There is a particular kind of blank page that comes with writing to a missionary. You have a week of ordinary life and a sense that it is not worth reporting, so you write something warm and general instead, and it reads like a card rather than a letter.
Almost every missionary asks for the opposite. The ordinary week is the letter they want.
Be specific rather than encouraging
“We are so proud of you and praying for you” is true and lovely and gives them nothing to hold. “Dad finally fixed the garage door, it took him four hours and two trips to the hardware store, and he is unbearable about it” is a scene. They can see it.
The test is whether a sentence could have been written by anyone, about anyone. If it could, it will not survive the week.
The small news is the real news
- What is happening at home — the dog, the neighbors, the weather.
- What you ate, who came round, what broke.
- Things that are half-finished: a project, an argument, a plan.
- What their friends and siblings are doing, by name.
- What you have been thinking about, including the unresolved parts.
Homesickness is not caused by hearing about home. It is caused by feeling written out of it.
Ask answerable questions
“How is the work going?” is enormous and gets a summary. Smaller questions get stories: what is your apartment like? What do you eat on a normal day? Who is the first person you speak to each morning?What is your companion good at that you are not?
Hard news, and what to do with it
Illness, a death, a job loss, a family crisis. The instinct is to protect them by waiting. Most returned missionaries say the same thing about that: finding out late, and realizing everyone had decided they could not handle it, was worse than the news.
Tell them. Tell them plainly, say what is being done, and say who is looking after whom. What makes hard news unbearable at that distance is not knowing the shape of it — vagueness leaves them to imagine, and they will imagine worse.
When they are the one struggling
A letter that says the work is hard, or that they are discouraged, is not usually asking to be fixed. Advice at that distance arrives a week late, into a situation that has already moved.
Say you read it. Repeat back the specific thing they said, so they know it landed. Then carry on telling them about home. Being treated as a person rather than a project is most of what is wanted.
Write every week, even when there is nothing
A short letter that arrives is better than a long one that does not. The weeks when you have nothing to say are worth a paragraph anyway — the rhythm is a large part of the message, and an unbroken run of weeks says something that no single letter can.
Those same letters, read end to end afterwards, turn out to be a record of the family’s months as much as theirs. That is usually a surprise to the people who wrote them.