Week 47 - "More isn't always better, Linus. Sometimes it's just more."

Hey, everyone.

So this quote from Julia Ormond's character, Sabrina, in Sabrina popped into my head when I was doing something earlier today. I think a lot of different ideas with this theme have been jangling around in my head over the past few days/weeks, and I'd like to kind of put those ideas on paper, as it were. Also, when we came home from the grocery store today I realized there's more food in the apartment than I was expecting there to be, and I didn't need to spend quite as much as I have in the last two weeks or so, I've just needed to use the resources I have at hand (more isn't always better).

So on Thursday morning I got to go and see Nancy in Worthington for a brief minute as well as Amber, a member of the church who would feed us a lot and whose house I called from on Christmas Day my first week or so in the mission. Pictures from those meetings are below. That was awesome. Then we went to transfers at the Dublin building, and I met Elder Neddo. It turns out he's a big fan of movies, too, and especially enjoys some of my favorites, like the Ocean's movies, Inception, Lord of the Rings, and 12 Angry Men. So we've been getting along pretty well. 

It's been another weird week in Chillicothe, though, as far as scheduling. A lot of good things have happened, but it seems like it's been difficult to find time to breathe, which may be mostly my fault--I want to spend the time we have as effectively as possible, so we try to do as much as we can in each day, but it's left me pretty worn out. Like yesterday: We went to the church early, by 8:45, to participate in a presentation on member missionary work from the stake, which was led by one of the missionary couples from the mission, and then we had church immediately after. After church, at noon, we met with the missionary couple to get some advice about how we can help the ward implement a new initiative, and then we helped the husband give one of the sister missionaries a blessing, and then we met with our bishop to establish what he wanted us to help the ward with in that transfer. After that we scarfed down some food before going with our ward mission leader to Waverly, a community about 30 minutes away, to visit a few families in the ward whom he wanted to see. Immediately after that he took us back to the church, where we were late coming in to a broadcast for the North America Northeast area from Elder Randall K. Bennett, Elder D. Todd Christofferson, and Elder M. Russell Ballard. After that we took home some food from a member who was kind enough to bring some leftovers from a turkey dinner she had made to the church for us, we ate, and then we went to a nursing home in the area to see a few members. We finally returned back home at a little after 8 and were able to do our hour of personal study for the day. It's just felt very fast-paced, which is great, but I'm feeling really tired, and I wonder if I'm pushing myself too hard. 

It's really difficult for me to strike a balance that I can feel good about between taking care of myself and spending each minute effectively. In the mission field people say a lot of things to suggest that missionaries aren't working hard enough and that they need to do more and accomplish more. I think that's a dangerous thing to do, because if you have a missionary who's working their guts out (not that I'm saying that's me), and they hear that message, I feel like they're either going to end up despairing or just running themselves into the ground. It's easy for me to take care of myself, and it's easy for me to give it my all, but it's not easy for me to do both and feel like I'm doing exactly what I need to be doing, especially when so much emphasis is placed on being effective. It's interesting, too, because when interviews rolled around last transfer I had been feeling pretty bad about the fact that we weren't showing a lot of numerical results in Chillicothe. I didn't feel like we were necessarily living up to our expectations, missionary-wise. But as President and I talked, he advised me in this area not to be too concerned about the numbers and to do what we can to help the members. I guess I just don't like feeling like I'm some sort of exception to the rules or the guidelines. Maybe it's because the rules are still there, and I'm pretty consistently reminded of what they are, and that makes me wonder whether I'm doing the right thing by doing what I was specifically told to do. It's a weird phenomenon and something that my brain doesn't deal well with. But I feel a huge sense of catharsis and relief writing it down, like everything is going to be all right.

In other weird events we had to cram everything in our apartment into non-carpeted spaces on Friday because carpet cleaners were coming to our apartment and our housing coordinator wanted to make sure they didn't neglect any of the carpet by just working around the furniture. So that day we were kneeling on swivel chairs and reaching over recliners to get at the peanut butter, plates, butterknives and cups in the pantry and then opening the fridge and stretching over the open door in front of us to get at the jam and the milk inside. It was an interesting day. We spent a lot of the evening just putting everything back where it was supposed to go. It's possible we'll be doing a little of that tonight, too, since we've been asked to identify spots on the walls that need repainting, and the maintenance guys will either be coming today or tomorrow, so we've pulled the furniture and so forth away from the walls to protect it. We spent some amount of time Friday trying to decide how we wanted the living room set up, since some elders (Elder Gibson, Elder Blake and Elder Barrus) will be going around the mission this transfer, visiting each apartment and helping us clean, organize and feng shui it. I spent a good 10 or 15 minutes trying to determine where I thought our couch should go. After cramming all the furniture into the middle of the living room today, I said to Elder Neddo, "Hey, I got it! I know how we should arrange the room! I think this really ties everything together, you know?" He was like, "Me, too. Let's keep it this way."

Saturday was interesting. We participated in a separate broadcast by those same general authorities about missionary work (Elder Bennett talked a bit about always being in finding mode--maybe that's why I've been a little triggered over the past couple of days), and then we spoke together about it as a mission. Then we and the Jackson elders "helped" one of the sisters fix her bike (Elder Muhlestein from Jackson did actually help. He changed the rear bike tire, which was what they asked us to do. I saw that the valve stem on the front tire was askew and wasn't pointed toward the center of the wheel and decided that was bugging me, so I emptied the tire and rearranged it and pumped it back up), and then we returned home for personal study and lunch and so forth. We had originally thought about going to Waverly that day to try to contact some referrals and such, but it was getting late, and we didn't want to waste any mileage by going there for such a brief period of time. I was trying to plan stuff to do in Chillicothe, but I just kept feeling this nagging pull that we needed to go see Alex, one of the people we're teaching, in Waverly. I talked to Elder Neddo about it, and he was like, "Let's go. We listen to the Spirit." When we were saying a prayer before we left I felt like we should visit a previous referral we had had down there, and we did, with no luck, but then we went and visited Alex, and his cousin was there. We chatted with him for a while and learned more about him, and we were there for over an hour, and when we were leaving, Alex's cousin, Jared, was like, "I like these guys more than the ones you've had over before." (Alex has been investigating the church for six years.) And he was like, "When they're coming over again, let me know." There's this great talk that we had listened to that day called "Conversion of a Catholic" by Bill Carpenter where he says that as a missionary you often have to help people and meet their needs before you can talk to them about the gospel. I think we did that with Jared. I think we helped him know that we were chill with him and weren't going to be judgmental toward him. Sometimes I think that's the number one thing people who aren't religious worry about concerning people who are religious: That we're going to judge or condemn them. If we read the scriptures, there's no basis for condemnation on our part. Christ says, "I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men." If we're deciding people's eternal fate, in my opinion, we're not living our religion properly, and there's other scripture that supports that assertion. Yes, it becometh every man to warn his neighbor, and yes, we are to relay, and emphasize with our own testimonies, the words that prophets have spoken, but that doesn't mean that we have the final say on whether people end up in "hell." We don't. So many people feel unwelcome at churches because of the way they look or the things they've done. Alex has talked about how he and his wife would walk into churches, and people would see his tattoos and piercings and see she was pregnant and tell them to leave. They would tell them they didn't want them there solely on the basis of the way they looked. That's messed up. It's like the Zoramites: They didn't want people in their synagogues because of their coarse apparel. But that's never been an acceptable reason to cast someone out of your congregation. It's not even an acceptable reason today. We ask people to dress in Sunday best out of respect for the ordinance we participate in and out of respect for the Lord, but we don't throw anyone out if that's not what they're wearing, or at least, we shouldn't.

Anyway, I feel like I'm going off on a tangent. So we ended up meeting Jared, and that was cool. I'm hoping we'll be able to see him again and teach him more about our faith. And it seems like we were led there and were supposed to be there. Having those experiences always feels good. It always feels like we're doing the work of God.

Also, one other thing that was cool: After the devotional Saturday we dropped by the library. So I've been working on this spreadsheet for the ward that allows us, the missionaries, to keep track of the members we've visited, whether their contact information is correct (which information goes directly to the ward clerk so he can correct bad information), what notes we have about the visit and, if they're inactive or less active, concerns about church attendance or other commandments that we or the ward can help them with (say they need a ride or a new job or whatever). It offers a simple way for us missionaries to record what work we've been doing with members so the ward leadership can see it and keep track of it. I was working on it all through last transfer with Elder Smith, and it uses a combination of JavaScript and Google Sheets formulas to put all the information in a central place and view it sorted by whatever category we'd like. I think it's going to help this ward get a handle on the multitude of records that it has for the hundreds of people in the ward whom we've never met and whose addresses and phone numbers we're not even sure are correct anymore. I'm hoping it would be useful for other missionaries in other areas, too, so I sent it to President, but I haven't heard back yet.

There are a couple other thoughts that have been on my mind about how sometimes more is just more. So in the past several transfers there's been a pretty big push for increasing the number of people being found in the mission. Initially for every 1 person baptized the mission was finding some amount of people in the 20s or 30s somewhere. That is to say of 20 or 30 new people being taught, 1 of them was baptized. Then there was this push for an increase in the finding in the mission. Missionaries were asked to be more focused on finding and to try harder to find people to teach. The number of people the mission found exploded, and there were a lot of missionaries who were excited. I think I heard from two or three missionaries in leadership that the amount of people we found was higher than any other mission in the North America Northeast area. At zone conference President talked about this statistic and drew a sort of funnel with these numbers, with the amount of people found at the top, followed by the amount of people at church, the amount of people on date, and the amount of people baptized (1) per baptism at the bottom. Obviously not every person you find and begin to teach is going to attend church, set a baptismal date or be baptized, as nice as that would be. So President talked about how we had been finding more. Then he asked if we knew what all the numbers were as a result of our increase in finding people. We didn't know. So he erased the finding number and put a number somewhere above 100. That was the only change. He said that now, instead of it taking us finding 20 or 30 people to end up finding a person who is ready for baptism, it was taking us finding 100 people to end up finding a person who is ready for baptism (a major drop in efficiency). He asked what that meant to us. Someone suggested that we were focusing too much on the numbers, and President agreed with that. It's always good to hear a mission president concur with that statement that we're too focused on numbers and not enough on people. It's a huge relief for leadership to recognize that there's more to the work than just pumping out numbers. So it turned out that in the aspect of finding people to teach (which really just requires that a person be taught something and agree to a return appointment), we were leading the pack. But in every other respect our output was awful. We had been focusing on the wrong thing. Considering the parameters for finding a new person, it would be easy to mark down a person you met on the street as a new person being taught, but we were taught several zone conferences ago by Elder Gibson to seriously consider whether a person is worth putting into our area books after our interaction with them. The whole goal and purpose of the area book is to help us keep track of people who are being taught or whom we suspect will be ready to be taught in the near future. It can be easy to think that we're being successful when we're "finding" new people, but if those people aren't turning into people who come into the church, or even just people who are actually willing to listen to and learn from our message, is there any point? One of what I think is the most important segments in Preach My Gospel is found in the final two paragraphs of the final chapter. It says "Missionary work has its greatest effect as people make and keep the commitment to stay active in the church all the days of their lives. It is not enough for people to simply come into the Church. They must come to stay. All of your teaching and invitations must be directed toward this end." In our zeal to do "missionary work," sometimes we can shortcut and forget about what's actually important, which is bringing people to a knowledge and testimony of Jesus Christ and of the principles that will lead them to enduring happiness, namely faith in Christ, repentance, baptism, the gift of the Holy Ghost and enduring to the end. I feel that is what we should be trying to do, regardless of the numbers it results in, though we should focus on those who are the most receptive to the message.

Anyhow, I'm going to get off my soapbox now. Probably this isn't relevant to most of you. So I'll add something else: Jeffrey R. Holland said in a talk that there are people who have wanted all their lives to serve missions, but for health or other reasons are unable to do so. He indicates that the leaders of the church are aware of these people, and that they will always be on the team, even as they are honorably released from service. He follows that statement with a forceful, "But we need the rest of you." Never more than on my mission have I understood the need for all of us to do everything we can to "succor the weak, lift up the hands the hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees." There are a lot of people here in Ohio who need help, both from a spiritual and a temporal standpoint, and it's frustrating to see so many who are in need and not be able to do much for them because of the focus of our specific calling. So I'd ask each of you to do what you can to "succor the weak, lift up the hands that hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees." There are a lot of people around you who need help, and you can help them. You just need to reach out and do it. I believe that the more people we can help, the more people those people will be able to help, and so on and so forth. So think of someone you know and do something to bless their life today. Some think "it is only great power that can hold evil in check," but as one wise wizard said, "That is not what I have found. I've found that it is the small, everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love." The greater impact you can make in the world around you, the greater impact you will make in the world as a whole. Lift where you stand.

I love you all! I apologize if this email was a little disjointed. I'm tired.

Elder Davis

Elder Bowler, Elder Meyers and I with Nancy (and Wilson).

Elder Bowler, Elder Meyers and I with Amber.