Week 90 - "You'd like it. It's about a prison break."
Hey, everyone!
This week's quite is from Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption. I forget the actor's name. You'll find out why it's relevant later on.
So today has been super good, which helps me feel that the week has been super good, and it has, but there were a few little rough patches. So to start, some of the blessings. The video Elder Grayson, Elder Douglass and Elder Day starred in has been performing really well. It's had about 6,500 views since it was posted, and we're going to boost it in the next day or two and see what happens to it. It's hard to tell with things like that how much of the success we experience is a direct result of it, but it's been exciting to see that people like it and that it's been well-received. I just posted it on Instagram, too, so if you would like to go and give it some love, that would be greatly appreciated. It's here: https://www.instagram.
Some other good things that happened this week. Let's see. Elder Washburn and I made a video for the elders and sisters serving in the zone, trying to help them understand how we're doing social media and what we're focusing on. We've basically set up a little schedule where we post certain kinds of content on different days. We haven't been getting a lot of content from the other missionaries, so we're trying to gauge what's going on and why they're not sending us anything, but we're optimistic that things will pick up. We may be asking them to blitz some stuff for us so we don't have to keep coming up with things to post on the page, but it will get better as time goes on.
We also decided that we wanted to do a little service and help out at the church. Like the large majority of other churches, it hasn't been used much for the last 4 months, if at all, and we wanted to make sure that it was still being kept tidy and so forth. A lot of missionaries have been using church buildings, and it sounds like sometimes they haven't been cleaning up after themselves. We wanted to try to make sure that wasn't us, so we started by vacuuming. We'll probably do more as the weeks go on--we need service hours, and there are a lot fewer approved things to do up here in Youngstown than there are in Columbus. Anyway, we started vacuuming stuff up, and then as I was vacuuming up the gap between the outside door and the floor, I noticed that there was a spider in the corner--I think I sucked up part of his web--so I got him, and then as I started looking around I saw more cobwebs and sucked those up--it was actually kind of sad. The buildings don't have people in them anymore, so the things that usually hide are just kind of taking up residence in the open, and there are literally cobwebs in a lot of places. And then I went to vacuum up the front vestibule, and I must have sucked up 25 or 30 spiders of all different shapes and sizes, along with a whole bunch of webs. But after we were finished it felt a lot better. It felt like there was more light. It probably doesn't hurt that the sun came out from behind the clouds while we were working, but it felt good. It feels good when things are clean and in order.
On that topic, a week or two before Elder Washburn and I showed up, Elder Day and Elder Grayson bought some bananas, and they didn't wash them, and so now we've got gnat problems. I've been seeing, like, ten at a time when I shower and use the bathroom (I'm not sure why they're so attracted to the bathroom). So today we got some apple cider vinegar at the store. Pro tip: A drop of dish soap and a cup or so of apple cider vinegar in a bowl attracts gnats, and they just kind of get in the bowl and die. It takes them a little bit, but eventually you'll just find a bunch of gnats in the bowl. It's weird. We put one in our bathroom today, and we looked inside, and I swear, there are probably 40, maybe even 50 gnats in and around the bowl right now. It's disgusting. I don't know where they all came from.
Back to good things. I made lasagna and bean salsa this week, and they were a hit. We're going to make some more bean salsa, but there was only one, dented can of fiesta corn at the store, so it won't be precisely to recipe, but whatever. Everyone liked it, so that's awesome. I'm going to make souvlaki tonight for dinner. I think everyone will be a fan. I like feeding people. I know how it feels to get a good, home-cooked meal, especially if you haven't had one for a while, so it feels good to do that for other people.
I think I mentioned in my last email that we did ultimate frisbee on preparation day with another companionship. Well, today we did beach volleyball with our whole district, and it was a lot of fun. There's a park nearby that has a court with the sand and all that, and we played for about two and a half hours this morning. We had a good time. It was us, the two sets of elders that were at ultimate frisbee, and then the sister companionship in our district. It was just a blast. It felt good. It's weird to think about what stuff like that might be like when I get home.
Other news... Things are progressing both in the area and with the page. We're getting in contact with more of the people the sisters were teaching before they left as we continue to reach out to them persistently and stuff. We've also become responsible for launching and helping out pages for every ward in the stake, so that's exciting. Our stake president is SUPER excited about this initiative, and he has awesome vision for it, which is great, though it often seems like there aren't enough hours in the day for us to accomplish everything. It's much better than us being bored, though. We have purpose and are trying to accomplish it as best we can. It's good.
For some other notable events of the week: on Tuesday we got some text from the vehicle coordinator, and he asked that whichever car had a certain driver number call him because he had some questions about our gas purchases. The driver number is indicated on the gas cards that we have, and we looked, and ours was the one he was asking about, and we were like, "Oh, boy." Suddenly I thought about a seedy gas station we had bought gas at a few days before, and I was like, "Crud. Was there a skimmer on the card reader? Is our credit card compromised?" So we hurried and called him up, and he said we won the prize, and we were like, "What?" He said that he wanted to see who would call in first (which I'm not sure I understand--it wouldn't have been anyone but us, considering we're the only ones with that driver number), and since we did, he was going to give us a golden Tiwi! For context, every mission car (that universal statement isn't really true now, because of how many cars are coming into the mission and how many are being replaced and so forth, but whatever) has a little device we refer to as a Tiwi that sits in the bottom left corner of the windshield and monitors what we do when we drive. It makes us log in when we get in the car to drive it, and it lets us know when we go more than 6 mph above the speed limit, and when we're driving too aggressively and so forth. It can be configured to report a whole slew of different driving events, including if you're idling the car for too long, and the alert sounds for each of those events is on a little SD card inside the device. ANYHOW, the church got a new line of Tiwi devices that they needed to swap out for the old ones, and when the vehicle coordinator at the time did that, he didn't know what to do with the old ones (the company who provides Tiwis didn't want them), so he took gold spray paint and little plastic jewel stickers and made them all fancy, and now it's an award in the mission. And if you get one and you have a precision screwdriver, you can get at the SD card and copy the sounds to your phone, which is fun. So now we have a golden Tiwi. I'll include a picture in the email.
As far as how we got it, he was going to just give it to us in commissary, but as we were talking to him, he asked us about our license plate and our registration, and as we told him about it, he told us something wasn't right. Long story short, when he put the license plate on the car at transfers (by the way, we have a new car, a 2020 Chevy Equinox, which does not have a Tiwi. We just passed 1K miles on it), he put the wrong license plate on and gave us the wrong registration. So we arranged the next day to drive to Mansfield, where we could swap out the license plate and the registration. When we met, he gave us the golden Tiwi. He also gave us a McDonald's gift card (which it turns out might not be activated? We're not sure how that works, considering when you buy it at the store your cashier has to activate it, but whatever). So we gave him a hug and then left. Elder Bower is awesome.
Also, as we were driving, I saw an exit sign that said Mansfield Reformatory, or something along those lines, and I was like, "Wait." I realized that we were in Mansfield, and I was like, "Elder Washburn, we may need to make a stop on the way back. I feel a little bad, because we missed the exit on the way back, and the detour ended up taking about 45 minutes, but we visited the Ohio Reformatory in Mansfield, which is where The Shawshank Redemption was filmed! We didn't go in for a tour--it wasn't preparation day--but we took a picture from outside. If I ever get the chance to actually go through it, I'm going to. From the outside it doesn't look anything like the prison in the movie, at least not how I remember it, but the cell blocks on the inside are where the inside parts of the movie were filmed. The warden's office might have been filmed there, too. I'm not sure. Anyway, it was cool to stop by and take a picture.
We also met with the elder's quorum president to help him set up one of the Facebook pages, and we chatted. He's really frustrated. None of the members do their ministering. He said when home teaching was a thing, they would consistently get 95% home teaching done every month, but now it's like people just don't reach out and communicate with one another. It's pretty garbage. If you're not doing your ministering, I hate to be the one to call you to repentance, but you need to do it. It doesn't have to be awkward or weird. Just call the person up, tell them you're their minister and you're sorry for not reaching out to them before, and let them know you'd like to visit with them and get to know them better, either through a phone call or a video chat or something. Maybe you could say you want to take them to lunch or get an ice cream cone or something, if they're comfortable with that. Find some activity you can do in order to talk with them. Then get to know them, form a relationship, and then ask if there's anything you can do to help them. Then you have the friendship established, and after that, it's simply a matter of letting them know you're there, and then checking in. But you have to take that first step, no matter how awkward it seems like it's going to be. Just do it. If they don't want to be ministered to, that's their problem. You need to do your duty and at least offer. So if I've got a call to action this week, it's for you to repent and reach out to the person or people you're assigned to. That's what God wants us to do, and people need it. One of the things the elder's quorum president said is that he thinks he never would have gone inactive if his home teachers had simply one their job. You can help someone maintain their faith and testimony, and there are a lot of people who are struggling with those things, especially right now. So just do it. And I want a report of how it goes, please. I'd love to know how it changes your life.
I guess the last thing for this week is a massive miracle I've experienced. So I was struggling a little bit this week and felt I needed to re-read my patriarchal blessing and my setting apart blessing, and I have a renewed testimony of the priesthood and of the spirit of prophecy and the way it works within this church. When I first came out on my mission I read through my setting apart blessing and wondered how the things that were on it could possibly happen, or at least, I was frustrated when I didn't see them happening immediately. It's been a while since I've read it. It might have been as far away as Delaware or something--that was five or six transfers ago. One of the things it promises is something about finding joy in studying the scriptures (which isn't surprising--I enjoyed the scriptures before my mission), but then it says that the words I read in the morning will come to my lips in the afternoon. I didn't understand how that would happen. How is it that something I studied in the morning would end up being relevant to a lesson I taught in the afternoon? I think I remember that at the beginning of my mission I would try to study for lessons we had planned and stuff and make that work, but it wouldn't. Truths I needed to share didn't just pop into my mind. I struggled through a few difficult teaching appointments. And I kind of just forgot about the whole thing. But as I look back now, that prophecy has been fulfilled at least five or six times. I have studied things in the morning that the Spirit then prompted me to share in the afternoon. I realize that for some that may be hard to believe, but it's true. That has been my experience. And it's not an insignificant thing. There's a mess of problems that any given person out here struggles with, and there are 42 doctrinal points that we teach as missionaries. Picking from all that, the scriptures we know, the general conference talks we're familiar with and other church materials we have resonated with in order to try to solve a problem someone is dealing with isn't something you just do. No matter how long you listen, you can't just find the doctrine that will specifically help them. The problems they have are entangled with one another, and one might simply be a symptom of another, larger problem, and solving it won't do much. There are many problems it seems like people just don't talk about, too, either because they're consciously not choosing to or because they don't realize they're problems. Anyhow, picking what will help a person from that list, understanding that you don't fully understand that person's problems, and discerning the best words to say, the best things to teach, within, like, a 30- to 90-minute period is difficult. But on top of that, happening to have studied that topic or read a relevant scripture about it earlier that morning--guessing that correctly is next to impossible. And I've had that experience multiple times as a missionary. I read through the rest of the blessing, and just about everything has been fulfilled. I hesitate to share more, because I get the impression that these are relatively sacred things that I shouldn't just widely broadcast, but if you ever want to talk more with me about it in person, let me know.
This time I still haven't decided on my missionary talk for the week. I can send it next week.
Thanks for reading! I hope you have a great week. Stay strong, help others, and find the good.
Elder Davis
Me at the Reformatory
Golden Tiwi!
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