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All easy missions are alike; every hard mission is hard in its own way.

Tolstoy knew jack squat about missionary work, but when you talk to someone who has served a really hard mission, you can hear it in their voice (distant, faint), see in their eyes (hollow, sunken) and read it in their words (confused, beaten). Craig Harline, decades on, still has these lingering symptoms. He served in a hard mission, you see. What exactly do we mean when we talk about hard missions? What are the easy missions? Dear Reader, I have the answers.

Let’s be clear: a hard mission has little to do with physical comfort. Physical comfort plays a tangential role, a supporting role; the weather is the exterior reflection of how terrible the mission itself, as if the Shakespearean Great Chain of Being were reflected, Lear-like, in the mood of the mission. Nor is the hardness to be found in the bizarre, inedible food or the inevitable digestive hijinks that ensue.

Here are the key criteria for a hard mission:

1. Nobody to teach

2. Nothing to do all day

3. Mean, mean people*

You need all three to have a hard mission. If you have nobody to teach but you have activities enough to keep you busy and you know nice people to talk to, you’re set. If you have nothing to do all day, the people are awful but you’ve got investigators, you’re fine. But when you have none of these, my friend, you’re going to have to be inventive. Tracting will be awful and awfully ineffective. The members will not furnish you with contacts. It means that you will feel, with some frequency, that you are a failure. It means that the folks at home will not understand.

Go on; tell me why your mission was harder than mine. But it wasn’t.

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*love the people.