Lightrail Revelations

I was riding Trax today, and a woman asked if she "could please use anyone's cell phone?" Yesterday someone let me borrow their phone, so I figured it was only fair, and I dug mine out of my bag and handed it to her. She made her phone call as I read my book, and handed it back to me: "Thank you." 

"You're welcome." 

I turned back to my book, but after a minute or two, she was thanking me again--she had been desperate. "I understand," I said, as I realized we were entering the full-blown small talk phase of the conversation where it would be awkward for me to just start reading again. We kept going as I hoped she would get off soon so I could get back to my book, and before I knew it she was writing her name on the back of a brochure for Prepaid Legal and expressing her amazement that I was twenty years old but had never heard of it. She got up to go, and I felt used. 

And then it hit me: that's what I'll be doing for the next eighteen months. 

I have been thinking recently about the odd vocation that is the full-time missionary. It seems to me that missionaries often preceded or accompanied colonists--in Africa, South America...and in Korea. And what they did certainly wasn't always positive. Considering that heritage, it feels like a somewhat antiquated vocation. 

I have cousins who are full-time missionaries, though (and not Mormon ones). And I typed "missionary" into Google and pulled up some tips for open-air street preaching. So evidently they are alive and well, these missionaries of the world, and of the world's religions. Today on the train, though, after that woman left, it felt like she had only talked to me to try to get a new client. I just hope the people I meet don't feel like that. But then hopefully I don't act quite like that, either.