Bruce R.

Read my blog: Preachin' to the Choir

I’ve gotten in the habit of telling missionary stories recently, and a post on Rant Fever reminded me of another part of my mission. As a Mormon missionary, I had 2-ish hours every morning for study. There are several things one is supposed to do during this time, including study with your companion and study the language. It’s a shame to say that most missionaries kind of fade out of study-time after the first few months of their mission. But, being accustomed to reading a lot and desperately needing some intellectual stimulation, I stayed fairly on top of things. After a month or two, I had exhausted the Missionary Guide (the one that was, thank heavens, replaced by Preach My Gospel), the MTC Spanish textbook, AND the “missionary library” (a collection of four or five universally approved church books for missionaries). Some mission presidents restrict missionary reading to those listed above. Had that been the case with my mission president, I might have gone crazy, having plowed through them all almost before I was out of the MTC. Some extend it to a few other staples like The Miracle of Forgiveness.

Luckily, my mission president had a little more discretion. For those of you who have seen The Shawshank Redemption, I was the Morgan Freeman of missionary libraries (also of ties, guyaberas, and electric water-heating showerheads). I was a networking champion and could get a hold of just about every uplifting or theological based book I could imagine. It started with raiding in-apartment libraries. Missionaries tend to move areas every few months, and suitcase space is at a premium. As they go, they collect clothes and souvenirs and stuff like small speaker sets to play classical music. This means that books that have been read are left behind. Quickly, I became the proud owner of a complete set of Institute student manuals, including the highly touted and out of print Book of Mormon study guide (literally three times as long as the current one. In a situation like this, page volume is at a premium).

It wasn’t just gospel reading, I needed more for my Spanish, too. I found a missionary who had a college level advanced grammar Spanish textbook and had it Xeroxed at a copy shop (no enforceable copyright laws in the DR. Serves me right, though, that it came back with every other page out of order. 2,1,4,3,6,5…375.). When that ran out, I went to used bookstores and got copies of uncontroversial (Treasure Island, a history of the Catholic Church) books in Spanish to keep the momentum up.

Soon I found that I had exhausted my on-island resources, and still had a year to go. I wrote home for all the books that I couldn’t find on Hispanola (The Great Apostasy, surprisingly. The Messiah series by Bruce R., Believing Christ, etc). Anything that I couldn’t get fast enough from them, I realized I could order from Amazon and have delivered to the Mission Office. I also found out that ‘Pres.’ (our mission president), was OK with us reading secular motivational book.

It was at this point that I had a brief but passionate affair with Self-Help Literature. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, others from the Covey line, How to Win Friends and Influence People, others from the Carnegie line, The Greatest Salesman in the World (terrible, by the way)…

I was hooked. I was addicted. You know how it makes you feel when you make a study plan on the first day of school, ultra rigorous but guaranteed to get you straight A’s. The euphoria from New Years Resolutions. The excitement of a new planner. I quickly learned that you can mainline those sentiments by reading motivational lit. Their plans for helping me become the best me possible are unrealistically rigorous, if not a little hairbrained. Some of them are down right irresponsible. But, the real reason they sell, the real reason why some of them (the irresponsible ones) were even written, was because they are good at making you feel good about yourself as long as you are reading the book. So, I’d end one and jump straight into another. The problem came when I started running low on editions to read. I had to quit cold turkey, and haven’t looked back since.