Under the Long White Cloud

By Miles Kent Farnsworth

Embark on an unforgettable journey through the eyes of a young missionary serving in New Zealand. In this candid memoir, you'll encounter the challenges, joys, and complexities of serving as a volunteer missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

 

Filled with humor, heart, and humanity, this book invites you to experience the rich culture and breathtaking scenery of New Zealand while gaining a unique insight into the highs and lows of missionary life. But this memoir is more than a simple travelogue - it's a deeply personal account of growth, faith, and self-discovery.

 

Whether you're a Latter-day Saint, a fan of travel memoirs, a curious New Zealander, or simply looking for a compelling story, come along for the ride and discover the true meaning of sacrifice, service, and the power of faith in this captivating memoir.

• Language: English
• Publisher: From the Desk
• Release date: May 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215598528

Miles Kent Farnsworth

Miles Kent Farnsworth was born in Provo, Utah and currently lives in Maryland with his wife and son. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University's Interdisciplinary Humanities program and works in the B2B media industry. You can find more of his writing at mileskfarnsworth.com. 

Book preview

Every name in this book has been changed. There are no composite characters, and every event is told as truthfully as my recollection would allow.

And the man said unto me, Son of man, behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears, and set thine heart upon all that I shall shew thee; for to the intent that I might shew them unto thee art thou brought hither: declare all that thou seest to the house of Israel.

– Ezekiel 40:4

Preface

WHEN COVID-19 STRUCK in March 2020, trapped inside like the rest of the world, I decided to use whatever duration the pandemic might last to write about my two-year missionary service for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Mormon Church, as we’re commonly known, has sent missionaries throughout the world since our inception in the 1800s. That tradition continues today, and every year, tens of thousands of young men and women, as well as retired individuals and couples, leave their homes and families for one-to-three years to serve as uncompensated, volunteer missionaries across the world. Missionaries undertake many roles in the local communities wherever they’re stationed. Mostly, they’re called to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ and invite others to join the faith. From 2013 to 2015, I was assigned as a missionary in Wellington, New Zealand, and the small towns on the country’s North and South Islands.

Anyone who already belongs to my Church will be puzzled by this decision to write a book about missionary work. Missionary stories are a dime a dozen. In some ways, hearing about a mission is like hearing about a coworker’s summer vacation. You’re so glad they had a great time, but after a few minutes, your eyes glaze over and you start thinking about what you’re going to have for lunch. It’s not that missions are boring or all the same. Rather, missions suffer from bad storytelling. The genre is so weather-worn that it seems that all possible mission stories that could ever be told have already been shared. The perfect mission memory isn’t too long, maybe two-to-three minutes tops, just succinct enough to share around the dinner table or slide into a sermon at Church. Returned missionaries, versed in the art of the mission story from their youth, adhere to the same tidy principles of stories past. In some ways, this is socially validating. Having heard siblings, parents, aunts, and uncles all share moments from their missions, the opportunity to follow suit, to join in the folkloric ritual, feels like a rite of passage. The way we talk about missions as a Church means that the personal significance is often lost in simple, familiar anecdotes. Instead of discovering a way to honor the integrity of the mission, we’ve reduced the entire experience to quick platitudinous summations. A mission is the best two years, brought me the greatest joy, and was so impactful on the rest of my life.

Part of the reason I’ve written this account is to overcome the fallibilities of the mission genre, to look at a mission in its entire arc, not just its best moments, and explore in personal detail what a mission experience was really like. Now, more than ever, our Church needs authentic, honest stories of faith. So much Latter-day Saint writing falls into two camps. Either it is too simplistic, glossing over nuance, painting a rosy yet unrealistic picture of religious life, or it is not faith-filled enough, written with too much distance from the real heart of belief. Meanwhile, those who have left the Church are incredibly effective at leveraging real, first-person vulnerability that makes their journey a more compelling portrait than that of someone who stays in the Church. Why couldn’t I be equally open and tell a true, honest story about a significant Latter-day Saint milestone that neither airbrushed the bad nor felt impersonal?

This urge to share a personal account explains one of the main stylistic choices of this memoir. I rarely talk about Latter-day Saint doctrine. I hardly even mention the spiritual experiences I had in New Zealand, except in one chapter near the end. Instead, this memoir reads more like a travelogue, following me from town to town as I encounter New Zealand, meet new and quirky people, and attempt and often struggle to fulfill my purpose as a missionary. This narrative choice also stems from the fact that not everyone I know belongs to my Church. Many of my coworkers and friends have questions about my time in New Zealand but feel uneasy asking about it. Perhaps they’re afraid if they do, I may transform into a missionary before their eyes and attempt to convert them to my faith. I want everyone to be able to vicariously experience a mission without being preached to.

There were also personal reasons for writing about my time in New Zealand. I believe strongly in the importance of genealogy and have personally had my life enriched through the stories of my ancestors. I hope that this book is a worthy entry into the records of my family history and something that my children and grandchildren will one day enjoy. Most personally of all, I don’t want to forget the places I went, the people I met, and the memories I made in New Zealand. Already, even just a decade since I first left, some details are hazier, shrouded by the passing of days and years. In other words, this is my love letter to New Zealand and the people who showed me more generosity, beauty, and affection than I deserved.

What this book amounts to is an amalgam of these desires: to make missionary work accessible, honest, and humorous, to entertain as well as explain, to be honest about the difficulties of serving a mission, and to create something that captured the fullest quantity of my memories before I lose any more. I hope every reader finds something different in its pages. More than anything, I hope that prospective missionaries, young men or young women on the cusp of adulthood, will read this book and learn what it’s like to leave their family for a few years and endure the highest highs and lowest lows they’ll have faced in their lives.

Writing and editing this book has been a tremendous joy. In the first six months of the pandemic when life truly ground to a halt, I’d wake up each morning and study my journals and letters, and then, midday, go for a run around the tree-lined lakes near my home in Maryland and sift through the events and faces of New Zealand. At night, I sat and wrote my thoughts, trying to make sense of who I was at eighteen years old and the narrative currents that carried me through the two years, some I was aware of, some I only came to recognize in retrospect. In the act of writing, this book has accomplished my goal of solidifying the two years in New Zealand in my memory, already. Now, I leave it before you. May you find New Zealand as wonderful as I do.

Chapter 1

I REMEMBER EXACTLY where I was standing when I heard the announcement on that warm Saturday morning in early October. Were it a Sunday, my family would have been sprawled in the basement, stuffed with rich homemade donuts, watching the semi-annual conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on TV just as we had for the last seventeen years. But it was Saturday, and we had no Saturday traditions. I had just walked into the kitchen when I heard the measured, breathy voice of Thomas S. Monson, the president of the Church, on the radio as he said, Effective immediately all worthy and able young men will have the option of being recommended for missionary service beginning at the age of eighteen, instead of age nineteen. Additionally, young women would be able to leave at nineteen instead of twenty-one.

A few years difference wasn’t much, but it was a big deal for Latter-day Saints. The change electrified the state of Utah, sparking open speculation as to the cause of the announcement. Some prone to dramatic utterances said this was the chosen generation. Others said it was a sign of the end of times. Cynics considered it a feeble attempt to pin down the potentially wayward young Church members who inevitably fell away from the faith in college. None of these interpretations mattered to me. I was seventeen, two months into my senior year of high school, and just given the chance to expedite my plans a year. Instead of college, my next step would be the mission field.

The same was true for my peers. Since almost ninety percent of American Fork High School were members of the Church, we discussed little else than when we might leave and where we might be assigned. While we had some influence over our departure date (most of us were targeting the summer months immediately after graduation, anyway), our assigned location, where we would complete our missionary service, was outside our control. It was a matter of luck and inspiration, decided upon by Church officials in Salt Lake City. Our only choice was to accept or not. After five years of French classes, I had my eye set on Paris, and for months before I applied, I importuned God for this favor in my prayers. I was subtle at first as if I could ease God into my request, but in February and with my application officially at Church Headquarters, my prayers grew pathetically direct. I knew I shouldn’t ask, yet Paris was my greatest hope, the essence of my worship, and as I would soon discover, the crux of my disappointments.

Each assignment arrived by way of a large, white packet in the mail. Some read their letter to boisterous fanfare—cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends, and cameras gathered around a living room. Others were less ceremonious, like my best friend Scott, who tore into the envelope alone at the post office. I opened mine with only my parents and four younger siblings gathered in the living room. I told myself this was modest, but in truth, I feared a poor reaction from myself and my peers should my assignment be short of spectacular. With careful dexterity, I slid the letter that named the location out of the envelope and read line by line so as not to jump ahead to the assignment.

The letter wasted no time. You are hereby called to labor in the New Zealand Wellington Mission. New Zealand? No one said a word, though an audible half-laugh half-sigh escaped my mouth, and I continued to read the rest of the letter. I don’t think in eighteen years I had ever spoken the words New Zealand. It was so outside my conception of the world that it felt like an elaborate prank, and I wondered if a letter would arrive from Salt Lake to correct the obvious error.

At school, I had the most exotic location of my peers, though this did little to comfort me, nor did the secret confessions from my friends that New Zealand was atop their list of desired assignments. Only an imbecile would wish to teach Parisians about Jesus Christ and only a fool would be let down by New Zealand. I somehow managed both and lacked what my friends had felt when they opened their letters: the immediate reassurance and sense of fate that their missionary assignment was perfectly suited for them. I wished I shared their excitement but was at best confused.

Still, it had never occurred to me not to serve a mission, even in the uncertainty of that eleventh hour. Membership in the Church was and is in my blood. My great-great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers joined the church in the 1800s, products of the earliest Church missions to England, Norway, Denmark, Scotland, and Wales. My devotion ran deep. I attended random Latter-day Saint chapels on vacation, couldn’t say shut up or stupid at home, didn’t drink caffeine until high school, and woke up at 6:30 a.m. every morning to read scriptures with my family. As a young boy, I sang a song at church with lyrics that proclaimed, I hope they call me on a mission / when I have grown a foot or two. I expected to go on a mission as much as it was expected of me. I had prepared my whole life for this singular event, and so while I was disappointed in my assignment to New Zealand, I never had any reservations about going through with it.

I also had a great legacy of missionary work in my family to admire. My father served in Brazil; my grandfather, Lawrence Farnsworth, served in Scotland; Lawrence’s father, Golden Farnsworth served in the Western States Mission; Golden’s father, Stephen Farnsworth, served in Great Britain; and my great-great-great-grandfather, Philo Taylor Farnsworth (not the television Philo), served in the Middle and Southern States Mission after he joined the Church in 1844, the year before Joseph Smith, our founding prophet, died.

In that ancestral line, aside from my father, only Grandpa Lawrence was still alive, and before I graduated and left for New Zealand, I went to see him with my dad. He lived back on a dirt road thirty miles southeast of Boise, Idaho in a large house paid for entirely from his girlfriend’s income. Though patriarch of the family, he was hardly an elder statesman or spiritual exemplar, nor would I say Grandpa or I had a relationship aside from his yearly appearance at a family reunion or the $10 McDonald’s gift card he mailed all his grandchildren for Christmas. When I was young, I had tried to connect with Grandpa Lawrence, an effort that amounted to a few handwritten letters exchanged back and forth over the course of the year. Try as I might, Lawrence excelled at avoidance. 

Despite his hermitage, or perhaps because of it, he became legendary in the family, both as a cautionary tale and example of mental fortitude that endured in our collective folklore, recycled by aunts and uncles at every family gathering. His reputation was that of a weed: unkillable. Once, after his horse bucked him off and kicked him in the femur, Grandpa climbed the farmhouse stairs on his hands and knees to a bedroom window and shot the horse dead with a single bullet. Another memorable tale was when he barreled down a hill like The Man from Snowy River to rescue a boy scout.

No story was as famous as the genesis of the Farnsworth family. While Lawrence was a young missionary in Scotland in the early 1960s, he met Martha, my grandmother, then a sixteen-year-old recent convert to the Church who worked in the missionary headquarters after school. Their courtship remains ambiguous to this day—Grandma stays tight-lipped, and Grandpa is an unreliable narrator—and the story can only be pieced together with fragmented anecdotes. They fell in love, and when someone suggested Grandma move to America, she didn’t hesitate. Scotland offered little to a working-class girl. As the only member of the Church in her family, she had started to feel that her life was on a different path from her mother and sisters.

From there, however, the details become hazier. In one version, Grandpa and his companion sold their boat tickets home and used the cash to trek around Europe with Grandma before they returned to the United States together. In another, Grandpa made the Euro-trek alone, and Grandma caught the boat to America herself a few months later. Which is true? I’ll never know. The only evidence we have is an 8mm video of Grandma at the port in Glasgow. She’s alone on camera and unfathomably young, standing barely five feet tall. I’ve seen the video only once, but the image of her on the docks, bags at her side, head cocked slightly to the left as she waves at her family, sticks in my mind like a superhero origin story, the remarkable beginning of our genealogy. She made her way to Utah through unknown routes, lived there with a Latter-day Saint family for several years, and then reunited with Grandpa to marry at eighteen. 

Twenty-three years later, while my dad was serving his mission in the southern tip of Brazil, Lawrence divorced Grandma, drained my father’s bank account, moved in with Sandra, and has been with her ever since. Though Sandra was—and still is—lovely, we never knew what to call her. Girlfriend, cohabitating partner, common-law wife? I preferred mistress, though their relationship wasn’t that intriguing, nor did she deserve the term. 

Dad and I arrived at Grandpa’s house, an oasis in an otherwise dirt-blasted, sage-infested hillside, after the sun had set. Large windows wrapped halfway around the home, augmenting the black abyss of night, and the following morning, the golden sunrise reflected off the barren, sandy valley below and filled the house with copper light. Sandra prepared dinner and we ate at a huge, hand-carved wooden table under dim crystal lights, listening to the coyotes’ howl beyond the borders of the yard. With my upcoming missionary service in mind, the conversation turned back to Grandpa Lawrence’s misadventures in Scotland and a few new stories I had yet to hear.

The mission stories drew from a similar vein as the other tales I had heard, namely violent and gritty. Grandpa told me of his first night in Scotland. After his missionary partner made a romantic pass at him, Grandpa punched him squarely in the face and threatened to kill him if he tried it again. In another, anger unchecked, he beat his landlord to a pulp after an eviction threat. These stories made me question the efficacy of his missionary work (not that it was ever held in high esteem; most valiant missionaries don’t return home with a wife). I doubted I would have as many opportunities to punch someone. 

After dinner, we sat in the living room, and I played a few songs on the guitar as the embers died in the wood stove. I felt a grandfather’s affection. It was a foreign emotion that nearly overwhelmed me in its exhilarating high and the accompanying painful realization that I had never felt it before and was unlikely ever feel it again.

––––––––

The school year pressed on; the summer exodus loomed expectantly before us as we milked the last drops of academic motivation from our distracted minds. I scraped a decent grade on my final French test, not that it was of any use. By graduation, Scott, the post-office-letter-opener, was already gone. The Missionary Training Center, or MTC, in Provo, Utah, called him in April with an offer to fast-track his experience. The sudden influx of new missionaries meant they didn’t have room for all the elders and sisters who needed training, and since he would speak French in Montreal, he could skip three weeks of language study. In consequence, however, he left the day before graduation. 

Scott and I had been best friends since middle school when we met in the back row of Intro to Foreign Languages the first week of seventh grade. His older brother had served a mission in Montreal, so Scott chose to study French. The Spanish teacher was lousy, and German was too ugly, so I joined him. For the next six years, we were inseparable. We joined the same soccer club and eventually tried out for the high school team. Both of us started to play guitar that first year of Middle School, and we alternated between banging out power chords and straight 4/4 drum beats on the kit in Scott’s unfinished basement. By junior year we improved enough to debut the Radio Flyers, our cover band, at the year-end battle of the bands.

The stage was the most incredible thrill of our lives. I dropped my timid self-awareness and pumped my fist like a lunatic. Scott was a natural performer, though no less excitable, and tested the audience with a crowd surf in the middle of our set. Our parents filmed us, and to our horror, we sounded awful. Every song rushed by about thirty bpm, and we shouted all the vocals. Still, we caught the bug, and after a particularly horrible season of varsity soccer our junior year in which we lost every game and heard more than our tolerance of profane-laced tirades from our coach, we quit the team to focus on music. We never made it past cover songs but played a few gigs at a hole-in-the-wall BBQ pit and a corporate Christmas party. Most telling, our friendship overcame several petty high school betrayals—he kissed my first girlfriend, and I sang for another band at the senior year battle of the bands. 

Though he had entered the MTC, Scott walked at graduation. To this day, it still seems like a weird fluke in the system, a unique blend of church and state that only a Utah public high school would allow. Seven hundred students and their large families filled the Marriott Center on the Brigham Young University campus. Most seniors earned a few claps and catcalls as they accepted their diplomas. When it was Scott’s turn, the announcer read, Elder Scott Cameron, and the stadium erupted. The small name tag clipped to the outer folds of his robe was just visible on the jumbotron. Scott understood the moment’s significance; he grinned like a rock star and gave an emphatic wave to the crowd. Eighteen-year-old missionaries were the new celebrities. He was probably the first senior to enter the mission field. 

I said a final goodbye to him on the lawn outside the arena and marveled at the shiny black badge on his chest. I could tell that Scott no longer cared for the things of my world. He existed in a higher, holier plane, set apart from the mortal concerns of us who remained. If he missed me, he showed no sign. We talked for a moment, and I only remember the slight distance in his eyes and jitter in his body, anxious to return to the MTC and commence his new chapter. I wanted to grab him, to keep him near, and at the same time, longed for him to take me, to save me from the next six weeks of anticipation before I left in July. I’ve always admired those whose good fortune lets them leave a party before its natural conclusion. 

His absence was most palpable at the graduation festivities later that night. For most high schools, I imagine the revelry involves alcohol and other celebratory measures unknown to us, but as we were in Utah, the school had booked an arcade to play mini-golf and laser tag. I felt lost without Scott; he would have relished the innocent fun and I could have fed off his energy. Without him, the whole night felt pointless. What were we celebrating? Perhaps that we would never see these people again. Still, mission service elbowed its way into the last carefree summer before adulthood, taking the fun out of everything we had come to enjoy like dating, music, and sports. I cried after I got home for all the doors that had closed. 

In the short summer before I left, I spent as much time with my younger brothers and sister as possible. Benjamin, my older brother, returned