Une Moissonneuse-batteuse

Yesterday I wrote about my love for the song God Be With You Till We Meet Again, especially the French version in which we sing of a joyful and holy hope to be with loved ones again in the presence of God.  Unbeknownst to me then, yesterday afternoon my mission president Craig Merrell was unexpectedly killed in a car accident, and now those words sink deeper today as I ponder his life of service and the reunion that can now only happen in heaven.  I pray for his family that they can be filled with that hope that comes “pour tous ceux qui suivent Jésus.”

As I ponder my experiences with President Merrell, the phrase that comes to mind is this: he was always prepared to serve.  The Lord told the Saints through the Prophet Joseph Smith, “You must prepare yourselves by doing the things which I have commanded you and required of you” (Doctrine and Covenants 78:7).  He was in my mind a man who did just that,  preparing himself by always doing what the Lord wanted him to, and because of that he became “a great benefit to his fellow beings” (Mosiah 8:18).  When he arrived in our mission, he hit the ground running and was a compelling example to all of us of the power of preparation and obedience.  For example, we were all amazed at how well he spoke French and could easily communicate with the people there from the first day.  He had spoken French as a young missionary, but it had been decades since then.  But he had somehow kept his French up through the busy years of his medical practice, and he was prepared to serve.  Sister Merrell was “no less serviceable” and had spent what must have been a prodigious amount of time using her incredible artistic talents as a potter to make over 400 heart-shaped bowls for all the missionaries to teach us about unity (Alma 48:19).  President and Sister Merrell had also shown their preparation in putting their significant musical talents to work before coming, writing what became a beloved mission song for us to go along with the recently released Preach My Gospel handbook.  Their preparation and dedication always proved “a great benefit” and inspiration to all of us.

I remember one particular car ride with President Merrell and my companion in which he was hard at work helping the two of us improve our French.  He wasn’t about to waste any time and he taught us the word for a combine harvester as we passed one on the highway—une moissoneuse-batteuse.  It was a word I certainly wouldn’t need to teach the gospel, but I still remember it and the lesson of hard work and dedication it represented.  It has since then taken on more symbolic meaning for me as I think about his service.  A combine harvester is a machine that combines multiple difficult tasks related to farming into one action with one machine.  As one description states, “Rather than using separate machines for activities such as reaping, threshing and winnowing the grains, combine harvester performs all these functions into one single machine.”  That was President Merrell: so full of talents that he did it all at once, blessing lives through his abilities as an organizer and a musician and a doctor and a teacher and most importantly a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.  And all this combined towards one single goal: the spiritual harvest of souls.         

               Throughout his years of service in our mission President Merrell continued to bless the lives of the missionaries and the people in France because of his preparation and dedicated service.  Indeed, he took his talents and did “cast into the Lord’s storehouse, to become the common property of the whole church” (D&C 82:18).  And outside the mission he similarly sought to bless others through his preparation, traveling all around the world as a surgeon with Operation Smile.  He left a legacy of preparation and service and I thank the Lord for my opportunity to learn from him.  His greatest work was to harvest souls in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and he was indeed himself a moissoneuse helping to fulfill the Lord’s promise that through Abraham’s seed would “all the kindreds of the earth be blessed” (3 Nephi 20:25).