a missionary

Sometime between the whirl of teenage activity and the confinement to cane and rocking chair, we find a strange creature called a missionary.  Missionaries come in two varieties: elders and sisters.  They come in assorted sizes, weights, and colors-green being the most common among the new ones.
  Missionaries are found everywhere, hurrying, climbing, knocking, walking, and getting thrown out.  Converts love them, young girls worship them, the law tolerates them, dogs hate them, most people ignore them, and heaven protects them.
  A missionary is a composite.  It has the appetite of a horse, the enthusiasm of a firecracker, the patience of Job, the persistence of a Fuller Brush salesmen, and the courage of a lion tamer.  It likes letters from home, invitations to Sunday dinner, conferences, checks, and visits from the mission president.
  It isn't much fun tracting in blizzards, ladies who slam doors, hats, suits and dull ties, apartment houses, transfers to hot areas, shaking hands at arms length with the opposite sex, alarm clocks, and "Dear John" letters.
  A missionary is an odd character.  It can get homesick, discouraged, and temporarily lose faith in the whole human race.  Yet nobody else can knock so boldly with such a shaky hand.  Nobody is so early to rise or so tired at 10:30 p.m.  And nobody else can get such a thrill at the end of a discouraging day from the words, "Come on in-I've been waiting for you."
  A missionary is truth with a pocket full of tracts, and faith with 69 cents in its pocket.  "Hey Dad, where is that check?"  Yes, they are all this but a strange lump will rise in its throat the day it receives its letter of release, and on arrival home its homecoming speech will probably contain the phrase it once considered trite.  "The time I spent in the mission field was the happiest time of my life."

-From the Finnish Mission newsletter, November 1959-