average life

I was sitting in the Elder’s Quorum of church barely paying attention. Unfortunately, like many guys my age I found Elder’s Quorum to be the slowest part of church. The instructor was doing his best to adapt the family-oriented lesson to his exclusively single class, but few people were buying it. I wondered how long it would be before I fell asleep.

Then the instructor posed a question, “how many of you were robbed at gunpoint on your mission?” A couple of people raised their hand and after a moment, I raised mine. The instructor asked me, “so how did you feel when you had a gun pointed at you?”

“Well, kind of annoyed. We had somewhere we needed to be,” I replied.

A few people chuckled. The instructor smiled an moved on to the next person. Turns out he hadn’t been robbed, but some other missionaries he knew were. The same with the next person, except the missionaries he knew weren’t even robbed at gun point, but merely threatened. The instructor went on to explain about how being placed in life-threatening situations did…something. I stopped listening.

My companion and I were walking back from an appointment. It was drawing near 9:30pm which is the time we were supposed to be back home at night. During my mission, punctuality had become almost an obsession and we had become fairly skilled at walking through the front door almost at 9:30 on the dot. We were walking down a dark, cobble-stoned street and the wind from the beach was channeling up the cross streets causing mini hurricanes at the end of every block.

We had just made it through Hurricane 7th Street when I hear the sound of a bike chain and tires thumping on the cobblestone behind us. I immediately was placed on alert. Only two weeks earlier, my companion and I had been robbed by two kids with a small pistol in the middle of the afternoon in one of the poorer neighborhoods. They also had approached us on bikes.

The bike increased its speed and cut in front of us. The rider said “Give me your money!” in a forceful whisper and held his hand at his belt indicating he had a gun.

I looked at his hand and was overcome with a wave of annoyance. We need to get home, it’s almost 9:30! I thought.

I answered him shortly. “We don’t have any money.” My companion’s already red face was a little paler than normal. He had only been in the field for a couple months and his Portuguese wasn’t all that great, but he knew what was going on.

“I said give me all your money!” the robber repeated.

I turned out my empty pockets. “We don’t have any!”, I replied the annoyance growing in my voice. Since the last robbery, I had started carrying any valuables in my breast pocket. Even then, I only had about R$5 on me. My companion didn’t turn out his pockets completely; he had more money than I did.

The robber looked at our backpacks. “What do you have in the bag?”

“Books.” I replied. “Bibles.”

The robber paused for a moment.

“Who are you people?” the robber asked, the sincerity showing in his voice.

“We’re missionaries.” I replied, my face hard. Robbers in Brazil often considered the Mormon missionaries to be akin to nuns – and you didn’t rob nuns.

The robber could feel his threat evaporating and he responded with anger. He turned to my companion, “what are you looking at? Do you want me to put a bullet in your forehead?!”

My companion hesitated for a moment. He hadn’t understood and gave the standard answer for someone who had no idea what was going on: “sure?”

I was barely paying attention to my companion, my eyes fixed on the robber. He repeated his question, more intense this time. “Do you want me to put a bullet in your forehead!?!”

My companion still had no idea what was going on, but became more intense in his response, “YES!”

The robber stared at him for a moment in disbelief and then turned back to me. “What are those, car keys?” he said pointing to the keys in my hand. I resisted to strong urge to point out the fact that we were walking home.

“No. House keys.” I said simply.

The robber sighed, fully mounted his bike, and muttered, “Alright, go with God.”

We waited until the robber was out of sight before we continued. It wasn’t long before we were laughing loudly. “I can’t believe we were robbed again!” Because I had most of my attention focused on the robber, I hadn’t really listened closely to his exchange with my companion, but in our laughter-filled review, it came back to me. I stopped. “Elder, do you understand what he said to you?”

He laughed, “Elder, I had no idea what he was saying.”

I explained, “You asked him to shoot you in the head!”

My companion almost doubled over in laughter. “Are you kidding?!” Our laughter echoed off the walls that kept the wealthy beach-house owners safe from the poor people and was carried away by the side street winds. When we walked through the front door, I looked at the wall clock: 9:45pm.