The Impact of My Mission Leaders

I’ve been thinking this week about the impact of my mission leaders. As I served my mission, I was blessed with some of the best.

For the first year of my mission, I served with President and Sister Kikuchi, and the second year was with President and Sister Perkins.

President Yoshihiko Kikuchi was a very successful businessman in Japan when he was called at the age of 36 (in 1977) to serve as a General Authority Seventy, which required him to leave his home and his employment and move his young family to Salt Lake City, Utah for this full-time church service. From 1987 to 1989, President Kikuchi served as president of the Hawaii Honolulu Mission.

I joined him there in 1988 as a 19-year old missionary.

Serving with President Kikuchi blessed my life in remarkable ways. I still remember lessons he taught me about centering my life on Jesus Christ and always putting Him first, how to improve my prayers, how to act with greater faith, and how to recognize and act on the promptings of the Spirit. I learned leadership lessons from him that are still helping me in my life today and have made me a more effective leader at both Fidelity Investments and my callings at church.. He would always share a powerful testimony of the Savior, the prophet Joseph Smith, and the Book of Mormon. I knew he loved me and trusted me.

At each of our zone conferences (which is a meeting led by the mission president with all missionaries every six weeks), the closing song to the meeting would always be “Love One Another”. President Kikuchi would stand in front of us and he first would sing the song once by himself, and then we would sing it a second time all together.

I remember one of these meetings in the Honolulu Tabernacle where he sang those words:

As I have loved you,
Love one another.
This new commandment:
Love one another.
By this shall men know,
Ye are my disciples,
If ye have love
One to another.

As he sang, tears beginning to roll down my cheeks because in that that moment I could feel this great love for him, but even more powerfully his love for me and all of us missionaries.

Speaking to mission leaders, President Henry B. Eyring has taught, “[The Father and the Son] love your missionaries perfectly, so you can be sure those elders and sisters will not come to you by chance. Our Father and His Beloved Son know in advance what help your missionaries will need to rise to their full potential in their service. And so They called them to you. Your missionaries may think, when they open that letter from the living prophet, that they were called to a nation or a mission or to teach in a language. They were. But more important to their lives will be the assignment to serve with you. You will likely have the greater effect on their mission and on their lives.”

I know this is definitely true for me.

I’ve come to recognize the main reason I was called to serve in Hawaii is because that is where the Kikuchis (and the Perkins) were, and God wanted me to serve with them to observe them, learn from them, and be mentored by them. It wasn’t just about our time in Hawaii together. These would be powerful, life-long relationships.

After my mission, when Kimberly and I were getting married, we went to visit President and Sister Kikuchi. We asked him if he would perform our marriage in the Salt Lake Temple, which he did.

Years later when our twins were born, I called President Kikuchi to see if they could come when we blessed the twins at our church. As a member of the Quorum of the Seventy, he often was out of town on the weekends visiting congregations all over the world, but he just happened to be in Salt Lake City that weekend, so they came and helped us as we blessed the twins.

A few years later, when I was called to be a bishop, I called him again to see if they could come the Sunday I was going to be set apart (which in our church is a blessing members receive when they get a calling or an assignment). Once again, lucky for me he was in town, and he was there that day.

When I received this call to be a mission leader, I called him and shared the news. Weeks later, in going through medical exams in preparation to serve as a mission leader, I was diagnosed with a health challenge that was pretty concerning. After we left the doctor’s office, Kimberly said to me, “You need to call President Kikuchi.”

So once again, I called my mission president. He invited us with our son Lincoln to come to his home so he could give me a blessing of health. It was a powerful experience that I will always remember. The fears I carried with me as I entered his home left as we visited with him, heard his counsel and advice, and he gave me that blessing. I knew everything was going to be okay.

I share this to highlight that at every key moment of my life for the last 30 years, my mission president has been there. I’ve always known that if there was ever anything I needed, I could call him and he would do anything possible to help. He has been one of the most important figures in my life, and has been a life-long mentor and friend.

This last week, I called President Kikuchi again to see if they could come to our worship services where Samantha, Kimberly, and I would be speaking before leaving on our mission. As I walked into our chapel, there were President and Sister Kikuchi. It’s hard to describe the emotions I felt in seeing them there, once again, at this very important “moment that matters” in my life. It was a full circle moment where I am now leaving to do what they did 30 years ago in the Hawaii Honolulu Mission.

I’m hoping to do for others exactly what they’ve done for me. They’ve set a pretty high standard for Kimberly and I to reach.

I regret that I didn’t get a picture with President and Sister Kikuchi on Sunday to remember that moment, but here are two from 2021 where I took our family up to visit them at their home.

As I think about these wonderful missionaries in the Tennessee Knoxville Mission, I hope that Kimberly and I will be able to do for them what the Kikuchis have done for us.

I hope to help them learn lessons that are not just about being a successful missionary, but being successful in life.

I hope to build their faith and point them to Christ and help them center everything on Him, along with so many other spiritual lessons that will help them now and long into the future.

I want to sing “Love One Another” to them.

I want them to feel loved and completely trusted.

And I hope that over the next 30 years they will be calling President and Sister Barlow to have us join in celebrating with them their big moments that matter, or when they need advice, or when they are scared or struggling and need a blessing, or when they just want to talk. These are all the things the Kikuchis have done for me and I will forever feel grateful and indebted to them.