Missionary Heroes

Everyone is the hero (or heroine, as the case may be) of their own story. Fiction writers need to understand this so that their secondary characters feel like real people. They have their own values and their own motivations. Their raison d'être is not to provide support the story’s hero, but to live their own life. Likewise, I am not a supporting character in the story of my life. I am the hero.

We Mormons have lots of missionary heroes from the Book of Mormon, Ammon being the most famous. Ammon is everything that a future missionary wants to be. He’s zealous, charismatic, dynamic, brave, humble, faithful, knowledgeable, and any number of other positive attributes. On top of all that, he goes on one of the greatest missions in history. He cuts off a bunch of bad guys’ arms, converts a king, and ultimately an entire kingdom. He is a hero worth emulating and missionaries would do well to strive to be like him.

However, it is important to remember that Ammon is a hero of the Book of Mormon, and he’s the hero of his own story, but he isn’t the hero of King Lamoni’s story, the man he teaches. King Lamoni is the hero of his own story, Ammon is merely a secondary character. That is not to say that Ammon is unimportant, or that his efforts weren’t vital in bringing King Lamoni to the truth, but that without King Lamoni’s own efforts to understand and accept what Ammon was teaching, those efforts would have been to no effect.

Too often I see missionaries that see themselves as the hero of every story they are in. They are rightly the hero of their own story, but they are egotistical to think that they are the hero of every person they teach and baptize. Using my missionary experience as an example, I don’t see myself as a necessary component in the stories of any of the people I taught and baptized. I strived to be the best missionary I could be, to teach as diligently and as clearly and as powerfully as I could, but I refuse to believe that those people wouldn’t have been baptized if I chose not to serve a mission. They are the heroes of their own stories. I didn’t convert them, they converted themselves. My blessing for serving a mission was just being a character, in any capacity in their stories. The great blessing of serving a mission is accepting that role, changing your raison d'être, and witnessing the miracle of conversion firsthand.