Week 84 - "We're too young to realize that some things are impossible--so we will do them anyway."

Hey, everyone!

This week's quote is from Benedict Cumberbatch's character (I don't remember his name) in "Amazing Grace." He tells his friend William Wilberfforce (played by Ioan Gruffudd) that he's going to become prime minister, and soon. William objects, saying no one has ever done it before, to which he responds with this line.

So this week we met our new mission president, and he's quite a bit younger than most mission presidents usually are. His name is President Horgesheimer, and he and his wife are from Utah. They've already decided to do a few things that were pretty crazy. For instance, within the first week of their arrival they met with every single missionary for a personal interview (that's 180-190 missionaries in four days). Elder Timothy and I were among the first to meet with them, and they took a picture of us and had us write a letter to President and Sister Stratford and paste the letter and the picture in a scrapbook that they're going to send to them. Then they gqve us each a really nice journal with the mission logo that they want to be our "small plates." They invited us to bring it to conferences and so forth in the mission and write down spiritual impressions we receive. They also gave us a stack of cards with a ring through them that have printed on them a bunch of important scriptures and their references so we can memorize them. That was pretty cool. All told, I think there might be 70 or so scriptures that they want us to memorize. They want us to be able to teach the truths of the scriptures without having to open them--to be able to speak in the language of the scriptures and use the words and phrases the scriptures use in our conversation. For instance, we could be talking to someone about weaknesses and strengths and just say, "The Lord gives us weakness so we may be humble, and if we humble ourselves and have faith in him, he makes weak things strong." So that's exciting. When I was in my interview with him he told us he was expecting each companionship to still have a baptism every transfer--he was pushing for that. It was cool for him to convey that the work isn't going to stop just because it's different. That was the sense I got from that conversation--we still need to be working hard and doing good and important things. The night before there was a mission-wide devotional to welcome them and have them speak to us. Sister Horgesheimer talked a lot about how, like Nephi we need to ask the Lord for help to find the tools (technically to find the ore to make the tools, but you know) to accomplish the task he has put before us. Basically they've just sort of hit the ground running, and they're setting the bar high. I think that's great. I think they're issuing us a challenge and pulling us out of a mire. They're inviting us to work hard and telling us it's possible to achieve great things. It's awesome. It's exciting to see their fire. I guess mission presidents have some level of greenie fire, too, but at the same time, I think this is a bit more than that. It's not naive or misguided, in my opinion, and I think we're in a position to accomplish great things. When we were watching the devotional with them, before President even spoke, I was like, "I like him." And when he did talk, he said some inspiring things. So I'm looking forward to working with him for the short-ish time I have left (oof). That's becoming less and less fun to think about. I feel like your excitement to be back at home has a direct inverse relationship with how capable and confident you are in doing the work. Or maybe it's something else. But I'm reaching that point where I feel like this is where I belong and that my time belongs to this work. I keep thinking about home and how weird it's going to be to finally be back and suddenly have all these things I can do again and all these other things that I can't do anymore. It will be weird to suddeny be entirely free to set my own schedule and everything, with no companion and no framework guiding me. I'm going to feel pretty out of place, I think, for a little while. I guess I just need to preserve that desire to continue to be a missionary and do missionary work or some kind of Christlike service whenever I can. I feel like that's what's going to be refilling my spiritual tank for the rest of my life--that's how I'll preserve this great experience I have with doing missionary work and learning more about the gospel.

Anyway, that was kind of a tangent. In other news, there was an emergency transfer, and now we're holding on to Elder Bond here in OSU. That's been cool because Elder Ciminski and Elder Bond relate really well and have a lot to talk about. The OSU 2 elders took the Beast and transported the Spanish elders to a fishing spot, and they themselves are out fishing with Elder Bond right now. So that's fun. Hopefully they get some good, quality time together. Elder Ciminski has been absolutely itching to go fishing since, like, the beginning of the transfer. I think it helps him a lot to do some recreational activities like that and be out in nature. He goes kind of crazy being inside all day. Elder Bond is kind of the same way. It helps them a lot to just get out. So that's what they're up to.

We had some pretty good lessons this week, though one today was with someone who I just am not good at dealing with and having a conversation with. I think she sort of feels personally attacked sometimes when we say things that question her religious beliefs, even though that's not the intent of the things that we say. So because we had the OSU 2 elders here using the WiFi (we used to have unlimited mobile data, but it got shut down at the end of June, and we're waiting for it to kick back on), Elder Hoffman from OSU 2 and Elder Timothy taught her. I was in the room with them, but I just sort of stayed in the background. I was just praying for them and for her during the second half of the lesson, and it actually went pretty well. I think they've convinced her she needs to do more digging in The Book of Mormon and understand what it really is and what it's really about before she can make much of a judgment call about it. So we're having some elders in her area (she lives in South Carolina) deliver a physical copy to her. We'll be praying for her, but if you could pray that the Spirit will speak to her and that her heart will be softened, even if you just do it once, right now, while you're reading this email, that could help a lot.

We also had a lesson with Nohemi, and we sent her the Gospel Library app, and she's discovered the Gospel Topics section of the app and the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price, so that was interesting. We explained what they are, and we're going to be talking to her about some of the Doctrine and Covenants on Tuesday. Oof. There's just so much to teach people. I sometimes wonder why we don't at least have addressing controversial topics as part of the curriculum to inoculate people against anti. I also wonder why teaching the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price isn't an explicit part of the lessons. I don't know--maybe it's in one I haven't studied closely yet. Because there's a lot of anti out here, and there's a lot of material that the church has published that even most members of the church aren't super familiar with. We need to do way better as individuals studying and understanding the gospel so that we can help other people understand what we believe.

That brings me to another topic: One of the things President Horgesheimer shared with us is this model that he wants us to be teaching to members. It's based on our purpose, and it's simply this idea that we have a relationship with God, and we're trying to facilitate and assist others in their own relationship with God, so we share what we have with them. It's a little triangle, with us (the missionaries) and the people we're teaching at the two bottom corners and the Godhead at the top corner. As we strengthen our relationship with God we became capable of helping others create and strengthen their own relationship with God. They've also heavily emphasized prayer, scripture study and church attendance as things we need to teach people we're teaching to do. And honestly, that makes a ton of sense. Not everyone understands those things, and we can't just hand them the scriptures or tell them to pray and expect them to know how to do it. We can't invite them to church thinking that they know what's going to happen when they get there if we don't explain it to them. We make a lot of assumptions and don't always meet people at their level when we do missionary work. We have to help a bit more and be a bit more clear with them about how to do all these things.

Bapa said in one of his tapes that when he was serving as a mission president, he learned "Most New Englanders don't know how to pray. Not in the way we do. [The missionaries teach them that a] prayer consists in calling on the name of God, [thanking him for blessings], and then making specific requests." He says that after they would do it, some people would be in tears and say, "I did it! That's wonderful!" When we help people we need to help them know how to do these things correctly. There was a lesson on that Ed app (it's an app the missionary department is now using to train missionaries to do certain things) that talked about how we don't put a kid on a bike, push them down a hill and hope for the best. We also don't tell them our expeirences of riding a bike and exlpain biking theory with them and then let them have at it. We do it WITH them. We stand next to them and hold them as they give it a try and try to catch their balance. It's the same way with missionary work. Honestly, it's sort of silly to think that people will come just understanding everything or understanding how to navigate everything, as though they're already being guided in all their actions by the Holy Ghost or something. That formula is backwards. We have to help them learn. We have to guide them. We can't just abandon them and expect them to figure things out.

That actually brings me to another story about a lesson this week. So this guy we're teaching, David, has been really, really closed off in the past, and as we've talked with him it seems like his answers have always been pretty terse and often monosyllabic. We talked about the story of Abinadi, and he didn't really pick up on the spiritually uplifting things we get from those chapters, so we went through it with him and through other parts of The Book of Mormon and talked about what Abinadi teaches: How the Law of Moses is not enough to save you and how you have to have a personal relationship with Christ, and how he needs to be involved in the equation. And then we went to all these other references, and it was awesome! He started sort of bearing his own testimony about the principles we were sharing, and by the end, we were like, "Man, I felt like the Spirit was really present at this lesson," and he was like, "Yeah!" It was cool. So we had a breakthrough with him. But it didn't happen on its own. It wasn't like we put the words in front of him, and then he just figured it out somehow. That's not how it works.. We have to help people along. And if we don't know the path ourselves, if we're not familiar with how it feels to walk on this path, to learn and to grow, then we can't really help. People need guides, and we as missionaries (but also especially you as members) can do that.

Oh, what else? I met Brother Knowles, the institute director. Some of the sisters needed a blessing, and the church building they would normally meet at was closed, so we picked up their district leader and met them at the institute, and Brother Knowles just happened to be there doing his class online. So that was pretty neat to be able to meet him in person.

As far as a missionary talk for this week, I'll be honest--I haven't taken the time to find and read one and prepare a Facebook post, but I'll do that tomorrow, or maybe later today.

That's about all for this week. If you haven't emailed me yet, I'd love to hear from you. If you don't have my email address for some reason, I'm at gabriel.davis@missionary.org.

Elder Davis

The missionary triangle thing I was talking about.