20 Questions to Ask a Returned Missionary, and How to Ask Them
Ask how the mission was and you get the version he has already told nine times. These twenty reach the part he is still carrying around loose.
He has been home a few weeks and he has already told the same four stories at every dinner. The bike one, the funny companion, the miracle, the goodbye. Those are the ones he has found words for so far. They are true and they are worth keeping, and they are perhaps two percent of what actually happened to him.
The rest is still loose. Not hidden, not painful necessarily, just not yet shaped into anything sayable. Most of it will never get shaped unless somebody asks a question specific enough to give it a handle.
Questions about the ordinary days
Missions are remembered as a highlight reel and lived as a routine. The routine is what he will want back in twenty years, and it is the part nobody ever asks about.
1. What did a completely normal Tuesday look like?
Why it works. It bypasses the highlight reel entirely. He cannot summarize two years, but he can walk you through one ordinary day, and the ordinary day contains everything the highlights leave out.
How to ask it. Ask him to start at waking up and go through in order. Do not let him skip to the interesting part.
What it opens up. The apartment, the study, the walking, the food, the heat or the cold, and what the hours actually felt like.
2. What did the apartment look like?
Why it works. It is the room he lived in for months at a time and he has almost certainly never described it to anyone.
How to ask it. Ask what was broken, what the beds were like, and what the view from the window was.
What it opens up. Companions, the neighbourhood, and the small daily indignities that are funny now.
3. What did you eat, and what would you refuse to eat again?
Why it works. It is easy, it is funny, and it is intensely specific to a place. Food memory is durable and unrehearsed.
How to ask it. Ask who fed him. That turns a food question into a people question.
What it opens up. The members who took care of him, and often the family he still thinks about.
4. What did the place smell like?
Why it works. Smell is stored differently from narrative, so it arrives without the polish and it puts him back in the street rather than in the retelling.
How to ask it. Ask about a specific location. The chapel, the market, the bus, the apartment stairwell.
What it opens up. A sensory version of a country he has so far only described in events.
5. What was the hardest part of the day, every day?
Why it works. The word every removes the drama. It is not asking about the hardest moment of the mission, it is asking about a recurring small difficulty, which is far easier to answer honestly.
How to ask it. Do not respond with sympathy. Just ask what he did about it.
What it opens up. Homesickness, weather, language, a companion, or the specific hour that was always hard.
Questions about the people
6. Who is somebody you think about who is not in any of your stories?
Why it works. It states plainly that you know the four dinner stories are not the whole thing, and it invites the rest without demanding it.
How to ask it. Ask for the name and then just wait. This one takes a while and the silence is doing the work.
What it opens up. Almost always the person who mattered most, and frequently someone who did not join the church, which is why they never made it into a story.
7. What did you learn from your worst companion?
Why it works. It reframes a hard relationship as something he got something out of, which makes it possible to talk about without complaint or disloyalty.
How to ask it. Never ask who the worst one was. Ask what he learned. He will give you the person on his own terms.
What it opens up. How he handles conflict, what he discovered about his own patience, and often a genuine reconciliation.
8. Who taught you something you still use?
Why it works. It reaches past the mission into now, which makes the answer feel current rather than archival.
How to ask it. Ask what exactly they said or did. The specific instruction is the artifact worth keeping.
What it opens up. A companion, a member, a mission president, or somebody local who never knew the effect they had.
9. Whose home did you feel most welcome in?
Why it works. Welcome is a strong and easy memory, and it names the people who carried him when nobody at home could.
How to ask it. Ask what the house was like inside, and what they always gave him.
What it opens up. A family, sometimes with names and a town, and often a connection he still has.
10. Who did you say goodbye to that was hard?
Why it works. Endings are more tellable than beginnings, and the goodbyes are where a mission's actual relationships show up.
How to ask it. Ask what he said, and what they said. Exact words if he has them.
What it opens up. The people he loved, and what he still wonders about them.
Questions about the change
These are the ones worth having in writing, because he will answer them differently at fifty than he does now, and having both is the point.
11. What did you believe when you left that you do not believe now?
Why it works. It gives him permission to describe real development without it sounding like doubt. Every honest mission changes somebody's mind about something.
How to ask it. Stay in the past tense. Ask about what he believed then, not what he believes today.
What it opens up. How his understanding actually matured, which is the substance of the two years.
12. When did you want to come home?
Why it works. Almost everybody did at some point and almost nobody says so, because the culture around homecomings does not make room for it. Asking it plainly gives him the room.
How to ask it. Ask when, not whether. The presupposition is what makes it safe to answer.
What it opens up. The lowest stretch and, more valuably, what got him through it.
13. What is something you got wrong out there?
Why it works. It offers dignity instead of requiring confession, and it treats him as somebody who has reflected rather than somebody being examined.
How to ask it. Do not reassure him afterwards. Reassurance closes the topic.
What it opens up. A person he misjudged, a time he pushed too hard, or something he wishes he had said differently.
14. What did you find out you were capable of?
Why it works. It is the question he most wants asked and the one nobody thinks to ask, because it is about capacity rather than spirituality.
How to ask it. Ask for a specific instance rather than a general quality.
What it opens up. The day he did something he would not have believed he could do, which is usually the real story of the mission.
15. What was the language like in the first month, honestly?
Why it works. The word honestly gives him permission to skip the triumphant version, and the first month is uniformly humbling in a way that is funny in retrospect.
How to ask it. Ask for a specific thing he said wrong. There is always one.
What it opens up. How hard it actually was, who was patient with him, and the moment it turned.
Questions about the place
16. Describe the walk you did most often.
Why it works. He walked one route hundreds of times and it is burned in. It also carries the town, the weather and the season with it.
How to ask it. Ask him to narrate it as if you were beside him. What is on the left, what is on the right.
What it opens up. The geography of his mission in a way a map never gives you.
17. What would you show me first if we went there tomorrow?
Why it works. It converts memory into a plan, which is a much more energetic mode than reminiscence.
How to ask it. Ask why that one first. The reason is the story.
What it opens up. The place that meant the most, and usually the person attached to it.
18. What is something about that country that people here get wrong?
Why it works. It positions him as the expert, which he is, and it is the fastest route to a genuinely enthusiastic answer.
How to ask it. Let him correct you. Offer a lazy assumption on purpose.
What it opens up. What he actually came to love, past the postcard version.
19. What did you carry in your bag every single day?
Why it works. Objects are the easiest possible thing to describe and each one has a story attached to it.
How to ask it. Ask what he still has. Then ask where it is right now.
What it opens up. The physical texture of the two years, and often an object worth photographing for the book.
20. What do you want your kids to know about these two years?
Why it works. It is the right last question because it stops being your interview and becomes his statement, aimed at people who do not exist yet.
How to ask it. Ask it at the end of a good conversation and record it if he will let you.
What it opens up. The thing he most wants kept, which belongs at the front of whatever you make.
Why to write these down now rather than later
A mission journal typically has forty or so entries and enormous gaps, and the gaps are not random. They are the hard weeks, when writing was the last thing he was going to do. So the written record is systematically missing the part that changed him most.
Right now, a few weeks or a few years home, he still has the detail. Names, streets, what people said. That fades faster than anybody expects, and it fades quietly, so there is never a moment where it becomes obvious that it is time.