A Mission Bookended by Evacuations
Not many Latter-day Saint missionaries begin their service by evacuating the Missionary Training Center because of a pandemic and then end it early by evacuating Ukraine under threat of a military invasion by Russia.
First, to be perfectly clear, Matthew Landon, 21, of Provo, Utah, felt safe throughout his mission. Caution was the point of its abrupt end late last month, when The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reassigned all non-Ukrainian missionaries to other countries. Some went home early if they were near the end of their assignment, like Landon.
Here’s what his nearly two years looked like:
He entered the MTC on Feb. 5, 2020, to learn Russian. He left early, on March 26, 2020, and went to Montana, where he remained for 14 months speaking English. Finally, last June, he arrived in Ukraine.
“I felt like I had to start all over because I couldn’t speak Russian,” he said.
By then, though, he had developed a valuable new skill. He was adaptable. He’d encountered some frustration in the MTC before the pandemic hit. Since then, he said he saw the big picture no matter how often the unexpected arrived.
That came in handy when the president of the Ukraine Dnipro Mission asked all 58 of the missionaries to leave the cities where they were serving on Christmas Eve and Christmas and gather at the Kyiv Ukraine Temple in the nation’s capital. It helped again when he told them the church had reassigned them either to go home or to leave Ukraine for other missions.
From Christmas until late January, the missionaries lived in housing on the Kyiv temple grounds and successfully continued the missionary work they had been doing in their previous areas over Facebook and video. Finally, word came that only Ukrainian missionaries would remain in the country.
“I kind of was shocked, but at the same time I wasn’t,” Landon said. “I was prepared already.”
Today, missionaries from the two Ukraine missions are serving in Germany, Croatia, Poland, Sweden, Spain, Canada and in several U.S. states, including Alaska, Illinois, Washington and at Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah.
“When everyone was finding out that they were leaving, it was hard for some missionaries. Some of them hadn’t even experienced a reassignment before,” Landon said. “I had a little bit of experience with that already. I naturally knew, and this is a gift that I was given by Spirit, that everything was fine, everything’s working out the way it should be happening. It’s God’s plan. It just worked out that way.”
Landon said he was impressed with the resilience of Ukrainian Latter-day Saints.
“This is their normal life. They always seem to have someone knocking on their doors,” he said. “They’re always living in fear. There’s no security for them in multiple areas of life, financially and emotionally. With their families, there’s not a lot of security there. It was really hard for us as missionaries to really comprehend.”
He said most don’t have the resources or a place to go if an invasion happens. Church members have worked together to prepare 72-hour kits in case services are interrupted.
“It was very inspiring to watch the light of Christ in their spirit of service, the way they stepped up and had charity to one another,” he said. “People on that side of the world are known for not smiling as much. They don’t show that much emotion, but in the last meeting we had with them, it stuck out to me that they all were smiling.
“They all trusted that they are in the Lord’s hands and had peace in Christ.”
Landon said the timing of his return home, though it was a couple of weeks early, worked out well. He is working in real estate now.
For more:
The parent of another reassigned Ukraine missionary recently shared his experience with an Alabama news outlet.
