God Sees Beyond Our Zeros

 

I didn’t open my mission call like most people. Forgoing a crowded living room complete with maps, snacks, and my fifty closest friends, I took my unopened mission call envelope to the Provo Utah Temple grounds, found a dry spot under a tree, and sat down to open it by myself. With my heart racing and the light fading, I decided to pray. I told Heavenly Father that wherever I was assigned to go, I would work my hardest, never give up, and make Him proud of me. Then I opened my call.

Discouragement in Romania

A year and a half later, I was halfway through my mission in Romania. The first year had been difficult. I worked hard and was blessed to learn Romanian fairly quickly, but I didn’t feel like I had any true impact. I hadn’t baptized anyone. I hadn’t even taught that many lessons. People say your success isn’t measured by the numbers you record—but zeros didn’t seem to give me a lot of hope either.

I began to be discouraged. I had promised the Lord that I would work hard and never give up, but I wasn’t seeing any success. I wanted to make Him proud, but now I feared I was disappointing Him.

Around that same time, I read this passage on perspective from Dallan R. Moody’s 2012 devotional address:

We must also remember that God’s ways are not our ways. His response to a given situation might be different than what we want to have happen. In addition, the timing of His response could vary greatly from our expected timing. Yet in all cases, God’s involvement in our lives is carefully crafted to bring about the greatest good. For “he doeth not anything save it be for the benefit of the world” (2 Nephi 26:24).

As I pondered his message, it became clear to me that despite the doubts I may have had, my call to serve in Romania had not been a mistake. While I didn’t see any direct “success” from my efforts as a missionary, that didn’t mean that I wasn’t doing any good for the people I was serving.

A Miraculous Phone Call

Four months later, I got a phone call. I was in the last transfer of my mission, just weeks from returning home. I still hadn’t baptized anyone, but I was feeling much better about the good I was doing among the Romanian people. On the other end of the static-filled call was the overly loud voice of a Romanian I had met several months earlier: Constantin.

When I first met Constantin, he had recently immigrated to the Czech Republic. While there, he ran into the LDS missionaries and felt the spirit that surrounded them. But there was one problem: Constantin didn’t speak Czech, and they didn’t speak Romanian.

The Czech missionaries frantically searched for a Romanian speaker and were referred to the Romania/Moldova Mission office—and me. For several weeks I connected with the Czech missionaries and their new Romanian investigator over Skype. I translated their lessons and added my own personal testimony of the Savior and His restored gospel. Finally, after a month or so of weekly Skype appointments, I was asked to translate Constantin’s baptismal interview. My heart sank when he wasn’t given the green light right away. I was told I may be called upon again to translate when he had his next interview, but I never heard from him again.

God’s Ways

That is, I didn’t hear from him again until that phone call during the last transfer of my mission. Somehow Constantin had tracked me down to tell me that he had been baptized! But that wasn’t all. He now lived in a small Romanian village with his wife and her family, two members of which had been baptized as well!

I was elated. I had been used as a tool in the Lord’s hands to help a family come to the gospel. I felt like I had fulfilled my purpose as a missionary.

God’s ways are not our ways. He sees a fuller picture than we do, and we can always count on His involvement in our life to be “carefully crafted to bring about the greatest good.”

 

—Tanner Preece

Tanner McKay Preece is an office assistant for the BYU Publications and Graphics Department. He loves reading, being outdoors, and spending time with his family. After his graduation in 2017, Tanner hopes to attend law school and enter the field of international law.