A Letter From Mark, or A Missionary's Thoughts

This is a section of a letter Mark wrote to us. He is currently serving a mission in France, in a city close to the German border. 

"It was after this rendezvous while walking to the church that I had a large realization. I had already written my President's email describing what had happened with Françoise and was thinking about why missions are so hard. (There was a bus greve last Monday so we had lots of walking to do between Brigitte's and the church). Why? Why do we have to go through all these literal heartbreaks? We open ourselves up to these people and present our heart to them, as it were, and love them so much, and then these things happen that mess us up. Elder Coburn had mentioned a bit of what he had put in his email to his family about this and it concerned the Savior. 

"So I started thinking about the Savior and His mission the earth. I started thinking of him as a man, divine though He was, a man in the sense that he has emotions and feelings that we all have. I thought about that and the reasons why I'm here on a mission. I have always thought that I knew exactly why I was here, to spread the Gospel, share what I have. But as I was thinking about Jesus Christ in this way, I realized that He was giving literally His whole life to the people He lived among. He gave them his whole heart. During His time on earth, He experienced the exact same things we do, or rather, we experience, as missionaries, the same things He did. We have investigators who don't understand our message (the woman at the well) we have investigators who have so much potential, but they don't go all the way (the rich young man), we have flatout rejection. I'm sure Jesus was hoping for these people with more hope than I could ever muster. He knew them better than I ever could know somebody. He understood their value perfectly, and yet they rejected Him too. They had the Son of God with them, and in the end, many many rejected him completely. 

"So, here is what I came up with after thinking of all this. As a representative of Jesus Christ here in Nancy, doing (or trying, anyway) to do the same things Jesus Christ would do if He were here in Nancy, should I not expect some rejection, some heartbreak, some disappointment? In being His representative, in wearing His name everywhere I go for people to  see, should I not expect to go through a small, tiny fraction of what He experienced and felt? And in living these hard things, do I not understand Christ a little bit better? I feel as if the gap between myself and Christ has gotten smaller this week. That is not to say that I understand in any way what Christ lived, but I understand just that little bit more."