Week 32 - "You're the Helper!"

Hey, everyone,

The quote this week is from Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. It's a line Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) says to Brandt (Jeremy Renner) when the team has decided what everyone is going to do except Brandt, and Brandt asks what his role is in the mission.

Sometimes when I have some free time for my brain (when we're driving or biking or waiting for something) I'll start thinking about what the main theme of my week has been and what quote I should put into my email. This one came to mind after we had tracted some doors on a remote street at the edge of our area and were then biking our way back to where we had left the car (our miles have been getting decreased--it's beginning to look like our mission is going to become largely a biking mission, and we're going to start losing a lot of cars--there were announcements about it in recent zone conferences--so we've started taking part of a trip with our car and taking the rest with our bikes). I was pretty wet (we had been biking, and it had been humid that day), and I was thinking about how as a senior companion I've seen now how bad I am at street contacting and tracting. Before now I was perfectly willing and able to play a support role: Some great moments have resulted from me chiming in after my companion has engaged the individual he wants to talk to. That's what happened in the case of that Italian woman in Ashtabula: Elder Hall start the conversation, and then I was able to contribute something. I tried to work up the gumption to start conversations with people, and for the most part it was OK, but I also had some bad experiences trying to talk with everyone here and in Worthington, so I'm leery of doing it. I'm working on that. 

Anyhow, at the time I was also thinking about some advice Elder Thomas gave me that a previous companion had given him: "Play your class." In tabletop and video roleplaying games, you often have a character "class" or type that dictates the skills you'll tend to be better at and those you'll tend to be worse at. You want to allow characters to play to their strengths so that you can maximize their effectiveness. For instance, you wouldn't take an archer, who's better at ranged combat, and put him on the front lines of a fight. It just wouldn't be the best place to put him. Similarly, you wouldn't put a brawler far away from the enemy, because he wouldn't be able to do what he's trained to do. Elder Thomas' companion taught him that there are strengths that we each have as missionaries, and we should use those strengths. We can use our talents to further the work and spread forth the kingdom. So those two thoughts about playing your class and me being bad at tracting and street contacting converged into that quote from Benji: "You're the Helper!"

All in all, this week has been pretty good. I got to lead my second district council (last week was zone conference, so there was no council), and that went OK. We've got another one coming up this Friday that I need to start preparing for. I got compliments on from the training specialists who were visiting, so that lifted my spirits a little. 

Speaking of the training specialists, their visit with us was awesome. I got to go with Elder Collier, which was a great blessing, considering we had been on an exchange together before, in Worthington. The focus of the training specialists this time was not so much on talking with everyone and trying to find people to teach and more on helping individual missionaries with the things they've been struggling with and helping them clean up their area books. The focus on that in this mission has, in my opinion, been a huge blessing. I think sometimes in our zeal to do missionary work we can neglect people who have real potential and sort of lose track of them. We're taught as missionaries that, to use a fishing analogy, we need to have our "line in the water" all day--that we need to be out and about. But if we're trying several different forms of missionary work--if we've got several lines in the water--and one of those lines gets a bite, if a decision has to be made it would probably be wise for us to reel that fish in instead of setting out more lines. "The house of the Lord is a house of order. There are forms for these things," as the mission president in The Other Side of Heaven says. There really is great importance in keeping track of individuals, how they're progressing, what they're learning, how they're reacting to different lessons, and the things that they need (which, incidentally, is becoming slightly more difficult--because of data privacy laws, we're no longer allowed to record in our area book whether a person is keeping certain commitments, like the word of wisdom, the law of chastity, and so forth). But sometimes we get so excited about talking with people that we neglect to sit down and do the "paperwork" to the extent that it needs to be done. So the mission is asking us to go through our area books and start dropping and deleting people. If we have very little information about a person and they don't look very promising, we delete them. If a person's only interaction with missionaries is one in which they told us they weren't interested, we delete them. We're doing this in part because missionaries have a tendency to look in places on their area book map and see a bunch of gray (dropped) or yellow (potentials) dots and think that area is one they shouldn't work in, which notion might be contrary to the voice of the spirit--maybe there is someone over in that area now who needs the gospel. We've been advised that we need to have the faith to drop and delete people with the knowledge that the Lord is watching over them, and if he wants them to find the gospel, as we missionaries pay attention to the Spirit, we'll be able to find them or they'll be able to find us. So that's been really liberating to go through the Area Book and clean it up. We've been devoting an hour to it on our usual days, and it's a relief.

On the exchange the elders also had us identify a belief on our "belief window" (if you haven't heard the attached talk, listen to it--it's amazing) that we wanted to erase and helped us walk through it to fix our "bad principles" that don't meed our needs. Mine was that talking with everyone isn't effective, and one of the wonderful things Elder Collier taught me can be found in the book of Acts, in Chapters 10 and 11. We often look at people and judge them on first appearances, and as missionaries, doing that sort of means we're looking at them and deciding that they don't want the gospel. But as one of the recent converts from Worthington taught me relatively early in my mission, "How you gonna decide for someone whether they want something?" There's a similar idea in Acts. Peter could have thought it was a waste of his time to go and see Cornelius, a Roman, who, as a non-Jew, under previous instruction would not have been a candidate for hearing the gospel. But God taught Peter "What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common." When we look at others and decide based on their outward appearance that they don't want the gospel, we fail to do what the Savior did, which was to look on the heart. We fail to consider that a person might have been prepared by God for this moment and be more than ready to receive the gospel. It's difficult to describe the way I felt when I was taught that principle and the realization it gave me about finding--I don't feel like I've expressed it adequately here. But suffice it to say that it changed my perspective, and I've been repeating that phrase, "What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common," in my head when we go out to find people. I'm trying to grow and improve and have the motivation to approach everyone and offer them the gospel, to "pass the cherries," as it were (if I've never explained that principle in an email before, let me know, and I'll talk about it next week). Anyway, because the training specialists have unlimited miles, Elder Collier was able to take me up to the upper border of our area to meet a referral we were given a while ago (he lives, like 45 minutes away), so we got to take a road trip and talk, and it was great. Also, we were able to get in touch with the referral, and we're hoping to be able to meet him for a lesson sometime this next week. Before we went to meet him, we saw some kids playing basketball and asked if we could play with them to contact them. They thought we were pranking them and were going to be super good and just destroy them and have it on camera or something, but, ah... we definitely weren't. It was kind of awkward. They beat us, and then we asked them if they knew anyone who could use a message about Christ, and they didn't and weren't interested, so we left. And then we dropped by a Subway and I got one of their chicken pesto ciabattas and sat in bliss for a little bit, and Elder Collier and I talked about missions and what he's learned and what he's going to do when he goes home (this is his last transfer). It was really good. I really enjoyed that exchange.

In other news, Bruce is on date for baptism! It will be in September as of right now, but we're continuing to meet with him and trying to overcome some of his concerns, so that's great. Also, Forrest's baptism is around the corner, and we think we might be able to just make it work before the end of the transfer. The district has set a goal for 7 baptisms by the end of the transfer, so we're doing all we can to reach that goal.

What else is new? Oh, so Android phones have a feature that allows you to create GIFs, which means missionary memes are a thing, and it's hilarious. What would normally be references to popular culture are instead references to old, goofy, church-produced videos and so forth. Maybe I'll include one here.

Sorry, this email might be shorter, but that's about all I have time to talk about. 

I love you all!

Elder Davis

Images

Elder Bennett, Elder Gallagher, Elder Collier and I

Elder Collier and I

Thanks for the Five Guys card, mom.

Mom, I know you love hearts.

This is a sign in the local bike shop.