Week 43 - "I think I'm gettin' the hang of this!"

Hello, everyone!

This week was... interesting. It seems like it's my lot at this time in my mission to have a bunch of variety and deal with a lot of administrative items and so forth. I'm not going to complain--it makes for a different mission experience, and sometimes that can be a good thing. The quote is from Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. I'm still learning.

So the week started off with Elder Smith and I heading down to Jackson, Ohio, for the Jackson Apple Festival. It's basically a mix between a swap meet or farmer's market (with the booths and so forth, but most people sell fair food or advertise a local business instead of selling produce); a carnival, with games and rides and so forth; and a concert (they had a Beatles tribute band performing Thursday, which I unfortunately missed. 😞). So what the missionaries do is set up a booth about the church there at the festival and then send missionaries around to ask if the people there want to sign up for a free raffle to win artwork of Jesus Christ. Four of the prizes were framed prints, and the last was a little miniature replica of Thorvaldsen's Christus (see picture below). It's funny how many people aren't interested in signing up for a free raffle to win a prize. I'm not sure if it's just because they're not religious or have preconceived notions about us missionaries or what. 

I've realized as I've been a missionary that the first step of doing any teaching is finding a person who's willing to listen, or as Preach My Gospel puts it, "finding them who will receive you." People's openness and willingness to listen is a prerequisite to their hearing the gospel. That's kind of frustrating, but it's just the way it works, especially in street contacting scenarios. Those who decide before we open our mouths that they aren't interested in listening to what we have to say won't get the opportunity to feel the influence of the spirit as we bear testimony of the things we know. That's difficult, because people who have negative opinions about us based on incorrect information don't give themselves the chance to learn what we're really about. I guess that's why anything we can do to educate people about what our church is and does is good--it allows us to correct bad information, which may help those we speak to soften their hearts and hear more of our message. But if someone doesn't want to listen to you, as a missionary you just have to sort of move on to the next person and see if they'll listen. Anyway, we went around the festival a bunch of times and met some interesting people. The first day we were there was pretty slow until the late evening, and then the next morning, before we left, was relatively slow as well, but we met some cool people. One was a self-described "Carny" named Liz who worked one of the games. She had a tragedy in her life recently and moves around a lot, considering she works in the carnival business. She was really nice. 

We did a brief training visit for about an hour where Elder Blake (one of the zone leaders) and I went out to invite people to sign up for the raffle and our companions watched the booth. We talked about missionary work then, and back at the apartment, and he taught me a lot about missionaries' conception of what good missionary work is and how the things we do and the way we do them can ultimately be really ineffective. I think we come into the mission field expecting to work the same way our parents and brothers and sisters worked, and that's not always the case. Missionary work is changing day by day, and it changes from area to area. We have to find out what we can do to most help the area we find ourselves in. 

While we were going around we ran into a guy who was pretty anti. He was calling whoever wrote The Book of Mormon an antichrist and invited us to read the New Testament, which he said contradicted The Book of Mormon. It's always funny to me when people do that. People are like, "Read the Bible more carefully." I want to invite them to do the same. I think if more people had religious literacy and did more independent Bible study and consulted the Lord in prayer they would come to the same or similar conclusions we do. I don't know that man's background, but I know that my own study of the New Testament has led me to conclude that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the restored church of Jesus Christ on the earth today and that the Book of Mormon is true and another testament of Jesus Christ. Missionaries have told me that sometimes people will throw 2 Timothy 3:16 at them to suggest that an individual scripture or verse they're citing is, on its own, enough and an accurate statement of truth. The problem with that (aside from it being patently and blatantly untrue--see Song of Solomon, the many verses in the scriptures that record the lies and deceptions of evil individuals and so forth) is that it takes a lot of communication and clarity to be precise, and as we look exclusively at individual scriptures we toss aside clarifications and doctrines that give greater understanding and meaning to the reader and help the doctrine become clear. A holistic approach to the scriptures, not one in which we pay exclusive attention to individual verses at the expense of others, is always going to yield greater understanding and greater closeness to God. So indeed, as 2 Timothy says, all scripture is profitable for sound doctrine. All scripture. All of it. Together. Not each individual scripture. All scripture.

Goodness, I keep going off on tangents. Sorry--I suppose these things have been occupying my mind since the apple festival. Anyhow, the experience was super fun--there were three elder companionships together at the Jackson elders' apartment when we were there, and there was one day that there were going to be a total of 12 missionaries at the festival helping out (we were only there Tuesday and Wednesday). It was fun to spend some time with a larger group of missionaries and get to know them better. It was also good to get an opportunity to proselyte about something that I felt was extremely neutral. Being like, "Hey, do you want to participate in a free raffle?" helped me practice reaching out to people, and experiencing rejection helped me realize that some people just don't want certain things, and that's OK. It doesn't have to be anything personal. I feel now like I'm more prepared to street contact individuals comfortably.

Our time at the festival was punctuated by visits, one companionship at a time, to the church to get meals--the ward very kindly provided all sorts of stuff for us to eat, and those times were nice opportunities for us to take a break and decompress a little. After Elder Blake and I encountered the antichrist guy, Elder Smith and I went to dinner, and I was sort of just fuming inside. I think he was concerned for my faith and testimony and advised me not to let it bother me, and I was like, "Don't worry--my testimony's not bothered or shaken or anything--I'm just MAD." He offered to give me a priesthood blessing, and I said that would probably help, and it did. He said a lot of things that I think I needed to hear and that I'll be able to draw on in the future. One was that my forebears are assisting me in the work. That was good to hear. It's nice to know when you're not alone.

On Wednesday, after doing district council at the church, Elder Smith and I headed back to Chillicothe, and later that night we and the sisters in our area, Sister Petersen and Sister Porter, got to help with a missionary activity for mutual for the youth of the ward. It was a really cool activity: Each of them got a mission call and put their name on a little note near the location of their mission on a map, then the boys learned to tie ties, and then they sat down with us, the missionaries, and we told them about our experiences on the mission and in the MTC. It was really cool. I wish I had been able to have something like that growing up, especially if missionaries who were currently serving had been able to participate in it. I think it would have helped me prepare mentally if I had known details about how my journey through the MTC and on a mission was going to go. It was great to be a part of preparing other kids to have those experiences and tell them about the ups and the downs. After that kids learned to sew on a button and then made paper airplanes (like they were flying off to the mission field). It was a cool activity.

Thursday we got to serve some members of the ward and power-wash the siding on their house. They sent us home with a really nice meal, and they're very interesting people. The husband was a convert from the Community of Christ and has an archery shop in his backyard. The rest of Thursday and Friday were just dealing with a lot of administrative stuff--we're working on a Google Sheet to keep information about our visits to ward members and so forth organized, and we're making steady progress, but it's taking a while, and Friday's the day we do weekly planning. It was also the day that the first Book of Mormon video was released, so we watched it. We both learned some things from it--for instance, I hadn't ever thought about how, from the perspective of the reader the reality of Lehi's visions is taken as fact, though Laman and Lemuel and the rest of Lehi's family only have Lehi's word for it that he saw all these things. Based on his behavior, especially his complete willingness and steadfastness about following the Lord, it would be easy to see Lehi as just a crazy old man who's got some strange ideas in his head. I just started re-reading The Book of Mormon from the beginning, and I realized that Nephi may have struggled with this as well--the language he uses suggests that had he not prayed about his father's vision his heart might not have been softened by the Lord, and he might have rebelled as well. It just helped me understand the great faith Nephi had to have in the face of such a strange account by his father and the difficulty Laman and Lemuel had with it. If you haven't seen it yet, watch it--it's good.

On Saturday we went down to Waverly (a town that's south of us, but in our area) and ended up getting a referral from Salt Lake while we were down there! We had a lot of trouble finding her house (the GPS was putting her basically in the middle of a field next to a strip mall), but after driving up and down the highway for a while, and with a little finagling we eventually found the address. The referral's name is Tiffany, and we gave her the Bible she asked for and set up another time to return. She also has a husband and kids. I have great hopes that will work out well. 

On Sunday we returned to Waverly and dropped by a member we hadn't met, and it turns out that she was in an awful car accident with her son two months ago, but they both miraculously survived. They were sideswiped by one semi and then hit by another, and despite a lot of broken bones (the son had 13 surgeries, and they only just barely returned home) they lived through it. I'm learning that I still need to develop my self-control. While we were meeting with them "The Green Mile" was playing on TV next to us, and I was pretty distracted. But we had a good conversation about why bad things happen and what God can do to sanctify them and make them for our benefit.

That Sunday we were approached by a member of the ward, Brother McCoy, who gave us each an envelope with replicas of historic Ohio money, including a note from the Kirtland Safety Society, and these little things the size of poker chips called "Tuits." I had seen a few wooden ones at the apartment before, but never these plastic ones. The idea is you give one to someone if you ask them whether they did something and they tell you they didn't get around to it. You hand them a round tuit. (Uncle Barney, I thought you'd enjoy that). When we saw that they were like poker chips, I started trying to figure out how to do LeChiffre's poker chip flipping trick from Casino Royale. Elder Jones, who was with us for two days at the beginning of the transfer, is a huge James Bond fan, so I'm going to try to impress him the next time I see him. I think he'll get a kick out of it. I've found you learn things a lot faster on the mission. For instance, I learned how to play "Jesus, Lover of My Soul" on the piano quite quickly when I was in Warren. I think that's a testament to the Spirit. On a previous Sunday Elder McCoy also gave us a tie bar engraved with our name and the name of the Chillicothe Ward. a picture of that is enclosed as well.

That's everything I have to report this week. Tomorrow we're having training visits with the zone leaders, and zone conference will be the next day. Elder Smith has an appreciation for organization, and he's gathered up all the extra, unnecessary items we have in the apartment, and we'll finally be able to get rid of that all at zone conference (see the GIF below). I'll let you know how that all goes.

Elder Davis

Pictures:

Us at the Apple Festival Booth (from left to right, Elder Smith, Me, Elder Wiggins, Elder Muhlestein, Sister Petersen and Sister Porter).

Apple Festival prizes

Currency replicas

Tie bar and round tuits

A little humor for last week's Come, Follow me (I apologize if it's irreverent)