Dungeon Day

If we told you that we had Dungeon Day in the Utah Salt Lake City Mission, you would probably think that it had something to do with the upcoming celebration of that great American holiday of ghosts and goblins - Halloween. Well, you would be wrong. So, you might venture a guess that the missionaries needed some more baptisms of unsuspecting souls, and thus, dragged people off the streets, down to the dungeon for a little persuasion on the stretching rack, or ancient Chinese water torture, or some other horrible torture to force them to read the Book of Mormon and agree to baptism. Once again, you would be wrong. Perhaps you think that Dungeon Day is when Mormon men grow tired of their current 5 or 6 wives, and go to a dungeon where unwilling young teenage girls are held captive, to choose another wife. Wrong again! (You are a HORRIBLE guesser, by the way, although you do have a fabulous imagination!)


Dungeon Day is the same thing as when you were a kid and your mom got the entire family up at 7:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning, and said, "We're all going to work together today, and do some spring cleaning in the house!" And it was probably greeted with just about as much enthusiasm by the missionaries as your mother's words were by all the children - and husband!


In the crawl space/basement of the Mission Office is "the Dungeon". For the last 350 years at least, missionaries have been "storing" stuff in there. When Elders put on a few (or 40) pounds, and cannot fit into their suits any more, they put them in the dungeon until they lose the weight. When a member is going to throw away a perfectly good keyboard that a missionary wants to keep, they put it in the dungeon. Bikes. Pots and pans. Clothes. Suitcases. Athletic equipment. You name it, it all lives in the dungeon. The only trouble is that everybody puts stuff INTO the dungeon, but nobody ever remembers to take it OUT!! Our dungeon was full.


So, Sister Winn (the dreaded mother) proclaimed October 6th to be Dungeon Day (the dreaded spring cleaning) on a P-Day (the dreaded stealing of your perfectly good Saturday)! Actually, our missionaries were very good sports about it all, because they know that there really is no free agency when your mother puts her mind to something anyway.


They came. They went down into the dungeon. They hauled stuff up. They sorted it out. They filled the dumpster outside, and to spare. They tried on clothes and tried things out. They played some basketball, since they were in the gym anyway. They had a great time. We fed them lunch. We had the Deseret Industries truck come and pick up what was re-usable. They were wonderful and our dungeon is clean!!!


Now there will be room for the torture equipment and teenage girls......