Week 55 - "What a lesson for him! I trust he will profit by it."

Hey, everyone!

This week has been crazy, but it's been good. (None of my weeks aren't crazy anymore--I think it's probably just the way things are going to be for me, at least for the next little while.) The quote is from Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest. I'll talk about its relevance later in the email.

We'll start with a funny experience from this week. So one of the staples of missionary service, it seems like, is getting "flamed," or having people not follow through on their appointments, and we had a funny experience with that on Monday. So there was a young woman who Elder Sears and Elder Madsen contacted near the end of last transfer, and Elder Sears suspected she had only responded to the two of them because she was attracted to Elder Madsen. It was getting difficult to get in touch with her, but we called her, and she responded, and we were able to set up a return appointment, and then when we went to the appointment, we found out from her mom that she was at work (her mom winked at Elder Sears, and he was really uncomfortable, but she encouraged us to go and visit her at work). So later that evening after visiting an AWESOME member who lived nearby, which was probably what we were supposed to do--within the first 10 minutes he offered to give Elder Sears a job in the network security after his mission, which is the field Elder Sears really wants to go into, and by the time we left, he told us to come back anytime, seriously, and he would be very happy to see us, because he loves missionaries. He also told us to talk to him if we needed anything for food, and to just give him a few minutes and drop in and he would make us something to take home. We're stoked about him and his family, and we're hoping they'll come to church more and associate with members of the ward they can really relate to.

Anyhow, back to this girl. So we went to the place where she worked (it was a restaurant), and we met the girl at the front desk, who we spoke to and asked about her. We said we had an appointment with her and her mom invited us to go visit her at work, and we wondered if we could say hi. She was like, "You want to say hi to her?" We were like, "Yeah, if that's OK." She was like, "Yeah, I'll go get her." We watched her walk back, and then we waited there for about four or five minutes (it was a small building--there's no way it took her that long to go find her. I could just imagine her going and finding this girl, telling her what was going on, and then the girl getting super flustered--I don't think most people, when they flame us, thing we're going to go and track them down, but her mom told us where she worked and invited us to go visit her, so--and then the two of them not knowing what to do and just hiding). Another young woman who seemed very authoritative (probably the manager), walked out from the back (probably after assessing the situation and deciding she would take care of it), asked if she could help us, and then we explained the situation more briefly to her, and she just was like, "Yeah, she's really, uh, busy doing some side jobs in the back," and the whole time she was just looking over our heads and not looking us in the eye. We asked her to give her a card for us, and she said she would, and then we left. When we got the car, we were like, "Well, she dropped us." But at least it was a funny experience. So we stopped teaching her in Area Book.

The next day we were in Worthington on a training visit with those elders. Elder Sears went with Elder Blake, and I went with Elder Bond and Elder Meyers. I went with them to visit three different members, and I'm hoping that I was able to more solidly connect them with those families and sort of transfer my relationship with those people to them. I also got to visit a family Elder Thomas and I started teaching. They've learned a lot about the gospel over the past 9 months or so, so that was encouraging, but most of them didn't remember me. But that's fine. I also crashed pretty hard during the shared companion study we had and just slept on the floor while they talked, and I felt bad. I'm trying to figure out what I need to do to get more quality sleep--it's been a problem from the beginning of my mission, I feel like. Anyhow, that training visit we doubled into the area, and tomorrow we're going to be doing splits with those missionaries (one of us will be coming back into Delaware, and the other will be going into Worthington). The new handbook encourages young missionary leaders to bring the people they're exchanging with into their own area to give them a sense for what a "model area" looks like, which means that when we're going on splits I'll generally be the one going out of town, which means I'll be in Worthington probably four more times this transfer, which I'm absolutely fine with. So that'll be cool.

The next day we had our Christmas zone conference, which was really cool. We did this service project for an organization that helps women and families leaving abusive relationships--we made all these blankets by taking fleece and then doing a sort of braided edge on them. Elder Sears and I got two done. We forgot to take pictures, which seems like something neither of us is good at remembering to do. The rest of the conference was spent first playing games and then getting training on the new handbook, and then hearing from Karl Anderson, the guy who gave us the tour of Kirtland at the beginning of my mission. It was AWESOME. There were very few moments where I wasn't just buried in my notebook, writing. Basically he detailed his experiences as a patriarch giving blessings and just generally as a member of the church and explained the characteristics of Jesus Christ that he has come to understand. He said, "That's the Jesus Christ I know." He explained that the Savior is someone who reasons with us and considers our concerns. He pointed out that when Martin Harris asked Joseph for a command from God to mortgage his farm for the production of the Book of Mormon, the communication from the Lord could have just been, "To my servant Martin Harris, do it," but that's not what he said. Instead, we got section 19. And Brother Anderson explained the relationship that section has with Martin's concerns and how Christ responded to those concerns. It was awesome. I'll take a picture of my notes in my journal. I'll send them to you. Hopefully they're legible. I'll also send my notes from the departing testimonies that were given at the zone conference. Each missionary got 60 seconds. There were a LOT of missionaries who are going home this transfer. Elder Bench was an assistant, Elder Davis was the only other Elder Davis in the mission (haha--I win), Elder Gallagher was my companion in Warren, Elder Lewis was in my district both in my second transfer in Worthington and in each of my transfersi n Warren, Elder Lowry was one of my zone leaders in Riverside, and Elder Blake was one of my zone leaders in Chillicothe my first transfer. Elder and Sister Allison were some senior missionaries who were really awesome. So all of those were some big lessons for me (see the subject line). I also felt some very sacred feelings at that conference that I think have changed me a lot, and they had to do with what I'm going to write about at the end of this email. 

Two days later, after weekly planning, we were about to call a person we were teaching, James, to see if we could go visit him. We hadn't seen him in a while. Right then, he beat us to it and called us and invited us to come over. So we came later that night, and that was a hot mess of an experience. He's got a girlfriend who he's going to be meeting on the 20th who he met by a really cool experience. They were in a relationship 30 years ago, and then she prayed to God to ask him to send a good man into her life, and then she got a letter from him. He reached out to her because he felt like he should after all that time. So he was just fiddling with his phone trying to figure out a bunch of tech things, and we helped him with that, and he was unfocused (which is reasonable--"I love to see the temple..."), but additionally, his TV was on, and his roommate was watching it, and it was playing Dr. Pimple Popper, which apparently is now a TV show and not just a YouTube channel, and which I was morbidly fascinated by (thanks, Brother Barton), so it was just distractions all around. I need to come up with my own safeguard plan for dealing with situations when the TV is on in a person's home, because I struggle to focus--it just sucks me in. Anyway, he asked if we could come back again, so we set an appointment for the next day. The next day we came, and Home Alone was playing, which wasn't much better, distraction-wise, but I made a real effort to focus. We came into that lesson hoping to share a scripture with him about how we have to take action for the gospel to have an influence in our lives, basically just trying to encourage him to keep commitments, but Elder Sears was listening to the Spirit and felt like he needed to share James 1:5. So we did, and then James kept reading, and we discussed it, and the Spirit was very present, and we found ourselves in James 2, where it talks about how faith without works is dead. We basically were able to give the same lesson, but it was more in a self-guided-and-accompanied-by-us-tour way rather than a call-to-repentance sort of way. It was really neat. It was definitely a miracle. I've had that experience a few times where I come into a lesson planning to share one thing and sort of lay down the hammer and then feel to do something else, and it's a testament to me of how much the Lord loves the people that we're teaching that I've been in those lessons with. He wants us to take great care as we teach them and try to help them, and we feel that as his emissaries. It's also cool how we'll be like, "X needs to get accomplished. We'll do Y to get that done," and then we go to do that, and the Lord is like, "Do Z," and we're like, "But Lord, you don't understand. We need to get X accomplished," and he's like, "Do Z," and we're like, "OK, I guess," and then it turns out to be a way better way to get to X than we had thought of. It's cool to see that guiding influence. It's another testament that the work we do is real. James said we were welcome to come back anytime. He also testified that since the missionaries came into his life, when we came over we really helped him. We've uplifted him. We also got the message across that we needed to, and we extended a commitment, and he promised he would keep it. His girlfriend will also be moving to the area, and he wants to come to church with her when she comes, and he wants to join the church. So that was a really good experience. It was a really good lesson for him, and I hope he profits by it.

Speaking of guidance to know what to say, on Thursday I was asked to give a talk in church and to use Elder Soares' talk, "Take Up Our Cross," which he gave this last general conference. I felt pretty guided to know what to say, but I also felt a tiny bit off, like maybe it wasn't quite what was needed, but it all ended up OK. I'll send you the notes from that, too, so you can read it. I don't have time to write much more about it. But I prefaced the talk by saying, which I felt this was true, that maybe everything I had learned was more for me than for anyone else, but I hoped someone could benefit from it. I hope what I taught is also stuff I have learned to do and can learn to do better.

That's about it for this week. The spiritual insights are more in the talk. Also, below is a photo of the photo of all of us at the mission conference with Elder Uchtdorf. I finally got my own copy. Also, I copied the other one I sent from another elder's email, and I didn't realize he had circled himself on it, so just so you know, the elder that picture was pointing to wasn't me.

I love you all. Have a Merry Christmas!

Elder Davis