Oh, Hondo...


OK, something weird is building up, I can feel it…

About a week ago, my MTC mission companion hit my website and signed up for a Pass-it-On CD. It was a lot of fun to correspond with him. I’ve not talked to him since ’84! He lives in Washington State, now. We corresponded a bit over companions and others in our MTC group.

Then, my colleague here at work tells me about this site called mission.net, and I go check It out. I find my mission’s home page, Honduras Tegucigalpa, and start flipping through the alumni database. Right off, I find one of my old companions, Elder Cooper. One of my seniors while I was in Belize. Then, I found Elder Bonilla, one of my old District Leaders.

Suddenly I was walking the streets of 3 de Mayo and Comayaguela again. Slogging through the mud in Torocagua. Sweating in the muggy air of Orange Walk Town. Someone had posted some pictures. This one struck me with a reminiscent smile. I remember there were a lot of power and phone lines strung overhead in Hondo, and there were these mosses and plants that would catch in the wires and grow. They’d make the whole line look like it’d been attacked by dust bunnies. Sometimes, they’d get pretty big. The ones in this picture are actually kinda small!

Anyway, I don’t know why all of a sudden I’m thinking about my mission, and why it keeps cropping up.

It’s interesting to look back on it in retrospect. I can’t honestly say that my mission was the best two years of my life. A large part of that is because, frankly, there’ve been a lot of good years in the two decades or so since then. My wife, my kids, my music have all given me some wonderful experiences.

My mission was, at the time, the hardest two years of my life. Especially if you include the year or so that followed of re-assimilation into the wild. Everything I am to day is built on the spiritual foundation that got poured when I was in Honduras and Belize.

But I like to think that I have built on it and grown on above and beyond it. I’ve built a house on that solid foundation. Sometimes, that house has shaken in the wind and the storm, and I haven’t always built it as strong as it could be, but its foundation, my testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Prophets of the old and latter days, is strong. So, even if parts of my house shake and creak, the entire structure will not fall.

MRKH
Mark Hansen
http://markhansenmusic.com