Lansing Michigan? You've got to be kidding!

Spring 1991: “Dear Elder Burton, You are hereby called to serve as a missionary…” This was a letter I’d been waiting for my whole life: my mission call. I had prepared: In high school I had taken three years of German and two years of Spanish. I was also hoping use some of the scouting skills I’d acquired. “You are assigned to labor in …” My eyes darted across the page. Would I be tracting through Europe? Or hiking past llamas to the pueblos of South America? “… the Michigan Lansing Mission.”

I was dumbfounded. Could this be right? I didn't know what to think. I had always believed that every mission call was inspired. But this was so out of line with my expectations ... so totally random. And at that moment I realized that while some calls surely came by revelation, there were others that just had to be filled. And (unfortunately for me) I was one of the missionaries who just had to fill them. I don’t know if there was ever a more deflated prospective missionary than me as I finished reading the letter announcing my call. If my assessment was correct—if I was just filling a space as a missionary—where might I have gone, I wondered, if had submitted my papers a week earlier or later? I was filled with disappointment.

Still, I was determined to serve and was blessed with many assurances as I prepared to leave—right up to the Sunday before I entered the Missionary Training Center. That night my dad and I attended a fireside where we met Elder L. Tom Perry. I remember how proud my dad was as he introduced me to the apostle, telling him that on Wednesday I was going to the MTC. Elder Perry congratulated me, and I turned to follow my dad off the stand. But as I walked away, I felt I needed to ask Elder Perry a question.

“Elder Perry?” I asked as I faced him a second time.

“Yes, Elder,” he answered.

“You’re an apostle,” I stated.

“Yes.”

“Like Peter, James, and John,” I continued.

“Yes,” he said again.

“What’s it like?” I asked.

Elder Perry bent his tall frame close to me, wrapped his arms around me in a bear hug and whispered in my ear: “It’s just like being a missionary. Follow the Spirit! Follow the Spirit!”

The thrill that gave me could have carried me through my mission. But still I wondered: why Michigan?


April 2010: Nineteen years later I listened to President Rasband of the Seventy in the Priesthood Session of General Conference as he explained how each mission call comes by revelation. This was not new doctrine; I had been taught it from childhood. But I had never heard in as much detail how the calls were made, and was greatly moved by President Rasband’s words and the process of revelation as he explained it. I entirely believed what he taught, and yet I didn't connect his message to my own mission. I had witnessed and been part of many miracles on my mission. But still, I didn't see why I was supposed to be in Michigan as opposed to anywhere else. I justified this thought using the mission call of Stephen Burnett in D&C 80: “Wherefore, go ye and preach my gospel, whether to the north or to the south, to the east or to the west, it mattereth not…” That’s how I felt about my mission. If it didn't matter, did it really take revelation to call me there?


Fall 2012: Last fall, my neighbor invited me to take a DNA test offered by the family history company he works for. The idea was to discover my ancestral homelands using my DNA. I was adopted and had no idea of my biological ancestry or countries of origin. (As far as I knew, my children were the only blood relatives I had ever seen.) So the invitation appealed to me. When the results came back they showed I was entirely Scandinavian and Finnish/Russian—not too surprising considering my light skin and blue eyes. What was surprising was that the results also included possible DNA matches (that is, other people who had taken the test, with a prediction of how those matches were related to me). Typically, a test result might show relationships ranging from 3rd to 6th cousins, and allows users to send anonymous emails so they can collaborate in building their family trees. However, in my case the results showed a “Close Family” match and predicted with 99% confidence that this was a close family member or first cousin.

For years people had asked me if I wanted to find my birth parents and while I was definitely curious about my origins (enough to take this test), I was content with my life. I already had a family—they had raised me. So I wasn't sure I wanted to go searching for another. I had no idea of what I might find and didn't want to open a can of worms. And now here was this match.

I sent off an email: I was adopted, I wrote, and this person was listed as “close family.” Could they tell me anything about my “family”? Within minutes an email came back. When was I born? Where? I sent the answers. The next response came late the following night: The “Close Family” match was my half-brother. The person sending the emails was my birth mother. She gave me her number and asked me to call her.

I don't know that I've ever been so nervous about making a phone call. But the next morning I dialed her number, and then we talked for almost an hour as she told me my story: She told me how when she first found out she was pregnant, her mother assured her that a baby was a blessing. How her bishop agreed that the baby was a blessing, and then suggested that this baby (me) should have a mom and a dad, and she thought so too. How I was born, and how she held me for two and a half days before I was given for adoption. It was such a good feeling to talk to her.

At the end of the call, I asked about my biological father. She told me his name and said she thought he was from Lansing, Michigan. Lansing, Michigan? More than twenty years after I opened my mission call, a light switched on in my mind.

I immediately jumped online and within a few minutes of “Facebook sleuthing” and a few phone calls to some people I knew on my mission, I was confident I’d found my biological father. (His online pictures looked a whole lot like me and my family.) Before this moment, my "curiosity" about my biological family was mostly about my birth mother. I'd never felt much about finding my father. But seeing the similarities in likeness, and with the dawning realization that as a missionary I had been sent to a place where I had such close (if at the time unknown) family relationships, I had a great desire to reach out. I sent an email. His response the next morning confirmed that he was my biological father. We talked later on the phone and I think he was as nervous about that call as I had been calling my mom. We had a good talk, and then he said that his sister and her husband were coming to Utah and asked if they could visit me while they were here. They lived in an area where I had served, so I was very excited to meet them and to see if I might possibly remember them from my mission.

A few weeks later my aunt and uncle walked through my door. Seeing them I felt an instant familiarity, but couldn't quite place where it came from. Then in an instant the light turned on again. His hair had gone from black to silver and I hadn't known his first name (he had always been “Brother”) so I didn't recognized him at first, but standing in front of me was my ward mission leader from the Grand Rapids Ward with whom I had worked for a six months of my mission. For half a year I had been at his home weekly. I had played with his children—my cousins, throwing them on my shoulders, rolling them on the floor. I had been with my biological family and hadn't even known it.

Not only had I gone to Michigan, I had interacted and worked with my family. My new found aunt told me the family story of how she and her brothers joined the church, but her mother (my grandmother) never did, nor her family before her. Spread all over Michigan, in the very places where I was called to serve, was my family. In light of what I now saw, could I continue to believe that my mission was simply a call to fill a space? Were my biological origins and my assigned field of labor merely coincidence? I knew now that this was truly a call by revelation and inspiration specifically for me. The only question that remained was this: Had I allowed blinding disappointment to keep me from accomplishing the fullness I might have otherwise enjoyed on my mission?

Thankfully for me, this is not the end of my story, and I wasn't shown this just to have a glimpse of what might have been. Rather, I believe that my Heavenly Father revealed all of this to me because there is still work to do—work I began as a full-time missionary and work I have been called to continue throughout my life. And next time I’m tempted to think that of life as bitter, random, or haphazard, I just hope it won’t take me twenty years to find the faith to see the purpose in it.