The year between my sophomore and junior years of college, I worked as a student missionary. With my good friend Charity, we committed nine months to teaching English at a church-affiliated school in the city of Prague. As far as missionary positions go, ours was an easy job. Teach English during the week. Build relationships with students. Invite them to church. Basically, our task was to make the soft-sell for Jesus. This suited Charity and me just fine as we were not die-hard evangelist types by nature. We were, after all, English majors.

But like most teachers, we were overworked and underpaid. Our director, a tall thin woman with perfectly coiffed blonde hair once told us: “When you work for God you don’t need to eat or sleep like normal people.” Within the first week of arriving in Prague, we were already trying to prove to ourselves this was true. Perhaps for siddhas it is. But we needed to learn the hard way that as much as we loved Jesus, we still needed protein and sleep. Even our director was confronted with this lesson as we later learned she once collapsed in the shower from exhaustion.

Our cohort of five student missionaries were given the job of writing, re-writing, and editing textbooks for the school who wanted to avoid the cost of buying regular textbooks. All of the missionaries lived in panelaks–those ubiquitous Soviet-era cement-block apartment buildings that surround the ancient heart of Prague and extend toward the edges of the city like a cosmic game of dominoes. Whatever romance with Prague Charity and I hoped to find the moment we stepped onto the tarmac was temporarily shelved as we began the daily slog of traveling upwards of four hours by bus and metro between our apartment, the main school campus and other classes we taught in offices throughout the city. Our evening hours were spent rushing to write something polished enough to teach the next day to smart, savvy Czech students with plenty of other language study options to choose from in the city. We weren’t eating well or exercising. Under the stress of the year, I gained twenty pounds and grew a new beard of acne. (Unfortunately for me, dumplings are a staple of Czech cuisine and make for excellent comfort food.)

By mid-year, we could see how burnout was a likelihood for ourselves and we began doing more to prevent it and pushing back against our director’s expectations. In retrospect, I didn’t handle the situation with the maturest of conflict management skills. At the age of twenty, I still tended to use more dramatic, reactive means of protest to get my point across. Once, I made a display of choosing to go to bed over staying for a late-night mandatory textbook writing meeting that our director called right as I was crawling into bed. It was at least ten o’clock and none of the textbooks being discussed were levels I taught; I felt I wouldn’t have anything to offer to the discussion. I asked for permission to leave–I was so exhausted. But the director told me I had to stay. I left anyway and in doing so defied her direct order. This decision would come back to haunt me later.

But even as I write this I look back on that year and find it difficult to understand what was so hard about any of it. Inconvenient, yes. Full of hard work and homesickness, sure. A few power struggles with management, absolutely. But as far as missionary assignments go, we had a cushy one. We lived in one of the most beautiful cities on earth with amenities like running water, grocery stores, public transit, Joan Baez concerts, and weekend trips to places like Budapest and Krakow. Life in Prague was a cakewalk compared to stories I heard growing up of missionaries who served in truly dangerous times and places; a few who might as well have spent their time in the mission field traveling into the Heart of Darkness. We, by comparison, had nothing to complain about. Especially to our friendly neighborhood LDS missionaries  who once calmly told us a story of how they were chased away from an apartment door by a man with a shotgun.

As easy as the year should have been, I still got fired.

To date, I am the only person I know who has ever been fired from being a missionary.  I wasn’t even fired for ordinary offenses like being late to work one too many days in a row. Or embezzling church funds. Or having my own personal Thornbirds moment. Rather, I was accused of being an “agent of the devil” and having “lost souls for Christ” (although it was never explained to me how this number is counted). It just so happened that the night I abandoned the late-night meeting months earlier was the turning point, my director told me, in discovering the ugly, demonic truth of who I am at my core. It was only after that night when she began to “watch” me, she said, ultimately coming to the realization that she was the only person who knew me for who I really am. Everyone else I had manipulated and fooled. At the time, it was devastating to be accused of such things and it took years for me to recover. On the upside, I like to think of how much I was able to accomplish before I even turned 21. Agent of the devil is not a position you just get handed. You really have to earn it.

Of course, I wasn’t able to be so flip at the time. My director and I inhabited the same scary world of spiritual warfare–one in which Satan was real and powerful and salvation from his grip was tenuous and conditional.  I sometimes talked to Satan in my head like I was alerting a would-be attacker hiding in the dark that I was calling the police. And Satan was the reason for almost everything scary that I couldn’t explain, including the night Charity and I rode a nearly empty bus home during our first weeks in Prague and from somewhere behind us a man started talking loudly in Czech. I turned my head just far enough to see him out of the corner of my eye sitting in the very back, gesticulating with his hands. Not being able to understand a word he was saying, my mind began to run away with possible explanations for his seemingly frightening behavior. Mental illness crossed my mind, of course. Why else would someone talk to themselves at such a loud volume? But it also seemed entirely reasonable to me to guess that he was, in fact, possessed by the Devil. That would make sense, right? Here Charity and I were, just arrived in Prague to begin our missionary year and here was Satan attempting to scare us away from our purpose. Of course! I’d heard stories like this all the time at church. We were being tested. And I think I was failing the test because, to be honest, I was scared shitless. I wanted to turn to Charity for her assessment of the situation but I was afraid that would just draw the attention of the crazy, demon-possessed man closer to us. So I just stared straight ahead and prayed hard.

When the bus finally dropped us off in front of our apartment complex, I finally found my voice and asked what had been going through her mind during that terrifying bus ride. She looked at me quizzically and said, “You mean the man on the cell phone?”

Eight months later, I was fired for being an agent of the devil. There’s poetry in that, don’t you think?

Ultimately, however, due to advocacy from back home the director reversed her decision and let me stay on for the last month of my contract. The fact that I chose to stay on when your boss thinks you’re an agent of the devil now seems as crazy as believing someone is an agent of the devil and then letting them stay on at your school. Of course, she did require an apology for having raised my voice at her. During our ill-fated meeting, I remained tense but relatively calm even when it was clear from her opening prayer that I was screwed. (Word of advice: If you are ever in a meeting with someone who begins a prayer asking the Lord to help you know that everything she says is true, run.) At one point, I even asked her what I could do to improve my standing with her but her response seemed as weird to me in the moment as everything else. All she said was, “Say hi and bye like normal people!”  Eventually, it was clear there was nothing to do but leave. I offered to quit then got up to leave. But she said I couldn’t quit because she was firing me. Before I reached the door, she blocked my exit. It was then that I snapped and came face to face with my potential to do serious bodily harm to another human being. But instead of striking her with my fists, I started screaming at her, striking her with words, repeating over and over as I cried that she couldn’t do this to me which, of course, she could. And for the violence in my own response, I apologized.

But to her credit, she may have been onto something about the whole difficulty I have saying hi and bye like normal people. Maybe at the time I didn’t see the seed of truth in her observation about how I enter and leave rooms because I was too busy trying to absorb the whole agent of the devil thing. Apparently, I do have the habit of entering a room too quietly and standing in people’s blind spots. Creepy, I know. It’s not uncommon for me to startle someone upon entering a room. Recently,  I surprised a male colleague who jumped and said, “You keep scaring me!” I didn’t know what to say. So I said in a chipmunky, high- pitch tone, “I don’t know what that means!” And then I left. A response, I know, that only makes me seem more creepy and suggests I am, in fact, one of the Children of the Corn.

For certain, I don’t know when to leave a situation. Because somehow going home early that year from such a toxic environment never really entered my mind as a possibility. I couldn’t imagine returning home as a failed missionary and having to bear the disappointment and judgment of my community. But as I learned too late, there was only love waiting for me at home. The judgment and disappointment lived on in my own mind. And if it weren’t for my own stubborn pride, I would have spared myself a great deal of pain. I only wish I had the courage of another student missionary friend, a soft-spoken art major who took a position that same year in a remote part of Nepal only to discover that the resident missionaries there had set themselves up as the gentler, kinder versions of Kurz in the village. Believing the locals were “dirty,” the missionaries would not enter their homes. But they weren’t above using them to build a nice house for themselves up on the hill overlooking the village, either. Once this quiet artist missionary girl understood what was happening, she packed up her things and made the day-long hike back to the bus that would take her back to Kathmandu where she demanded a new assignment. I heard her tell this story and thought, “You mean you could do that? You could just leave?”

So by the time I did finally return home to California, I had only begun the long journey of leaving Prague. There’s a picture someone took as Charity and I stepped off the plane into the terminal at the San Francisco airport where a loving circle of our family and friends were waiting for us. In the picture, you can see me slightly falling forward, my arms stretched out reaching for my mom who was ready to catch me, my face contorted in pain and relief as I began to sob.  No one should return home from their missionary year crying like a sick cow. It’s bad for business. It frightens the public and it doesn’t translate well into a very marketable testimony. Most dangerous of all, it threatens the very heart of what a missionary is and does in the world—what does it say, after all, about the God you proclaim when you aren’t guaranteed the small benefit of returning home in your right mind.

And I wasn’t in my right mind. Though depression nipped at my heels for much of my adolescence, returning home from Prague threw me into one of the deepest depressions of my life. Always a serious student/athlete, I began finding myself doing things like sleeping much of the day, including through basketball practice. I lost my starting position on the team. I withdrew from friends. My dreams became a little too real, sometimes daring to cross into the realm of hallucinations. In the end, I decided to cut my junior year of college short and went home to my parents in the early Spring to try to find my new center of balance after having been thrown so far off course. It helped a little. But by my senior year of college, I still hadn’t found my center. One morning, as I lie awake in my dorm room bed, I had the very real experience of watching a lizard-faced demon dressed in a brown robe step out of my full-length mirror, turn, and look at me. The demon didn’t look at me with malice but with a sense of being lost–as though it didn’t know where it belonged either. I did my best to cast the demon out in the name of Christ. But it just stood there, looking at me, wondering what came next.