Peering dimly through the glass in Switzerland

An autobiographical reminiscence:

Living, as they do, in a very stable, highly educated, extremely prosperous, and largely crime-free country that hasn’t been involved in a war for roughly two centuries and whose landscape ranges from beautiful to spectacularly beautiful, it’s not surprising that the Swiss are comfortable.  (Some would say that they tend to be a bit complacent.)  They’re not necessarily seeking to make big changes.

Nor are they religiously anguished nor energetically searching for new spiritual paths.

So serving as a missionary in German-speaking Switzerland, while it had its substantial personal rewards and while I am passionately in love with the country, posed some challenges.  On the whole, people just weren’t interested.  We rarely got in doors, rarely taught lessons, and only very rarely got beyond the first or second lessons.

I would have to catch myself from time to time, realizing that I hadn’t seriously thought in weeks of seeing a convert baptism.  My job was simply to get up every morning, get out on the doors by 9 AM, ring doorbells all day, have the doors shut in my face, and repeat the same general plan the next day, as well.  Rinse and repeat.

About midway through my mission, we were given a new edition of the general Church missionary handbook.  One line in it provoked laughter and jokes among the missionaries.  As I recall, it read almost exactly as follows, stating a goal for us:  “Find a golden family each week; baptize a golden family each month.”

That might have fit Mexico or Brazil at the time, but, in Switzerland, finding a single “golden” individual over the course of two years would have been a satisfying and not necessarily likely achievement.

One day, while I was serving in the mission home in Zürich, my mission president called me to his office.  He had just received some sort of letter or newsletter from his home neighborhood in Salt Lake City.  “Brother Peterson,” he said to me rather wistfully, “do you realize that the Ensign Stake mission out-baptized us last year?”  (That, of course, would have been a local, part-time missionary effort in the very headquarters city of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint, as opposed to our admittedly relatively small force of full-time missionaries in Germanic Switzerland.)

That’s why, one day, I was so deeply surprised to see a woman answer our ringing of her doorbell . . . and have a powerful internal voice tell me, not precisely in words but still very clearly, “She’s going to be baptized.”

And, in fact, she let us in the door.  We introduced ourselves, set up an appointment, returned, and taught her a lesson.  Perhaps — I can’t quite recall — we even returned later to teach her a second lesson.

And then she told us that she wasn’t interested.

I was puzzled by that, since the impression had been so distinct and so unexpected.

Come summer, my companion and I were transferred from the area, which was (and is) a major tourist destination.  That was that.

In the fall, a new missionary pair were assigned to the area.  Looking through our record books, they saw the woman’s name and address and decided to look her up.

She consented to be taught further lessons, and was eventually baptized.  Roughly a year after my first contact with her.

I’ve thought about this experience many times since.  It seems pretty clear to me that we can receive genuine inspiration and still not know or understand the details, that we can even have true intuitions about the future and yet incorrectly visualize how those intuitions will be fulfilled.  (The latter has happened to me on several occasions.)  As the apostle Paul expressed it in 1 Corinthians 13, in this life “we see through a glass, darkly.”