Week 72 - "Rain, shine, tidal wave

Hello, everyone.

I'll start by saying it's important to take your medication for any mental illness you deal with, especially during circumstances like this. Because of the change in circumstances, our schedule became less consistent, and so I forgot to take some of my medication when I would normally take it. My wonderful mother wisely asked whether I was taking it consistently and helped me realize that I had missed a lot of doses. I'm feeling much better now than I was before.

The quote is from the adult Scott Smalls, the narrator of the movie (I don't remember the actor's name). He's talking about Benny's love for baseball and the circumstances in which he would play it.

Our mission president's wife recently told us to be out twice a day and walk for 2 miles both times. We're trying to do that, though it takes a lot of time out of our day. In any case, I bring my camera along, so I've taken a lot of photos of the different places we go. Yesterday Elder Heil wanted to go to the state park, so we went on a hike over there and got some really cool pictures. It was really green--a lot of new growth and flowers and mossy boulders and stuff. I felt like we were in Ireland or something. Anyway, Sister Stratford told us to do that regardless of the weather, rain or shine.

Missionary work is soldiering on, too, I guess, through all of this. We got a referral the other day for a Bible, and we'll be teaching the person we got it from this Wednesday, hopefully. We also did a training visit with the zone leaders, and I got to go to Newark and spend time with Elder Wiggins, one of my missionaries from my time as a district leader in Cambridge. The tables have turned: Now he's in the senior leadership position. He's a really good person, and it was good to spend a day with him. It was also good to see someone remaining dedicated to the work. With everything that's been going on, it's been discouraging and difficult to stay focused, but Elder Wiggins has stayed pretty focused. We talked about it, and he feels like most missionaries have been struggling that way. When I was there, we got to visit a Hopewell Native American mound that sort of fits the description of the fortifications that Moroni put around some of the cities in The Book of Mormon (though it seemed sort of backwards to me).

This week we've also been working on recording some two-minute-ish videos on the 42 doctrinal points we teach. Each zone has made videos in each language the missionaries teach in, so here in the Columbus East Zone we've done videos in English, Spanish and Nepali. Elder Heil and I were obviously assigned to teach in English. We taught The Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ through Joseph Smith; Resurrection, Salvation and Exaltation; Obedience; Keep the Law of Tithing; and Endure to the End. It was an interesting experience to try to teach the points in such a basic and quick way, with a companion. We've done it as individuals in different roleplays, but not as companionships. It makes for an interesting dynamic. It was also different to teach without any feedback--as a video and not to a person. We've definitely seen our inadequacies and the ways we need to improve. There are a lot of lessons I haven't taught very much at all, and even the lessons I have taught I need to align better with how Preach My Gospel explains them. It's always good for us to go back and review those lessons. We think we know them, but we don't know them as well as we could, and it's my belief that as we improve our teaching skills and are better at teaching the lessons the way the Lord wants us to teach them he will give us more opportunities to teach. We have to be sharp instruments in his hands before he'll trust us with certain people, so it's always good to try to improve when it comes to teaching the lessons.

We had a cool district council in Wednesday where we talked about Family History. I invited everyone to find a story about one of their ancestors in FamilySearch and share it in the Messenger group we have for the district, and there are some cool stories! Sister Lowe's great-great (etc.) grandfather wrote "High on the Mountain Top." One of Sister Cox's ancestors had a widow of Zarephath-type experience where she was going to turn a begging woman away because her family was in need as well, but the Spirit prompted her and told her that if she gave the flour she had to the woman, she would never want for flour again. She trusted the prompting and went for it, and when she returned to her stores, they were filled with flour! That was a cool experience to hear about. Sister Keller's ancestor had cancer and was told she would not have children but asked for a priesthood blessing and went on to have 16 children. Elder Hill's ancestor had a sister who died in the Willie handcart company, but her father would not give up on her and rubbed her arms all night trying to warm her up. She awoke the next morning, and they were eventually rescued.

It's been really cool to learn about those stories from members of the district. Now's a great time to work on your family history, by the way. If you want help getting started, reach out. It's one of the things I really love to do.

On Saturday we drove about 3 hours to and from New Albany to get commissary. When we got back we were pretty wiped out, and we crashed for about an hour and a half.

I had a cool faith-building experience recently. I've had a lot of trouble sleeping, and I've been wanting to reach out and ask for some help with it. You can't really get a sleep study done as a missionary (probably even more so now)--I've asked--but I've been feeling kind of at the end of my rope. I didn't feel, though, like I could approach my mission president and his wife without saying I had tried everything, so I decided I was going to faithfully do every single thing (as applicable) that Adjusting to Missionary Life suggests for how to improve your sleep. I don't know if I was really expecting my sleep quality to improve, but I decided I was going to try everything. I've been doing it the last few days, and it's working. I wake up feeling more rested than I ever had before. Adjusting to Missionary Life really works, people! Use it!

As far as people we're teaching, we sort of have one right now, but currently that's it, at least officially. We did get a referral for a Bible study this last week, and we contacted the woman and dropped off her new Bible, and we have a lesson planned for her on Wednesday. We really hope that goes well. I guess you'll find out if it did next week. In other prospects, there's a woman one of our members is working on who seems to be getting really, really interested, and maybe we'll be able to start teaching her remotely soon. It's super cool, because this member is less active, but she shares the gospel like crazy, as much as she can. For some people who aren't active in the church, it's not because they don't want to be there, but they have difficulties that keep them from coming. We know someone in the ward with intense social anxiety. She feels like a bad member of the church for not attending, but she also has had really terrible experiences with her anxiety, and it scares her. Those people need help. Reach out to a less-active member on your roster. You never know their reasons for not coming. Sometimes they need support and help. They certainly need it regardless of whether they are active or not. And sometimes they just need an invitation (although maybe that's a bad idea, considering you can't really invite them to church right now... You could invite them to a remote meeting and have a shared Sacrament meeting over Zoom or something like that.

On that topic, we did just that this past Sunday with a few families in our ward, and the Elder's Quorum president suggested that we invite our parents. We thought, "Why not?" So we invited both our families and taught a lesson during Sacrament meeting. We basically taught about Christ's life and invited everyone to ponder on his characteristics as we watched a video about him appearing to the apostles and reading some verses from 3 Nephi 11. Then we taught about how the emphasis in our lives needs to be on Christ, like President Nelson emphasized, and how that was the pattern of the Book of Mormon prophets. We quoted 2 Nephi 25:26 and pointed out that the whole point of the scriptures was to teach the prophets' children that Christ was the source they needed to look to for a remission of their sins. Then we invited the parents to follow the examples of the prophets and bear their testimony to their children (we felt like that doesn't happen a lot--parents in general don't often take their children aside and just bear testimony, especially of their personal relationship with Jesus Christ. So that was really awesome. It was a good experience.

Love you all! Keep calm and carry on.

Elder Davis

They don't look great, because I smashed them down, but these are Quantum of Salsa burgers. It's a Blue Apron recipe that I brought on my mission, and they were super good. I've had more time to cook recently, so it's been kind of nice. We made Chicken Souvlaki (a Greek dish on pita--we couldn't find any, so we used naan) this evening, and it was super good. I forgot to take a picture. :/