Dear Missionary: The Letter I Wish I'd Had (PREORDER)

In the summer of 1990, Jason Wright walked into the Missionary Training Center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with thrift-store suitcases, a call to Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and a hole in his pocket where a letter should have been.

His father had died three years earlier, a week before Christmas, when Jason was just sixteen. The letter a parent writes the week a son or daughter leaves — the one you fold into quarters and open on your hardest day — never came. So Jason spent the next thirty years writing it in his head.

Dear Missionary: The Letter I Wish I'd Had is that letter, written to one missionary at a time.

The New York Times bestselling author writes as a returned missionary, as a father who has sent two children into the field, and as a young single adult branch president who still writes these letters by hand. He walks through the whole arc of a mission: the restless weeks between the envelope and the airport, the first lesson where you understand nothing at all, the companion you'd never have chosen, the door that closes on people you've come to love, homesickness, and the day the badge comes off in a stake president's office.

The stories come from the field. A family in Brazil whose copy of the Book of Mormon had been sitting on a shelf for years before two elders knocked. A broken foot and a companion strong enough to do something about it. A bus missed outside Uberlândia. A soccer game in the rain that wrecked a perfect schedule and made the day even better.

Every chapter is anchored in scripture, and a closing "Going Deeper" section sends readers into Preach My Gospel with a passage and a journal question for each one.

This is the letter he wishes he'd had.

And now it's yours.

(The views expressed are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)