There is no way around it, learning that you have a gay father and then experience the dissolution of your parent’s mixed orientation marriage is a monkey wrench in the life of an 18-year-old preparing to serve a mission.  It can take some time, especially for older children, to work past a binary understanding of heroes and villains in the deeply complex narrative of religiously facilitated mixed orientation marriages.

But when you are leaving on a mission, you don’t have a lot of time to do that kind of heavy lifting. You just don’t have the bandwidth to talk about the elephant in the room in that moment. You move forward not ignoring what is happening, but prioritizing all of the sensory input to be processed on your own timetable.

This timetable meant that my blessing as a father for my son in the name of God, to arm him with the strength of the Kitchen house, the hope of generations gone before, and the courage to sustain him through his mission, wouldn’t be able to be delivered in a conventional in-person manner. But it could be delivered nonetheless, filled with power and authority.

I penned this letter and asked that he open it on the plane to the Missionary Training Center in Provo.