Latter-day Laughs

Missionaries on Facebook, huh? I gotta tell you, the Church just gets truer and truer.

I once bore my testimony of Facebook to an audience in North Carolina, all because I never receive inspiration until ninety seconds before I’m supposed to speak. I was sitting on the stand (isn’t that a funny phrase?), blissfully enjoying the musical number, hoping that my talk would soon materialize in my head, when suddenly, I realized that what I needed was a quote by C. S. Lewis. I fired off a Facebook message to my son, he looked it up, and sent it back just as I stepped to the pulpit.

Facebook? Totally true.

So now, it seems, our missionaries will be using computers in LDS meetinghouses to contact investigators, coordinate with ward mission leaders, and report to their presidents that a certain companion whose name I won’t mention but it rhymes with Shmelder Shmones is ordering contraband CTR rings off the internet and cheating at Words With Friends.’

I just made up that last one, but it’s only a matter of time, don’t you think?

I really can’t wait to see how all of this plays out. If the communiques look anything like my own Facebook feed, missionary work is about to get a lot more entertaining.

Take my own near-mission-aged son. He looks like a regular kid but he’s got the soul of a beat poet. Most of his statuses read like this:

“Keep your heart in a shoe, man. Feet on the Earth.”

Groovy, to be sure. Just not terribly helpful if you were, say, looking for directions to the zone conference.

Young missionaries will probably spend at least a couple of MTC days learning how to un-abbreviate everything, which is the last hope for the survival of the written language. Perhaps when they have to write the complete words Laughing Out Loud’ they’ll discover why Nephi never once said it. “These plates, that I make with mine own hands, yea, and if thou dost not think that digging gold out of the ground, cooking it, mashing it flat, and then writing on it ist tough then thou shouldst try it sometime, do not, as thou mightiest imagine, have loads of blank space for nonsensical drivel, because otherwise where wouldst we put all that stuff about how much barley ist containd in a senine?”

Knowing the tenacity of the text generation, however, an entirely new code will emerge among missionary Facebookers. COS-Companion Over Shoulder,’ GFC-Golden Family Contact,’ QCTRRFS-Quality CTR rings for sale.’ (That one’s from Shmelder Shmones. Ignore it.)

But the under-20s won’t be the only ones revamping their Facebook posts. I know at least two dozen women who-bless their hearts-have not posted an original thought in three years. Instead, it’s a steady barrage of memes-those inspiring messages superimposed on equally inspiring pictures.

This means that, without additional training, Senior Sister Sue will be confirming dinner appointments with a photo of a sunset over the ocean and the message, “Whenever you feel down and out, just remember that by adding a bunch of letters and some new punctuation and then rearranging it all, down and out’ becomes stop whining, you big baby.’

So, is that a yes, Thursday at five works for us,’ Sister Sue?

Mission presidents probably won’t have much time for Facebook, so the task of keeping tabs on the missionaries’ use of social media will likely fall to their wives.

Don’t get me wrong; I love mission presidents’ wives. My sister-in-law is one. But these are often women who are suffering extreme Grandchild Withdrawal Syndrome, which means their Facebook updates may well be the most frightening on the web.

Status: “Here is a picture of my three-year old princess dripping Popsicle goo all over the dog. Isn’t that just adorable? I want to hug her and kiss her and squeeze her like Charmin.”

Then, because she knows she’s supposed to be posting something useful to her missionaries, she’ll follow it up with, “So, when teaching investigators who own dogs, don’t…um…do that. The Popsicle thing, I mean. Oh, and probably the Charmin one, too.”

Naturally, the missionaries will be linking to videos and articles from LDS-dot-org. And they’ll end their missions with oodles of new friends.’ (I have to admit, however, that when Elder Perry suggested adding all these missionaries and their investigators to our Facebook family, I privately invited the brethren to re-think that plan. A missionary-crazed girl followed my husband home from Argentina, something which, in those days, required an actual airplane. Who knows what superfluity of naughtiness she could have got up to via the internet?)

Still, there’s no denying, the Lord knows His audience. Facebook-once feared as Satan’s Database-is completely overhauling the way we deliver the gospel to the world.

And in case you prefer the efficiency of Twitter, you might be interested to know that the Book of Mormon has 1,418,073 characters in it (including spaces), which comes out to 10,129 Tweets-fourteen per day for two years.

The times, they are a-changin’.