Week 53 - "Charles, we need you to hope again."

Hey, everyone!

This week's quote is from Charles Xavier to Charles Xavier (a younger version of himself) in X-men: Days of Future Past.

This week has been really great. My new companion, Elder Sears, is awesome. He's a solid missionary. He was trained by Elder Brinkerhoff (one of the assistants when I got here). He's very motivated to be obedient, and I feel we are already seeing miracles as a result of that. I'll lead off the email with a few.

So when I first got here, on my first day, we went to visit a woman who's going through a really, really rough time. Her situation health-wise is very poor. She has some very, very sticky family situations she's dealing with in her immediate, nuclear family, and her mother and siblings aren't helping her because they disagree with some decisions she made in her past. She was also 3 days away from eviction when we met with her, and she's functionally a single mother with two kids, one a toddler. We heard her story, and then we made a return appointment to come back and listen to her, and share something with her if possible. We left her with a Plan of Salvation pamphlet. She also told us she was looking for a Christmas tree, so we told her we'd look around, and that evening we were told that the pair of elders who are going around and cleaning the apartments were coming three days later, that Saturday, so we were de-junking the apartment for the next few days in preparation, and we found a Christmas tree (a little one, albeit, but still a Christmas tree) just sitting there in the apartment, along with a bunch of Christmas decorations and ornaments. So we decided we were just going to take those to her. When we came back, she told us that one of her grandkids was with her and was holding the pamphlet we gave her upside down and said he was going to read to her about Jesus. :) She said OK, and he said, "Jesus is coming, and he wants you to know it's soon, and he'll be coming to see you." She was like, "You're reading it upside down," and he was like, "I read it better that way." It was a pretty adorable story. She also told us he put himself in time out for doing something bad. He said he knew that she was going to do it, so he just went ahead and beat her to the punch and did it himself. 

So anyway, we were talking with her, and she kept telling us about all the crazy stuff that's happening to her, and we were there for probably 90 minutes. Elder Sears kept saying, "I wish we could help more," and "I wish we knew how to help," and she kept saying, "Oh, you're doing fine, honey." She said it was just helpful to get a break from her life as it was. There's someone in her household that's very, very uncivil toward her, and later on in the conversation we heard that person yelling inside. So we stayed and kept listening. But I started thinking to myself, "How can we help?" I asked that question of the Spirit, and started listening for responses. She hadn't read the pamphlet, and we later learned she had been given a copy of The Book of Mormon but didn't know where it was and hadn't really read it. I thought, "Maybe we can contact her on a daily basis with something." So then we asked if missionaries had given her a copy of The Book of Mormon, and she said they had, but she hadn't really read it. I realized while we were talking, based on what she had said, that meeting with us was really helping her to just get away from her life, and part of that was because we were listening, but it occurred to me that part of that was because of the Spirit we were bringing. So we asked her how she would feel if we sent her inspirational messages, emphasizing that because we weren't there every day, it would be an opportunity for her to feel what we brought when we visited. She said that would be fine, so we've started sending her those messages. Anyway, at that point, then we had to jet. After we left, Elder Sears asked me how long I had that idea. I told him just for the last 5 or 10 minutes. He told me that he had also noticed we had been there for a long time, but hadn't known how long we'd been, and he said he kept asking Heavenly Father, "Should we go?" And he kept being told, "No," or "Not yet." After I introduced that idea of sending inspirational messages, then he felt like we were ready to go. So that was really cool. We're hoping what we're sending has been helping her.

Later in the week, we were at church, and I've noticed that if I don't heed the promptings of the Spirit, I lose it. So I had the thought that we needed to start getting to know the members, so I struck up some conversations. And then later on, we walked outside the chapel during Sunday school, and we saw someone sitting on the couch. We passed him to make a call, and then we passed him on the way back into the chapel. As were sitting there, Elder Sears asked me if he felt like we should talk to the guy, so we went out and invited him to come in. We found out he isn't a member, but has been attending church for 3 years but hasn't been baptized. Elder Sears had never met him before. Later we met his mom, who is a member, and she invited us over for dinner. So that was cool. We're going to see if he's interested in pursuing that.

Basically we had two experiences where we tried to follow the Spirit, and we saw some good things happen. We're trying to be as obedient as we can so we can be worthy of the trust of Heavenly Father.

Some other cool stuff that's happened this week... We got the apartment all cleaned out. It feels way better now. We had fun with the elders who helped us clean it, too. One of them gave us a video from another missionary that was hilarious. I'll attach it to this email. You may only get the joke if you're from my generation, though. 

We went to four different Thanksgiving dinners, one of which was a family, the Kwoks, who I know from Worthington! They moved up here, and he's the new ward mission leader, so that was sweet. We took the son of one of the families we visited for Thanksgiving out to work with us, and at the end we had a great conversation about movies, and he gave us some movie recommendations, so that was good. There are some super supportive members and a recent convert named Martin who's stellar. He called us wanting to buy us groceries today and keeps giving us food, including spaghetti, beef and noodles and a very festive cheese ball that we've been enjoying. We're probably going to be able to take him to the temple soon to receive his endowment, and we may be able to take some other recent converts to do baptisms in the near future.

The rest of the week has just been pretty crazy. We've been dealing with a lot of administrative tasks (what else is new?), and haven't had a lot of spare time to get other things done. But I've come to expect that. I've warned Elder Sears that now that I'm here, we're probably going to get bombed with a bunch of crazy to-dos and circumstances that will interrupt things.

As far as the reason for the subject line, I decided when we set goals this past Friday that I was going to study each of the 42 doctrinal points that we teach during the transfer--one a day (6 weeks x 7 days a week = 42), and so I started by studying "God is our Loving Heavenly Father." I've continued to wonder how we can reach people, and I've started to ask in my mind and write down questions that I feel can be answered by those 42 points. So I asked, "Who is God? What is he really like? What are his traits and characteristics?" As a side note, it's easier to teach people principles when you have something they're already familiar with to connect it to, but it's becoming increasingly more difficult to teach people in a way they can understand that God loves them by referring to him as their father. There are so many abusive and deadbeat dads out there in the world that many people don't have experience with what a father should really be like, and so describing God as a father, as the Father of their spirits, has a tendency to sort of miss the mark. It's just one more way Lucifer is trying to stymie the work of salvation, and it's clever. How can people know what their Heavenly Father is like if they haven't experienced good from their earthly father? But as Elder Sears and I discussed it during a companion study, we realized that the majority of people in those situations know that the way their earthly father treats them is wrong, that they don't deserve that, and that being abusive and unkind is not how a father is supposed to be. It feels wrong. My personal opinion is that some of them understand that because they remember: They know what fatherhood is really supposed to be about and what their father is really supposed to treat them like. They've had a Father who treated them with love and care before, and they get echoes of that.

Anyhow, I realized that knowing who God REALLY is can bring a lot of hope into a person's life. If they consider God a punitive, uncaring and even abusive individual, and they are unclear on the real answer to the question of what God is like, hearing the message we share will give them hope in the future. It's rough seeing the difficult things people go through, but I'm realizing more and more that if we connect them properly with the very real concerns people deal with and the real questions they ask on a daily basis, they really can bring people greater hope. And hope moves us to action and allows us to make a better world, or to make it a better place, at least a bit at a time.

I love you all. Have a great week. Do your part every day to light the world within your sphere of influence.

Elder Davis

The picture with us and the Uchtdorfs. See if you can find me.

A screenshot of an insightful post I saw a couple weeks ago that hopefully encourages you to light the world.