Omar Call wrote these words in his Missionary Call Acceptance letter to the LDS church in 1995. He was excited, though going on a mission was entirely expected.
His father, Brad, is a medical doctor and a former missionary himself. He met Omar's mother, Lola (now a psychologist), while on his mission in Peru and converted her to Mormonism. Lola was a devout Catholic and in her late teens at the time, and after she converted to Mormonism, she left her predominantly Catholic home country to attend Brigham Young University in Utah.
courtesy of Omar Call
Omar Call in his Mormon days, flanked by his parents, Lola and Brad.
Kyle Jacobson
The Secular Free Thought Society, a group that often joins Call on street corners in Tempe.
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Back in the U.S. himself, Brad heard Lola was at BYU and called to see how she was doing. They began dating and eventually married. They had two children — Omar, born in 1977, and his sister, Ariana, born 15 months later. When Omar was 6, his family moved from Baltimore to Tucson. They continued attending three-hour Sunday services at an LDS church.
Ariana, who lives in Tucson and works as a high school science teacher, says their home environment was "somewhat restrictive," but otherwise normal. Halloween was a big holiday for the family, and they all made intricate costumes, especially Omar. One year, he and Ariana made Garbage Pail Kids outfits by cutting the bottoms out of garbage pails, slipping trash bags over their bodies and climbing into the pails, and rigging the lids to open so their heads could pop out.
Another year, Omar made a Transformer costume out of cardboard boxes and metallic paint, with elaborate robot limbs on the front, and an automobile coming out the back. The last Halloween Omar's father recalls him "dressing up" was when he was 14. He dressed as himself, and said he had the most original costume anywhere.
Their mother didn't want Ariana and Omar to watch too much TV, so she taught them how to sew and paid them to do it several hours every week. Today, Omar alters clothing for customers at the boutique where he works and sews his own fashion designs — sometimes well into the night and early mornings.
His whole life, Omar says, he followed the tenets of his religion closely. He attended every church service, refused to listen to secular music on Sundays, didn't watch R-rated movies, abstained from premarital sex, and tried not to drink any caffeine. At 19, he says he was quite secure in his faith, to the point of being "self-righteous."
In 1995, Call enrolled at Arizona State University, planning to follow in his father's footsteps as a physician. Before he got more than a year deep in college, the LDS church sent him on a mission to Lisbon, Portugal.
Call's schedule as a missionary was typically rigid: He got up at 6 a.m. every day, prayed, showered, dressed in his suit, went through the neighborhoods of Lisbon and knocked on doors all day, and went to bed by 10:30.
The goal was to spread the vitally important message of God to as many unconverted souls as possible.
It was hard for him to accept rejection. Once, Call was trying to find a neighborhood in Lisbon where he could "share the gospel." As a senior companion, he was in charge of guiding the younger missionaries, and every day, they would try to find some sort of divine guidance for the Lisbon area.
"Every day, we were like, 'Okay, there's somebody that the Lord wants us to teach. There's someone who wants to hear the gospel. We have to be faithful enough that we can be led by the Holy Spirit to find them,'" Call says.
So they got down on their knees and prayed, asking God to guide them to the right place. Afterward, they looked at a map and had a really strong feeling about one particular neighborhood. So they went there, and they had a bad day.
"We went and knocked on doors for eight hours — the whole day," Call recalls. "We couldn't get anybody. People slammed doors in our faces. No one let us in."
They returned to one particular door, practically pleading to be let in. "I was getting kind of desperate at this point," Call says. "I thought, 'Something's wrong. I thought this was the area; this is where we were led. There's someone here we need to teach.'"
The woman who answered the door told the missionaries to stop begging her, and closed the door. Call wandered off so his junior companions wouldn't see him crying, and spent the next several days thinking about what had happened.
"Eventually, I was able to assuage my conflict with it by just saying, 'This was a test to see if I'd be able to maintain my devotion in the face of rejection. The Lord just wanted to see if I would stay strong,'" Call says.
Toward the end of Omar's work in Portugal, the president of his mission wrote a note to his parents. In it, President and Sister Clegg thank Brother and Sister Call "for sharing with us such a dedicated and spiritually prepared son . . . We loved Elder Call. He is one of our savior's finest missionaries."
