Elder Davis in Ohio

  Hey, everyone! This week's quote is from Wheatley (played by Setphen Merchant) in  Portal 2 , which is a video game, so I'm sorry for veering from movies for a moment. This is the best I could recall for this week. So I've found my final resting place: Youngstown. Here is where I will die. Elder Washburn will be killing me off, and I will return to my heavenly home. Lest any of you panic upon reading those sentences, I will tell you that those are terms missionaries use to describe a missionary who is returning home. I'm also partial to "going to that great Transfer in the sky," which is one I came up with. I thought it was an appropriate season to be a little bit morbid. All this is to say that transfer news says Elder Washburn and I are staying here for my last transfer. I will finish off my mission as a social media specialist, and hopefully the work we will do will be able to benefit the people in this area and most of all the missionaries. We've bee...

  Hey, everyone. It feels like I just wrote a weekly email. The weeks are going by so fast. I'm not sure what it is, but I think it's a combination of being close to the end, being in some level of social isolation still, staying busy and spending A LOT of time at a computer. The quote is probably butchered, but it's supposed to be a line from Ferris Bueller (played by Matthew Broderick) in  Ferris Bueller's Day Off .  So in the past couple of weeks we've been working with some of the other social media specialists to try to formalize and structure the work we're all doing and so forth. Up until this point we've been pretty disorganized. Like, really disorganized. It's sort of just been a free-for-all. Elder Washburn described it as a system of feudal lords. In contrast, now we're installing some kind of constitutional system. Basically, up until this point, there's been no leadership assignment among all this social media stuff. All the scial me...

  Hey, all. This week has been pretty awesome. A lot of good things have happened, and I've been learning some things I think are really important. There are a lot of questions I have that I never knew were questions I had, or rather questions I couldn't really put into words. Throughout my mission I've been able to clarify and sharpen those questions and find the answers. I'm not sure how to phrase the question that brought me this answer, but it's important to me, and it's the reason for the quote above, which, by the way, comes from Phil (Philoctetes, if that's how you spell it) in   Hercules . So one of the things I have experienced a lot as a missionary is blessings and insights from personal study. I have learned so many things that, like I said, have been answers to questions I could never really put into words. As the hymn says, "Jesus, listening, can hear the songs I cannot sing." He understands what we're going through even when we do...

  Hey, everyone. This week was a doozy. The quote is an iconic one from Denzel Washington's Coach Boon in  Remember the Titans . There was a lot about unity at conference, and unity is what we need to be experiencing as missionaries right now, too. I'll talk about that in a second. So the stake president here in Youngstown is very enthusiastic about social media work, and he's trying to spread that enthusiasm to the other people in the stake, mostly ward leaders. He called us on Tuesday night, and he was like, "Are you elders done with your P-day?" I'm not sure he was quite clear on what day it was. We told him yes, and he asked if we would be willing to jump on a call with the Bishops of the stake to explain what we were doing with social media and how it had furthered the work. Now, we can't speak for everyone else, but at least here in Youngstown we haven't been getting a lot of direct results from Facebook--we haven't gotten any messages from p...

  Hello, everyone! The subject line this week is courtesy of Archimedes from  The Sword in the Stone . You know, the old animated Disney one? Boy, this week has flown by. Maybe even faster than last week, if that's possible. We got to yesterday evening, and I was like, "Tomorrow is P-day." It didn't feel like I was crawling across the finish line this week. It felt more like I could have kept going for a bit longer. As far as what's been happening this week, we've had a lot of meetings. Elder Bennett, a Seventy, has been doing a mission tour (remotely), and so he met with the mission every morning at 9 a.m. to 10:30. There was one day we had an additional meeting, and then two days mission leaders had additional meetings. So lots and lots of meetings. He mostly talked about some of the same things he talked about when he visited the mission the first time, over a year ago. I think I was in... was I in Worthington or Warren? I'm pretty sure it was one of th...

Hey, everyone! The quote this week is courtesy of Q (I don't know the actor's name) and Daniel Craig's James Bond, respectively, from  Skyfall . It's funny--we haven't been given a huge amount of direction as missionaries (we've been trying to come up with that direction for the missionaries that we work with). We were talking about it with some other missionaries today, and it's almost as though the expectation is, "You're young! You know social media! You can do it!" and that's all we're given. That's an exaggeration, but sometimes it can feel that way. The lines of communication aren't buzzing, and some things get lost between different missionaries--there's a missionary who was a social media specialist last transfer and never got these slides that every social media specialist is supposed to get, so he's been flying blind for a full six weeks. It's sort of the blind leading the blind, but we're trying to fix...