The  following is an excerpt from a talk "Decisions for Which I've Been Grateful"given by Clayton M. Christensen, Professor, Harvard Business School at Brigham Young University–Idaho Devotional, June 8, 2004

The fifth decision that I wanted to recount for you, was the decision I made to call myself on a mission again. I served a wonderful mission in Korea. As I mentioned I did most of it only being able to say that I believed the Book of Mormon was true, and I testified of those things that I knew to be true, and I felt the Spirit with me almost everyday when I was a missionary. But when I returned I began to feel the Spirit less and less as my life progressed. We moved to Boston and I enrolled in the MBA program at Harvard, and I was called at the time to serve as a counselor to our bishop, and I was a busy guy. I just did everything I could to magnify my calling. I was studying the scriptures everyday, I was praying, and yet on a day to day basis it just seemed like I was feeling the Spirit less and less as time wore on. And I yearned to have the same spirit return to me that I had felt when I was a missionary, and yet it didn’t seem like any of the usual levers of magnifying my calling or study or prayer brought the same spirit back into my heart. 

Then we moved to Washington and I had the chance to take a job in the Reagan Administration. All of a sudden we were living with new people and I was working with new people and I was riding in on the bus with new people, and it gave me many more opportunities than I had had living in a stable situation in Boston to begin talking with people about my church. Some of those opportunities then resulted in deeper opportunities to discuss the gospel, and I then invited one of my co-workers to come to our home with her boyfriend to hear the missionary discussions.

I remember it was a Sunday afternoon, and my wife and I were scrambling around trying to clean up the living room before they and the missionaries arrived and I put on a cassette tape of the Mormon Youth Symphony and Chorus in our stereo, and they were singing “The Spirit of God,” like a fire is burning. They came to the third verse where they sang “We’ll call in our solemn assemblies in spirit/ To spread forth the kingdom of heaven abroad/ That we by our faith may begin to inherit/ The visions and blessings and glories of God” (Hymns, 2). As they sang those words, I felt a beautiful spirit again come into the room and into my heart, and I realized that as I had begun working again to spread for the Kingdom of Heaven abroad as a member missionary, that the visions and blessings and glories of God had returned to my life. I was dreaming spiritual dreams and thinking happy, spiritual thoughts as I walked to the bus in the morning, and joy had come back into my heart, just as it had been there when I was a missionary. 

This is what I realized: Just imagine that you’re the general of an army, and you’ve got some state-of-the-art-weapons, and you’ve got to decide which of your soldiers you’re going to give these state-of-the-art weapons to. You’ll give your best weapons to those soldiers who are right in the front line, engaged in direct combat with the enemy. Those soldiers who are operating behind the front lines, who are driving the supply trucks and cooking the soup and keeping the records, they won’t need the state-of-the-art weapons because they never really confront the enemy, per say.

I realized what had happened to me is I had been released from my mission and had begun engaging in service in the church as a member that most of my assignments were in fact administrative in character, and as they were administrative in character, plain old Clay Christensen, with his plain old talents, was perfectly capable of doing most of the assignments that I was given as an administrator in the Church. But when I made that decision to become again a missionary for the Lord Jesus Christ, it was as if geographically I repositioned myself right on the front line, engaged in direct combat with Satan in this vicious war that he is waging over the souls of the children of men. 

It turns out that missionary work is an assignment in the church at which we cannot succeed if we don’t have the Spirit with us at all times. And I am so grateful that I came to make that decision to be a missionary again because it has blessed our family in profound ways. The next year, 1984, I was listening to General Conference, and Elder M. Russell Ballard gave a talk at that time where he invited us as members of the church to set a date, a point in the future, as a commitment to our Heavenly Father. He invited us-don’t pick a person that we were going to share the gospel with but to set a date. He promised us that if we would do all that we could to engage in conversations about the gospel, with as many people as we could, that God would bless us by that date, that we would intersect with somebody who would accept our invitation to meet with the missionaries. His talk just sunk into my heart.

That night I went home and knelt by my bed and committed to my Heavenly Father that by a date I would find somebody for the missionaries to teach. That was in 1984. That year, by the date, Heavenly Father blessed me to find a man who we could bring into our home to teach with the missionaries. I have set a date once, twice and now three times every year as a commitment to my Heavenly Father that I’m going to be a missionary, and every Sunday I fast that God will help me to intersect with somebody who I can invite to learn of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Every time I pray, I pray that God will put somebody in my path, and I’m grateful to be able to say that God has answered my prayer every time. It’s been 20 years. 

This last Sunday, we had probably the best first discussion that I’ve ever participated in, taught to one of my wonderful students, a young man from France named Guillaume. On the last day of my class, which is taught to the second year students in our MBA program, I describe for the students how all semester long we’ve been studying about these companies and goals and strategies for achieving these goals, and yet in the way that they invest their money on a day to day and a year to year basis, they tend to invest in things that offer the shortest term payback. That pattern of directing their investment decisions often causes companies that could be very successful in the pursuit of a lofty strategy actually to lead themselves toward failure. And I told my students, “You know, now you are graduating from the Harvard Business School. And a lot of you in your personal lives are going to do the same thing.”

I told them that “none of you have a strategy to leave here and go get divorced, and raise children who are alienated from you and become unhappy people, but that is actually the strategy that many of you are going to implement, because as you have opportunities to spend your time and energy, your very likely to spend them in pursuit of career success because it offers them most immediate and tangible evidence of achievement.” And I invite them not to do that, but I tell them, “but in order for you to figure out how you’ve got to spend your time and your energy, you need to figure out what the purpose of your life is.” Then this year I told them about the experience that I had had dedicating an hour everyday when I was a student at Oxford to figuring out what the purpose of my life was. And I invited them to do the same thing. 

A couple of days later I got an email from Guillaume, and he said, “Professor Christensen, I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t know what the purpose of my life is. Will you help me? He came in and as we talked he said, “I’m going to spend an hour a day; I just don’t know what to read.” I was able to give him my copy of the Book of Mormon, and invite him to take the missionary discussions. And I was so grateful this Sunday to be able to testify to him that of all the things that I taught him in our class, the things we were teaching him that day were the most important. I was so grateful to be able to tell him that he is a son of God, and that there really is a purpose for him coming here. 

Sharing the gospel has allowed me to feel the Spirit in my life more profoundly and more consistently than anything else that I’ve done. And I invite you. Some of you have served missions, some of you are anticipating a call, some of you may not go on missions because of other callings that you have, but I invite all of you to be member missionaries. If you can live your life positioned squarely on the front line engaged in hand to hand combat with Satan over the souls of the children of men, there is no way you can succeed in that calling if you don’t have the Spirit of God with you every day. It will be a great blessing to you. Don’t let yourself only engage in administrative work in this church. It’ll have a profound influence on your family. 

Several years ago another one of my students accepted my invitation to come and meet with the missionaries. The missionaries, during the second discussion, just did a marvelous job. And at the end of the discussion they bore their testimonies to Sunil, and then I bore mine and my wife Christine bore her testimony, and then I called on one of the missionaries to give the closing prayer, and our 11 year old son Spencer had been sitting over on the piano bench listening to the discussion. He raised his hand and stood up and he said, Dad, could you wait a minute? I have something to say. And I still remember that beautiful clear look in Spencer’s eyes as he looked at Sunil and he said, Sunil, “I am only an 11-year-old boy, but I want you to know that I know that the things that the missionaries taught you today are true. I know that God lives and that you are His son.” And he closed his testimony in the name of Jesus Christ.

As Spence bore that testimony, that beautiful spirit came into the room again, and I started to cry, right there in front of my student. The next day Sunil sent me an email and he thanked me for arranging the missionaries to teach and he complimented them on how clear the lessons were, and he said, “But you know, when your son Spencer stood up and said those things, I felt something come into the room. Is that what you mean when you say the Spirit of God?” I thought to myself, ‘I’d pay a million dollars to give my son an experience half that good.’ It really has been a wonderful decision we made to be missionaries.