Handwritten in three journals over two years

The Missionary Series is, first and foremost, a love letter to the boy I once was and the man I eventually found the courage to become. 

My mission to South Africa was one of the loneliest experiences of my life. It has taken me several years to understand there was much to love about it as well, though for reasons I hadn’t fully processed at the time. Reasons that began, as this series does, on a campus in Provo, Utah.

My novels are a work of literary fiction rooted in lived experience. I have compressed time, rearranged events, created characters and relationships, invented scenes and conversations, and altered circumstances in service of the story. Some moments do bear close resemblance to things I experienced. Others do not.

Therefore, this is not an attempt to provide a definitive record of my mission, nor do I expect the reader to separate fact from fiction along the way. I am much more interested in something those old journals preserved with bold clarity: a young man’s faith, fear, loneliness, humor, desire, and extraordinary capacity to contradict himself without realizing he was doing it.

Book One (Genesis) is focused is on the training: how missionaries prepare to serve and what kind of sacrifice that preparation requires. The training itself should not be viewed as a prologue to the mission. For a boy liked me who was in deep denial about his sexuality, Provo was where decisive things happened.

Books Two (Exodus) and Three (Revelation) chronicle my two years in South Africa. It’s an even messier, more uncomfortable, often humorous, and hopeful story. It’s also a story of survival.

Readers should know I have written this story from outside of the Church, but with the intention of showing what the process of deconstruction and one’s own coming out process looks and feels like within a strict religious framework.

My affection for the people, places, music, and moments of my mission years should not be mistaken for a defense of a missionary system that taught me to treat my sexuality and ordinary need for intimacy as defects. That pressure was psychologically harmful, and its effects outlasted the badge.

This series is dedicated to my husband and to all missionaries who have ever been made to feel their sexuality was something to overcome.