Week 61 - "A hero is not judged by the size of his strength, but by the strength of his heart."

Hello, everyone!

So I looked back through my emails and found out I've been one behind for the past 5 weeks or so, so I'm sorry about that. I guess last week was week 60, which means this is week 61.

The quote this week I landed on was from Disney's Hercules. It's something Zeus says to Hercules. I had a couple different options for quotes, though. I was oscillating between about four: that one, "Oh, look! Now I've gone and got a sniffle!" (Indiana Jones from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), "Why so many questions?" (Saccharine from The Adventures of Tin Tin), and "From now on, I'm gonna try to be the same." "The same as what?" "The same as people who aren't different." (Howard Bannister and Judy from What's Up, Doc?) 

There's been a lot going through my head this week, and a lot of things have happened. I'll try to talk about all of it in one email.

So the first reason for the first quote is that we had zone conference this week, and one of the activities was to go into a room with our companion, kneel in prayer and ask what we need to do to repent and come closer to God. As I did, I felt like the thing I needed to do was to love more. Essentially, I felt like I needed to be more free and open with how much I cared for people--that I should care about them and express that care for them regardless of what I thought the outcome was going to be (more specifically, whether they were going to progress in the gospel or not). That probably sounds odd, considering that "Jesus said love everyone," but it can be hard as a missionary, and it's been hard for me: When I care about people, when, as Preach My Gospel teaches us to do, I "love people and desire their salvation," and when I try to feel that care with every individual I meet, it gets exhausting. You can spend a lot of emotional capital trying to love a lot of different people, because when many of those people don't take the time to get to know and appreciate you, when they don't reciprocate, because they make assumptions about you and reject you, that can hurt a lot, and it can make you take a step back and reserve your care for people with whom you think it's actually going to make a difference. I guess that's my rationale for why I wasn't doing that in the first place. But I felt like I needed to love more freely and unconditionally. I think it was important for me to understand that, because it affected some of my decision-making later in the week. But I can get to that later. Anyway, that was something I learned at zone conference Tuesday. We also a bunch of other good principles that I think really strike at the root of our efforts as missionaries. We talked about goal-setting and obedience and why missionary work is so difficult and what we can do about it. It was a good zone conference. We also heard that there are 21 new missionaries coming in this next transfer. I'm a little worried I'm going to be called to train, because I felt last transfer like I needed to prepare to train. So keep praying for me, I guess.

The Indiana Jones thing was because we just have a virus going around Ohio and the mission. It's just a little cold, but apparently it takes a while to go away, and Elder Henshaw's been dealing with it for the past week or so.

The Tin Tin thing was because I've been struggling with a lot of personal questions. I have every confidence that the answers to those questions can be found in the scriptures and in spending time with the Spirit, but we only get an hour of personal study every day, so that's been somewhat frustrating, too. When I get home I want to just sequester myself somewhere with the scriptures and just study for hours and days and weeks. Life marches on, so I don't know how possible that will be for me to do, and I've noticed real gospel learning sinks deep when the study periods are broken up with application of the doctrine, but it would be nice to just have time to get immersed in the scriptures. It can sometimes feel like, even with the hour of study, that I just get a little sip of water in the morning and then have to walk through a desert all day. I have so many questions and so many things I want to look into and so much to learn. But it is what it is.

Earlier today I had a conversation with my family on the subject of the last quote. I have felt compelled to do things in my missionary service that don't seem like the normal picture of a "good missionary." But I'm not sure that picture is an accurate one. Preach My Gospel quotes President Hinckley as saying, 

"So many of us look upon missionary work as simply tracting. Everyone who is familiar with this work knows there is a better way. That way is through the members of the Church. Whenever there is a member who introduces [someone], there is an immediate support system. The member bears testimony of the truth of the work. He is anxious for the happiness of his ... friend. He becomes excited as that friend makes progress in learning the gospel. The full-time missionaries may do the actual teaching, but the member, wherever possible, will back up that teaching with the offering of his home to carry on this missionary service. He will bear sincere testimony of the divinity of the work. He will be there to answer questions when the missionaries are not around. He will be a friend to the convert who is making a big and often difficult change... The process of bringing new people into the Church is not the responsibility alone of the missionaries. They succeed best when members become the source from which new [people] are found." (That''s from a talk called "Find the Lambs, Feed the Sheep," by the way, from the May 1999 issue of the Ensign, and it's awesome. Go read it.)

Because of that and other statements from President Hinckley and others, and probably because of some of my own weaknesses, I have felt a need to focus on recent converts and put effort and care into the people we already have in our teaching pool and in our potentials and not lose them. Some of those statements are as follows:

"There is absolutely no point in doing missionary work unless we hold on to the fruits of that effort. The two must be inseparable. ... Every convert is a great and serious responsibility." (Gordon B. Hinckley, from the same talk)

And then this from my grandfather:

"And then, finally, there was the unstinting love of Mormon people around him. No matter how he slapped them, tore at them, condemned them-- sometimes in their presence, sometimes not--they loved him. They invited him. They got an arm around him. They stuck with him. And love ALWAYS wins. It may take a long time. Love, the tangible kind of love that somehow grows out of this church and out of the Spirit, does eventually wear down even a stone. And it moved him,--though he wasn't willing to shed tears publicly, he did privately--moved him that Doug Bunker fasted four days while teaching at Harvard Business School--moved him that my wife did the same. It moved him that we just were willing to do anything to help. And even a little it moved him that after he told me joined the Church of the Good Shepherd, I could have said, 'Well, then, good-bye!' and I didn't, I said, 'Well, maybe that is a step in the right direction,' and I was sincere. It turned out to be that. So the 'love' thing counted." (Truman G. Madsen, talking of Milo Baughman in his talk "Every Member a Bird-Dogger.")

"I've wished sometimes in my slang phrase--I've wished that President McKay could have said 'Every member a bird dogger,' because that's really what he wants. He doesn't want you to teach the gospel and the discussions to people, or know all the answers to all the mysteries, he just wants you to point. To invite them in your living room and calmly fold your arms and not get upset when within ten minutes the missionaries are asking the man if he'll be baptized when he knows it's true." (Truman G. Madsen, in "Every Member a Bird-Dogger")

Statements like those and the feeling I get when I hear them make me think that I need to really show people how much I care about them, and how much Christ cares about them. I also think the more we can help members understand that they can indeed do missionary work, the more we empower them to do it and show them how and demonstrate to them that they can be successful, the more missionary work they will do in the future, and the more the work will progress over time. We will have more than just the full-time missionaries--we will have member missionaries who are excited to share the restored gospel with others, and they will share the gospel with their friends, and we will spend most of our time doing what we were trained to do in the MTC, and what we are taught to continually strive to be better at: teach.

Anyhow, what happened this week? We had the zone conference (which, but the way, I felt validated in again--President showed us the number of baptisms in different areas in the past few months and how they correlated with an increase in visits missionaries made to members. On Wednesday we were able to visit with a member family that, in their awesome charity and love, is housing two homeless people right now. We also met with a less-active family the father of whom came to church last Sunday, and we had a good time with him. He should be a stand-up comedian. He lived in Hawaii, and he told about how there are so many chickens on the island of Kauai that he was over at an older guy's house once, and he was like, "Are you guys hungry? I'm hungry. I want some chicken," walked out the back door, and 10 minutes later they saw him hobbling through his backyard with a shovel chasing after chickens. He also told about a time he watched a septic tank explode while a guy was mowing his lawn over top of it. The guy was fine, but they never found the mower. His delivery was incredible, and he had me in stitches.

Oh, man! I nearly forgot one of the coolest things that happened this week! So we looked back through our voice messages, and I heard someone say, "Hey, Elder Davis, this is Elder Pollan. We have a referral for you." I called the number back, and Elder Carter Pollan, my district leader from the MTC, was on the other end, and I got to talk with him a little! What's more, his companion, Elder Kearl, was the one giving us the referral, and we were just headed that evening to visit his family! It was nuts! It really gave me a boost that day. Elder Kearl, if you're reading this, or if Elder Pollan is reading it to you, your family is awesome. They're super tight-knit, and they roast each other a ton, but you can tell all the members of your family love each other. Your house is, like, the cool house I wanted to hang out at in high school. We think they like us, too. Your siblings are awesome. Also, we had no idea your family included quadruplet teenagers in high school. They're all awesome. And we haven't visited that referral you gave us yet, but hopefully we will this week. We just haven't quite been able to carve out the time. But we shared a message with them, and it really had an impact on your mom. We shared the ARP video "Aram's story" to talk about what God's really like.

On Friday we got some chicken from a cool member named Michael, and then Elder Henshaw got an allergic reaction to it, we think. He's OK now, though. We didn't need to go to the hospital or anything.

In relation to expressing love, on Saturday we visited with a guy we were teaching, and we think he was either high or coming off a high, because he was really out of it and wasn't behaving like himself. It also felt a little weird in his house. We asked him if we could visit him the next day, and when we did, he seemed like he was back to his old self, mostly, but his place was kind of a mess. When we got there, he was kind of distracted, even though we had expressed that we intended to sit down and have a lesson with him. It didn't seem like we were going to get anywhere with him, so we just rolled up our sleeves and asked if we could help. We spent a good 3 hours or so just helping him clean up his place, and I'd like to go back and continue to help him clean up and then bless his home. I think that would make a real difference. And that's what I was talking about when I was talking about the love thing. I think I needed to understand that so we could help this guy out. We could have just written him off and not helped him, but I don't think that's what Christ would have done. We tried to teach him at the end, but he wasn't very receptive, though maybe a different day he'll be more interested.

Also, we had someone at church! Her name is Raychelle, and we were only able to get her there because we didn't write her off: We left her with our number, and she never called us; we dropped by again and didn't catch her; we went to bring her cookies, and she wasn't there (we left the cookies on the doorstep); then we dropped by again and caught her, and she said she was going to to come to church, but she didn't; and then we tried by one more time, and she told us her kids were sick, and she was going to come for sure this week. She also told us after church that her sister-in-law is a member and that she has a lot of questions she wants to ask us, so she's going to set up a time to have us come by. It was awesome!

I wanted to leave you with one last statement from Truman G. Madsen's talk "Every Member a Bird-Dogger," one that I think is particularly empowering and inspiring.

"We're scared. And that's what the Lord meant when he said 'Don't hide your light under a bushel.' Give them the chance to say no, don't' assume they'll say no. You all assume. Now why hide your light under a bushel when a thimble will do? Because even the light under a thimble is needed in this world of darkness. And the darker the world gets, the more it shows up. Some of you are very disheartened at all the things happening around us. Actually, these are other ways of teaching people and preparing them. And, you see, by the turn of the century, according to experts, do you know how many people will be in this world? One third of the total population that ever have lived will be alive simultaneously in the dispensation of the fulness of times. Who is gonna get the word over? You are, or it won't get over! But you're scared. We talk about our being "typical Mormons, by which we mean a guy who has some progenitors that crossed the plains. We are no longer typical!  We're being crowded out by some fireballs that have recently joined the church. You see, there are a million and a half people who live right now who know only one president, David O. McKay. They have never known any other. They're the typical ones. And there will be an increasing number if you will cooperate with the stake missionaries and the other missionaries."

Pictures

I won! But I think the contest is over. We only just got our mail key, so we only found this today. Kind of a bummer. $5 grand would have been nice.

I saw this sticker on a car today.

Me and Elder Henshaw, if I haven't sent a picture of us already.