Our son nearly came home in his eighth week.
Not dramatically. Nobody was called. He worked out, quietly and reasonably, sitting in a chapel in Côte d'Ivoire with malaria and dengue fever in him, that he had a plausible reason to be reassigned and that he could take it.
This is the story of the week he didn't.
He thought he had lost the Gift of Tongues
It began with the language going.
He had been doing well — well enough to carry conversations, well enough that the mamas in the village fell out of their seats when he greeted them in Abidji. Then one Tuesday in sector the French stopped arriving. He could hear it. He could not catch it. Speaking at all became physically exhausting.
His first thought was not that he was ill. His first thought was that the Gift of Tongues had been taken back, and that he knew why, because his language study had not been, in his words, really celestial level recently.
That is a nineteen-year-old's theology, and it is also a nineteen-year-old's honesty. Offered a mystery, he did not reach for a medical explanation. He reached for a spiritual one, and the one he reached for blamed himself.
The low
It was malaria. Dengue fever arrived on top of it.
By Thursday his eyes were red and he could not lift his arm to high-five the village children. He rode thirty minutes out to a village anyway, thought he was going to pass out, and started working. The fever reached 103.9. He hallucinated. There was no hospital within two African hours.
We asked, four times across three days, whether he had asked his companion for a blessing. He had not. He is not a boy who asks for help. When he finally did, he told us afterwards that it was hard, and that he was dizzy the whole way through it.
He was not healed on the spot. His fever went up that night.
Then came the weekend, and the weekend was worse than the fever.
By Saturday the illness had left his muscles wrecked — his ribs, his spine, his shoulders, knots he could find with his fingers. He sat in church on Sunday and cried, because it hurt and because he was weak and because he had run out. I can't do this anymore. I cannot do this anymore. Why me?
And his phone kept lighting up with photographs of friends serving in Italy. Gelato in the evenings. One of them complaining about a leak in the apartment. He has a leak too. He also has to put shoes on to cross his own floor at night, because of the cockroaches.
He could have been reassigned. He had, as he put it, definitely got plausible reason.
The email
On Saturday a voice memo arrived from an American in his mission he had never met — Elder Udall, a name on Facebook and nothing more.
I know how you feel, bro. I got malaria my first transfer, right around the same time of year as you. I wanted to die. And I had the same thoughts — I want to leave the mission, I could just get reassigned. I know how you're feeling. I haven't really met you yet, but I love you and I'm here for you.
Then Udall forwarded him something else: an email he had been sent a year earlier by a teacher at the MTC. He mentioned the name almost in passing — he might have been your teacher too.
He was. Frère Box taught our son French in the MTC. Our son thought enough of him to have spent part of his time there setting the man up with his wife.
Here is how that email came to exist.
A year ago, an elder called Udall was struggling in Côte d'Ivoire. Udall's mother has a friend. That friend knew Brother Box. She told him: you should write to this boy, he is having a hard time. Box had served in Ivory Coast himself — he knew exactly what the elder was sitting in. So he wrote it. To a missionary he had never taught, at the request of a friend of a mother.
A year later that email was forwarded, by the elder it was written for, to a sick boy in a chapel who had just decided he might go home.
Our son wrote back to Box to tell him. Box's reply, as our son repeated it to us, was that it was an amazing thing that an email he wrote a year ago could help somebody else — and somebody he actually knew.
Our son's own account of it is four words long. Such a tender mercy. He said he could not help thinking it had always been God's plan for him to read that email eventually.
Alma 26
The email carried scripture, and the scripture was already his favourite — Alma 26, Ammon's account after fourteen years among the Lamanites.
He told us he had never read it the way he read it that weekend.
Now when our hearts were depressed, and we were about to turn back, behold, the Lord comforted us, and said: Go amongst thy brethren, the Lamanites, and bear with patience thine afflictions, and I will give unto you success.
What caught him was not the promise. It was the admission in front of it.
Ammon — in our son's estimation the most goated missionary of all time — was about to turn back. He wanted to go home too. And the answer he was given was not rescue. It was bear with patience thine afflictions, and then success.
His conclusion, written down while he was still aching: if Ammon can want to turn back, he can be patient in his suffering and let God make him into who he needs to be. Ammon's mission was fourteen years. He has two. But if he does not turn back, God will bless him. And Christ, he added, experienced this and more in Gethsemane — so there is somebody who can carry his burdens. Bare mes fardeaux, he wrote, in the language he had just got back.
Saturday evening
There was a baptism on Sunday, and the chapel needed cleaning.
So on Saturday evening — the same Saturday he had spent crying, the same weekend he nearly asked to go home — he went and cleaned it. Three days after a 103.9 fever, too weak for his own clothes to fit, planning a trip to the market for a smaller belt because nothing stayed up any more.
Nobody watched him do it. It went in no report.
Christian Koffi is eight years old. They met his father about five weeks earlier, and after that the family came almost every single time. His parents are to be married in November and baptised the same day.
On Sunday our son stood in that clean chapel for that boy.
His father asked him that evening how the first real day back had gone. The whole answer was two words. It was solid.
The gift, returned
That same weekend his father asked him, almost in passing, whether he could speak French again.
He could. Yea i can speak French and understand well.
He had spent the hardest week of his mission believing something had been taken from him because he had not been diligent enough to keep it. It had not been taken. It came back — and it came back on the far side of a week he would not have chosen, along with things he did not have before.
He also found out that week that his own grandfather spent a fortnight in hospital on his mission. Sixty years, and it had never come up. It does not go in the weekly letter. We only heard it because a boy was ill and an old man finally said: that happened to me too.
What he wrote at the end of it
We would like to finish with his words rather than ours, because we could not improve on them and because we did not expect them.
He is grateful, he wrote, for having had this at the start of his mission. Two African diseases that wrecked him, and it feels a little like God showing him that he has got what it takes — that he could get malaria and dengue on Monday, push until Thursday, get absolutely wrecked, and still make it out to clean the chapel for a baptism on Saturday evening.
And then:
I'm so grateful for God to show me who I am, and you best believe I'm still praying for mountains, and I want them to be higher. What else do I have that I don't know I have in me?
I'm always gonna come out of the refiner's fire red hot, ready for more molding. I'm excited to see what that next mountain is — maybe it makes this one seem like an ant hill.
If you are deciding whether to go
It will not look like the version in your head. Some of it will be genuinely awful, and you will ask why you and not somebody in Italy, and you will mean it.
But somewhere a teacher you have not thought about in a year may already have written the thing you are going to need, for somebody else, because a friend of a mother asked him to.
And there will be a Saturday evening when you are too weak for your own clothes, and a chapel that needs cleaning before a baptism, and nobody watching.
That is the part nobody warns you about either.