As a pre-mission teenager studying at Brigham Young University, I took an interesting biology class. It has been satisfying to look over some of the papers I wrote for that class and to see how my understanding and writing style have progressed. While this text certainly doesn’t represent my best work, I thought I’d include it here just for fun. As is evident below, at BYU secular and religious education are seamlessly merged.
A million thoughts race through the mind of any potential missionary as he opens his letter — thoughts of preparation, of locality, of missed girlfriends — but as I opened mine a few minutes ago, I had only one thought, only one hope. I yearned only to avoid big spiders. The Lord, in His infinite wisdom, has apparently seen fit not to respect my wishes, and so I’ve decided to make my weak things strong by researching a very large and very scary arachnid of the Brazilian back country, the Brazilian Pink Haired Bird Eating Spider. After all, how scary can a pink spider be? Pink isn’t a very aggressive color, right?
This alarming arachnid dwells in the tropical rainforests of Brazil — far, far away, I might add, from my mission on the cost. The spider has very poor eyesight, so even though it moves with lighting speed through the nocturnal darkness, its nine inch legs and three-inch-thick, hair-covered body flying over the earth beneath, its solid, shiny fangs glimmering in the moonlight as it chases me through the darkness, at least it won’t be able to see how tasty I look. The hairs of its body can detect the slightest vibrations, like the movement of the air when I scream or the thud on the floor when I faint. No, it won’t see me, but it can smell — and taste — with the skill of a gourmet chef, only I’ll be the main meal — I just know it — even though I’m not a small bird or a lizard or a rodent. Its bite is only painful for man, but it’ll inject its venom into me anyway, softening my tissues and then sucking out my juices with its hard fangs as I scream in agony, the whole time fully conscious as its poison digests me from the inside out, as the pain from the needle-sharp fangs is exceeded only by the torment of muscles and tendons turning to mush under the influence of the Brazilian Pink Haired Bird Eating Spider’s digesting enzymes!
Well, I feel a lot better, now. How scary can a pink spider be, right? It seems to me that the gospel has a pacifying effect on most creatures; maybe I’ll become friends with the Brazilian Pink Haired Bird Eating Spiders. After all, didn’t Christ teach us to love our enemies, even the eight-legged, scary-looking, digestive-enzyme-containing ones?
Information from http://aztec.asu.edu/phxzoo/spdrbird.html