(no subject)

[raincitygirl]

On the bus home from work yesterday I was hit on (for Jesus) by a very young, very handsome, very blond Mormon missionary from Salt Lake City who wanted to convert me in his gap year as a missionary before university. It was actually a relief when he cut to the chase and brought up my personal relationship with Jesus Christ, because I'd been sitting there thinking incredulously, "Is this INFANT a good 20 years my junior seriously hitting on me? Seriously?"

I have nothing against Mormons, but who sends teenaged missionaries to Vancouver??? Send them to Venezuela, where people desperately need food and medicine and will likely put up with being preached at in return. Also, your average Canadian is likely to stare in bug-eyed disbelief at any stranger who asks them about their relationship with Jesus, at least around here. I know plenty of religious people, but they don't try to convert people on the bus. The infant might have done better going to Calgary on his mission. Alberta is kind of the Texas of Canada, after all. I know, I know, Texas and Utah are entirely different states. But we don't have a province that's known as the Utah of Canada.

So how are you guys doing? Met any handsome teenaged missionaries lately?

Comments

[twistedchick]

I see them whenever the Mormon Temple two miles away graduates another class of hopeful proselytisers. You would think that after decades of sending people into the heavily conservative Jewish and Hispanic area where I live, they might have gotten the idea that nobody's going to convert, but no.

[raincitygirl]

LOL! Yeah, you'd think. But I guess they must be eternal optimists.

[twistedchick]

And only about 20 years old... if that.

[sanguinity]

My understanding is that the point of sending young men on mission isn't so much to bring in new converts as to drop young Mormons who might be feeling their oats into The Teambuilding Exercise From Hell That Lasts An Entire Year.

[twistedchick]

*nods* If they want to waste young people's time and energy by making them go door to door instead of going to build affordable housing on Pine Ridge reservation or helping people deal with whatever latest natural disaster is going on, I can't stop them -- but I think it's a waste.

[antisoppist]

I was friendly with the Mormon missionaries in Rovaniemi, because both they and I were adopted by an American woman at our first Finnish for foreigners evening class and dragged back to her flat to be fed apple pie. We bonded over being the only English speakers on the Finnish Arctic Circle in the dark, and, as I was a Church of England atheist and she was a Ba'hai, agreed never to discuss religion. We played board games mostly. And then they got a new mission leader person and they banned them from associating with us because we were not being converted. But I've always viewed Mormon missionaries as doing basically their equivalent of national service ever since.

Nice little boys. They had much more Finnish vocabulary than I did at the time but it was all a bit specialised... And they were terrified Scandinavian women were going to drag them into their houses and seduce them, which must have made it all a bit fraught.