Elder Davis in Ohio

Hey, everyone! This email may be a bit shorter because right now I don't have access to my keyboard, but I may later tonight. I guess we'll see. The quote is from Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne in  Batman Begins . It seemed appropriate for a couple reasons: The first is that we had went through kind of a difficult patch in the middle of the week, but it's over now. I'll get to that later in the email. It was a tough thing to struggle through, and I guess I'm kind of trying to downplay Satan and his antics with the quote. I've got a bit of a defiant attitude now, like, "Give me some more. I dare you." The scriptures say you're not supposed to tempt (or test) God, but I wonder if they ever say anything about tempting or goading Satan. I've also been getting a lot of practice at doing some unfamiliar things recently, so the quote kind of works. So the first thing about this week is that we had a couple of training visits. We di...

Hello, everyone! The quote this week is from Robin Williams' Mr. Keating from "Dead Poets Society." He says it after helping a shy young man to find his poetic voice, and he encourages him through the laughter of his classmates. The young man then says something profound and stunning, and his classmates go silent and then applaud, which is when Robin Williams says his line. Allow me to explain the reason for the quote: Transfers were this Thursday. For some reason I thought they were going to be like any other transfer. I guess I was busy and a little dazed, and I had it running around in my mind that I was jumping into my 12th transfer. We get something called the PBZ (picture by zone) every transfer, and when it's released on Tuesday night, that's when we find out where we're headed. I've been saving and labeling them in my phone for my whole mission, and I was on PBZ 12. What my brain didn't decide to factor in the day and hours leading up to...

Hey, everyone. This week has been... different. There's been a lot of relative chaos and some turns (literal and figurative) that took us places we hadn't intended to go. The quote's from Owen Wilson's Lightning McQueen in the first  Cars  movie. Doc Hudson tries to teach him how to make a sharp turn around a dirt track by telling him to, "Turn right to go left." After watching Doc race around the track and finally understanding what it means, he learns to race on dirt and uses that to his advantage in the final race. It's also something my trainer used to say when talking about things that didn't seem to make sense or didn't seem to lead us to our desired destination, but that did. So I guess the first piece of crazy news is that I've now been assigned as a zone leader. I'll be companions with Elder Schreiter, who I came out with. I remember wondering when I first met him if I would ever be his companion. I'm also being move...

Hey, everyone. So things have been going pretty well, although we're still on a stay-at-home order and unable to visit anyone in person, unless, I guess, as we did last week, we just happen to run into them and stay 6 feet away. The quote is from Tom Hanks' Josh Baskins and an unnamed government employee in Big. He's looking for the Zoltar machine, and so he has to fill out a form (in triplicate) and hand it in to a government agency so they can try to find it for him. Thank goodness for Google. We found out this week that Governor DeWine (the governor of Ohio) extended the stay-at-home order for the state, and we're trying to be obedient to that as a church and as individuals--we're trying to be good citizens. I don't know if we'll have reached 12 weeks by the time we get to the current deadline, but we will have been inside for probably 9 or 10. I've lost count. In some ways, though, that extension has done some really good things. We had a me...