Please Be Nice to My Baby Sister

I just spent an hour going through a Facebook friend's posts.

I won't explain just how far back I went, but suffice it to say that there was some stuff about Mitt Romney in there.

What was my intention? My intention was to find a status that this person posted years ago, when Older Sister was on her mission. To the best of my memory, the status said something along the lines of how Mormon missionaries don't deserve any kind of respect unless they've earned it. I suppose that's a fair statement, though I didn't love it. What upset me was that, if I recall correctly, in the comments of this status this person and some friends were trading stories of ways they liked to troll the missionaries.

I got really close to leaving my own comment: "Hey, my sister is serving a mission right now. If she were serving here, would you do those things to her?" Something like that. Something just to remind them that, hey, missionaries are people too, and just because you don't agree with them doesn't mean they deserve to be harassed. Yeah, I get it that no one likes to be approached by people they disagree with, but when I went to Nameless Utah College, I was approached by so many political and religious activists that I didn't agree with. I still managed to engage with them civilly, even when brushing them off. I didn't go out of my way to harass them, because why would I do that? (Okay, well, that's mostly true. There was one time when a girl brought voting registrations to the school. She explained to me that the political party that most people in my college supported needed help in the elections. She asked me to register and offer my support. Since I wasn't registered to vote, I took that opportunity to register...for a party that believed the exact opposite of the party she was promoting. And then she had to mail my registration in. So I guess that was a little harassing. But it was still civil.)

The reason I'm thinking about this long-ago status now is that Baby Sister is due to ship out on her mission any day now. Consider it: she has something she believes in so much that she's willing to give up her family, her job, her schooling, her friends, her right to sleep in, her free time, the many Netflix and YouTube shows that she follows, fry sauce, the premiere of How to Train Your Dragon 3 next summer, the ability to celebrate the epilogue day of Harry Potter (September 1st 2017—so close!), and her beloved makeup palette with approximately 7,000 kinds of eyeshadow. Whether you believe that sharing the gospel helps people, she believes that sharing the gospel helps people. And in the end, it's those people that she must be going on a mission for, because the enormous amount of sacrifice required of her suggests that she's sure not doing it for herself.

I guess the title of this post is misleading, because if you see my cutie baby sister when she's out in the mission field, you sure don't have to be nice to her. But I hope that you will not be actively rude to her...and not just because if you are, super irrational Big Sister! Awkward Mormon Girl will track you down and give you several paper cuts.