Homecoming Talk

I’ll try to pick some good stories. I know that’s what you came to hear.

All right, for those of you who maybe don’t know me—I don’t think anyone out there doesn’t know me—but if you don’t, I am Teancum Hadden. I just returned from my mission in the Canada Montreal mission, which is in eastern Canada, if you know where Montreal is.  It’s in the province of Quebec, which is the French part of Canada where the all speak really, really weird French.  It’s kind of like The South of Canada.  They all kinda speak funny and they all don’t really want to be a part of the rest of Canada.  It’s an interesting place.  It’s a very, very interesting place.

So I served most of my mission in the province of Quebec with all the French people.  Our mission also covered a tiny little bit of Ontario, where Ottawa is.  Ottawa is the capital city of Canada. It’s very small.  It’s about the size of Salt Lake, pretty much.  Not a whole lot of people, but a lot of politics.  So I did serve a little while in Ottawa as well.  That was pretty much my mission.

I served in three languages on my mission:  Chinese, English, and then French, so it was very varied.  Very varied.  I had to learn a lot, spoke a lot of different languages, talked to a lot of people from all around the world.  Canada is a very, very cosmopolitan country. Montreal is a very, very cosmopolitan city.  If you name a country, I probably talked to someone from that country, likely in the language that they speak natively. It was a grand old time.

They asked me to talk about faith, so I kinda wanted to tell the story of my mission a little bit and how I kind of developed faith on my mission.  It was a lot of faith going to work there.  My companion speakers have talked about faith pretty well so I don’t feel like I need to define it or anything. Hopefully you were paying attention.  If not, you’re a little behind.

Before my mission, I was like, “Yeah, I got faith. This is good. I’m ready to go on my mission.  I’m great. I worked at Scout camp. I was teaching merit badge classes and talking to people.  It was basically a mission.  That’s all you do, right? I’m good. I’m good. I’m prepared.” And then I got to the MTC and . . . Missions are pretty crazy because they take your self-confidence and they just kind of say, “Buh-bye.  It’s gone now. You don’t have it any more. You have to build it again.” You find your own self-confidence with the lack of self-confidence that you have right now.  So it was kind of hard.  I went in and I was like, “I’m exercising so much faith right now!”  I was getting out of the car with my bags and everything; I’m in the MTC with a name tag on.  Great!  Fantastic. But that faith really got me about that far, and then I kind of realized that I had to do a whole lot more, and that Chinese is a real language and people really speak it, and it’s actually really difficult to learn. And those little squiggly little boxes that you see?  Those are real things and people really read them.

It was a little bit of a splash of cold water there.

Everything that I did for the first long part of my mission I was just like, “I am not good enough. I am nothing.  There is NO WAY that I can perform to the level that I should be performing at.  There’s no way that I can perform to the level that I did before my mission.  My self-confidence is in the toilet, in those bathrooms at the MTC.  It’s gone.” So I was really hard on myself. I was doing OK with the language, but I got to the mission field and I couldn’t really do anything right.  I didn’t know how to teach--especially not in Chinese—I wasn’t very prepared.  It was pretty difficult.  It was very difficult.  Missions have their own struggles and trials for everyone.  I think that’s how they’re designed to be, to kind of destroy you.

One time I was in my second area, I was in Ottawa serving in the YSA ward.  We lived right next to the University of Ottawa in downtown Ottawa, which is a pretty big university. It has lots of Chinese people.  We were doing some Chinese work, some not Chinese work, French/English/Chinese all at the same time, so it was a little bit crazy. We met this guy, his name was Min.  He was Vietnamese Canadian from Toronto, and he was in Ottawa for an internship or something.  We met him at a park. We just walked up to him. I thought he was Chinese, that’s why I talked to him.  He was not Chinese.  

I said, “Hey, do you speak Chinese?”

He said, “I’m Vietnamese.” 

I said, “Oh.  That’s awkward. OK . . . . Do you believe in God?”

He said, “You know, it’s funny that you asked that.  I started believing in God about . . . [looks at watch] two days ago.” 

I said, “Well, great! We share a message about God with people.  That’s our job.  We teach people more.” 

He said, “Yeah, sure I’ll meet with you.  Here’s my number.  I’ll text you when I have some time.”  When people say they’ll text you when they have some time, that means they’ll never text you.  I thought, ‘OK, great.  That was fun. Time to go to sleep.’ 

So a week later he actually did text us. 

He said, “Hey, do you guys want to meet up at such-and-such a time at the University of Ottawa?”

I said, “Wow!  Sure! Great! That sounds fantastic! We’ve got nothing going on. Let’s do it.” But I forgot to write it down in my planner. So we get to the day of, and I’m hanging out with my companion from Tahiti--his name is Elder Tarati-- and we’re studying in the morning.  Then all of a sudden we get this text from Min saying, “Are you guys still coming? I thought you were supposed to be here 45 minutes ago.”

I said, “Oh!  Dang it!  We were. Right.”  So we got ready to go and we ran out the door, and the whole time as we were walking over to the University I was like, “Oh, man! I’m a horrible, horrible person because I totally forgot to put this in the planner, and now this guy who was probably a golden investigator is gonna have such a horrible image . . .and yada, yada, yada.”  I was really, really hard on myself.  But it all worked out in the end because he was still there. We met with him and he was very excited to meet with us.  We met with him for a while, the sisters met with him for a while, and then he moved back to Toronto, and after a while he got baptized.  So it was great. It all worked out in the end. 

So I walked away from that experience realizing I needed to take it down a notch.  Things work out even though. Someone else is in control here. I don’t have to be perfect.   And around this time I really started to feel like I was developing faith in Jesus Christ specifically. At that time I started really, really enjoying sacrament every week, because I knew that sacrament is the place where you go to repent, and you renew the covenants you make at baptism, and one of those covenants is that Heavenly Father forgives all the bad things that you’ve done, so long as you’re trying to keep going, and to look forward, and to be better than before. You’ll be forgiven. It’s OK.  It’s all good. I really enjoyed that because it kinda cast out a lot of fear from my life. Even if I mess stuff up, it’s OK.  Jesus has got my back. It’s OK.

There’s a quote in Preach My Gospel where it talks about faith in Jesus Christ.  It says, “Faith casts out all fear.”  I think that really having faith in Jesus Christ really does cast out all fear, because if you have faith in Jesus Christ, you know that know is nothing is unsalvageable.  Nothing will go so wrong that the atonement of Jesus Christ cannot fix your problems.  So long as we keep moving forward, keep trying our best, it doesn’t matter how well or poorly we perform.  It’s not really a question of that.  It’s a question of the direction we are moving.  So I started to think about my mission a lot more in terms of that. It started to go a lot better.  It was the beginning of a long process of self-discovery, I guess you could say.

So as I continued on, I also stopped looking at my mission as “I’ve sacrificed two years to the Lord” and I started thinking of it as I sacrificed one day at a time, and I give that to the Lord. I sacrifice myself every day.  It’s not something that I’ve already committed to for two years, it’s something I do every day.  I think whether you’re on a mission or not, that’s something that we all do--and need to do--every day.  When we get up in the morning and say, ‘This is the time that I am giving to serve my Heavenly Father’, whatever way that might be for you in your own lives and your own situation.  For me on a mission it was doing missionary work, and now it’s a totally different thing.

As I started to think about that and started to have faith on a daily basis, the kind of faith to sacrifice my life one day at a time, it really changed my mission around a lot.  I remember one moment when it really clicked.  I was in my second-to-last area. I had just moved there from serving in English in Montreal, and I went to this tiny little town called Granby, which is about an hour east of Montreal.  It’s famous for having a zoo, and that’s about it.  It’s very French. Deep Quebec.  Everyone speaks weird and eats poutine and all that kind of stuff. I went there and I’m not entirely sure what happened, but everything kind of clicked in my mind.  All of a sudden, missionary work wasn’t this thing that I had to do, faith wasn’t this thing that I really had to work for, it was just kind of there.  It was who I was.  I woke up in the morning and this is what I did. I started to really, really enjoy it.  I met people that really changed my mission around and made me really enjoy what I was doing.   I had really great companions.  I was companions with Elder Tarati again, the Tahitian guy who I was with when I taught Min for the first time. It was a wonderfully peaceful place.  I think I felt the Spirit more there than in any of my other areas.  It was so calm and relaxing. I think it’s really where my faith became in Christ.  I’d say that I kind of found Christianity in that area and realized what it was all about. It only took me a year and a half, but I did it in the end.  That’s what counts. It was a wonderful experience.

I know that we exercise faith in our lives.  There’s a lot of big decisions that we have to make sometimes.  There’s a lot of sacrifices that we have to make to the Lord.  I know that as we do those, even if they’re really, really hard and they stay really hard for a long time, at some time, everything will kind of click in our lives.  All the sacrifices that we make, all the callings that we have, all the things we do, whatever it may be, it will all kind of click, and there will be a moment when we realize that it’s actually for our good.  This is the Lord sculpting us into the people that we need to be.  So long as we have faith to take those opportunities, to make those sacrifices, when they are given to us, and we have the faith to stick with them as we go along to keep faith in Jesus Christ that everything will work out in the end, everything really will work out in the end. And we’ll become the people that Heavenly Father really wants us to become on this earth.  That’s the most beautiful lesson that we can have.

I’ll bear my testimony that I know that Jesus Christ lives. He is born for us, and because of that we can do anything. We can overcome any challenge in our life. We can return to live with God one day. 

I’ll bear my testimony in Chinese and French.

[bears testimony in Chinese]

[bears testimony in French]



poutine:  A Canadian dish of french fries and cheese curds topped with gravy, and sometimes other things.