Week 38 - "If we hadn't been right here, in this exact spot, at this precise moment, we may never have found him again!"

Hi, everyone!

This week has been sort of up and down. We experienced some cool miracles, but I also hit a hard low (or two) that was hard to come back from. I'm still learning a lot about being a missionary and how to improve, but overall, things are going about as well as can be expected. The quote is from Elder Calhoun in The Best Two Years, and you'll see its significance in the next paragraph.

So I may have mentioned it in the last email, but there was a push within the mission recently for us to clean up our Area Books. Because we use digital tools instead of paper tools, records can accumulate very quickly if we don't keep up with sorting through them and don't follow up on the people we find and so forth. Well, missionaries in our area, Riverside, deleted nearly all the records in area book. I'm not sure if it's because most of them were less solid or if they just wanted to make a clean slate or what, but when we got here we had about 5 people being taught, 4 potentials and not a lot of formers: Just the ones that they weren't able to delete because other missionaries had followed them. Well, on Friday I scanned through some of those "Unable to contact" formers (people who missionaries stopped teaching because they weren't able to get in touch with them) to see if any of them looked promising. I made a list of those people and sort of outlined the way I thought we should try to contact each of them. Later that night we were working in an area, trying to find a few people and get in touch with them. 

Our ward has an interesting dilemma: I guess in the past when people on the university campus (Ohio State University is within our area, by the way--more on that later) who were members of the church going to YSA wards stopped going for two or three weeks, the wards would kick their records over to the nearest family ward, which is us. As a result, our ward records have been pretty clouded with a lot of people who no one in the ward knows. It's been part of our job as the resident missionaries to try to reach those people and see if they're still living at the addresses listed. We were in an area the other night just looking for people to teach, and I had been trying to do better at listening to the voice of the spirit and following the promptings it sends, so I had knocked on three doors and offered them FamilySearch cards: two weren't interested, but the third, though she said she wasn't interested, asked if she could keep the card. So I felt good about that. I felt like I had been obedient and done my part. 

Later that evening, while we were looking for some of the people on "the list," a guy drove up next to us and was like, "Are you the Mormon missionaries?" We were like, "Yeah, that's what some people call us," and he was like, "Well, the Latter-day Saint missionaries. Can you guys tell me when and where services are tomorrow? I've been meaning to go but haven't gotten around to it." We were like, "Yeah, we can do that." He works for Fire/EMS, so he had a laptop set up in his car, and when we were trying to look up the details, our internet wasn't working, so he booted up the laptop and logged in, and I saw his name on the login screen, and it was the name of one of those people I had found in the area book earlier that day who I thought looked promising. We gave him the information and asked a little more about him, and we traded numbers, and then he drove off, and I was like, 

"🎵Sacrifice brings forth the blessings of Heaven...🎵"

If I hadn't tried to follow those promptings of the Spirit and stopped at each of those three houses, we very well may not have been on that street when he drove by. We wouldn't have gotten his number, and we may have never gotten in contact with him again. So seek the Spirit and follow it: It will bring you blessings.

Earlier that week we had a district council, and both the zone leaders and the Assistants were there. I was expecting the former, but not the latter. But it was great to have them. I'm always excited to see the Assistants: One of them, Elder Winn, is from Rexburg, and he's awesome. He knows what he's doing as a missionary. The other, Elder Bench, is just all-around a really solid guy. He seems like a great, smart, hardworking missionary. He was in the car when I first went up to Warren, and I worked his area in Tallmadge when I was waiting for Elder Gallagher to arrive from the South at the beginning of last transfer. Anyway, they joined us for district council, and it was really good! It was the first district council we've had this transfer in person (the last district council we had we tried to do over the phone because the former district leaders had been doing that before we got here, but we decided that wasn't the ideal way to do things). Then we had a training visit from the Scioto Elders, the zone leaders.

So we're in a car share (that means we have the car for a week, and then we give it to another set of missionaries, who take it for the week, and then we switch again), and we got the car from another companionship the day before district council, and they told us that one of the tire pressure sensors was a little screwy, because it was telling them the front passenger tire only had 8 PSI, when it was actually fine. They told us not to worry about it. But at one point when we stopped in the car to call a few people, I decided that it would be a good idea to get out and check the tires, just for the heck of it. It turns out that one of the tires was at 8 PSI, it just wasn't the tire the car was warning us about: It was the rear passenger tire. We went and put air into it, and when we did we found not only a screw stuck into the tire on one side, but a rusty nail stuck into it on the other. When stuff like that happens with vehicles, the mission likes us to get it fixed as soon as possible, so we sort of dropped our plans for the evening and took the car over to a repair shop, but it was closed. So we asked the vehicle coordinator what we should do, and he said we should put the spare on and go to the shop in the morning. So that evening if you drove by the local Firestone you would have seen two guys in white shirts and ties frustratedly jacking up their car, wrestling a punctured tire off and replacing it with a rickety spare. The next morning was district council, so Elder McVey and I left early to go to the Firestone and get the car fixed, and then afterward we had to take the car to the local Chevy dealership to get another problem fixed (the car would tell us it wasn't in park when it was, which would leave the car on and had the potential to drain the battery). So the zone leaders had to follow us to the dealership (which was a Mark Wahlberg Chevrolet, which I had never heard of before--I guess he owns a bunch of dealerships: Posters for movies he starred in were hung up everywhere as decoration) and then take us back to our area and do our training visit with us. The last training visit we had with the Scioto elders was pretty funky, too, so when I was out with Elder Klinkowski, he was like, "I promise we're going to have a normal training visit one of these times." We've got one more chance with them this transfer, so we'll see if that's true.

Thursday was a tough day. It started off with us going back to the dealership to pick up the car and then returning to our area. I don't know what was wrong with me, but I guess I just felt off-rhythm: We hadn't gotten the chance to do a lot of missionary work in those past few days, so it was like I had decelerated and needed to get back to where I was before. Before I left for my mission, I wrote down some mantras I wanted to return to when things got hard, and one of them was "Maintain momentum." It's way easier to keep going than it is to get started, and we had really slowed down with all the things that had gone wrong, so it was tough. Elder McVey saw something was wrong, so we sat in a park and he invited me to tell him what was wrong. I was able to explain how I was feeling, and he was about to give me some advice when a dude rode up on a bike and was like, "Mormons! I've got a song for you guys." He proceeded to play a song out of his speakers that was just the F word sung to different tunes. He then started filming us reacting to it. I tried to engage him in conversation, which didn't work until the song was over. But then it ended, and we were actually able to have a pretty good conversation (considering) about the really deep, difficult questions about religion. He told us some things about Scientology and a mock religion whose name I don't remember and told us as a general piece of advice to question everything and follow the money. To be honest, after he had gone, I kind of felt better than I had before he showed up. That interaction with him helped me: It was odd--it was like some kind of weird emotional catharsis. I think part of it was that it taught me that even though when we go out and actively try to find people to teach we don't always find people who are pleasant, the people who find us aren't always going to be pleasant either. Waiting for people to teach to come to us isn't necessarily going to produce a different ratio of interested people to not interested people than going out and trying to find people is. Elder McVey and I talked about the interaction afterward, and I told him I thought it was funny when people told us to question everything. I was like, "With everything we deal with and have to do as missionaries, do you think I'm NOT questioning everything on a daily basis?" But I can't deny the experiences I've had with faith and with the priesthood and with the gospel. It's just all true. It's as simple as that. I don't know what else to say.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that a fair amount of missionaries left in the middle of the transfer, on Thursday, and flew home. One of them was Elder Hall, my district leader in Warren for the my first two transfers there. Another was Elder Carter, one of my zone leaders in that same area for my first two transfers. Elder Mathews, the other zone leader in that area, and Elder Thomas, my trainer, will be headed home at the end of this transfer. Anyhow, four of those missionaries were serving on Ohio State campus, and move-in day for the university was this last Saturday. That means that now that school is starting there are only two companionships on OSU. So we reached out to President Stratford and asked him how he would feel about us taking a day or two during each week to go down there and help out. He said that would be great, so we're going to join their District Council on Thursday and then get kind of a crash course from them on what OSU missionaries do, and we'll begin helping them out later in the week. It's going to be good. It's going to be crazy, though. Basically all the missionaries on OSU do is contact all day. They just talk with a bunch of people. So in all likelihood, that's what we'll be doing. I'm hoping that helping out there breaks the fears I have about talking with everyone. Also, we'll be working with Elder Anderson, my second companion, whom I served with in Warren. It's going to be great.

I love you all. Keep the prayers and emails coming, please. :)

Elder Davis

Pictures: A far view of the Columbus city skyline, from the top floor of a hospital where we had companion study on Thursday.

Some ramen I made last night that I felt pretty proud of.