wanted to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. 
I remember this packet we got in Sharing Time once that was about the size of a grade school text book (meaning about 1/100th of the text books I currently devour) and it was all about missionaries. Most of it was like Oh, here's a word search, here's a map of the world, here's a picture of missionaries to color-I wonder if I should color his suit black or dark blue? But one of the pages had you calculate what year you would serve, and it turned out that I would turn 21 in the year 2014. 

It just looks like a good number. Honestly. 

Fourteen. The day of the month I was born. My basketball number (at least before I grew up to be the biggest one on the team-presently, it's 44). An even number-so my OCD child-self could spin around seven times in either direction and be satisfied. Fourteen is just a wonderful number all around.  And now, it represents the year I would serve a mission. 


I did have a vague idea I wanted to serve before, but this revelation pretty much proved the predestination of my fate.