Week 100 - "Hello! This is the part where I kill you!"

 

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 been working on some things with some other social media specialists, and there will be a slight restructuring of the social media specialists starting tomorrow. We're taking a role as financial specialists for the mission as far as social media work goes--ads will sort of pass through us, and we'll approve them based on whether we think they're a good use of missionaries' budgets. We'll also be tracking numbers and so forth for the Facebook pages and their growth and the teaching opportunities that they bring. So that's cool. I just hope we can find a balance between motivating the missionaries, educating them and not distressing them or making them feel like we're restricting them. We should have some level of content moderation, but we also don't want missionaries to feel like they're not good enough. They need to be able to have the freedom to experiment and possibly fail so that they can learn and build confidence and so forth.

In other news, this last week we filmed a BUNCH of missionaries, and we're going to do our own "Hear Him" series, like the one the church is doing. We got the idea from the social media specialists in Columbus. We're really trying to make them look good and professional and be inspiring. We're going to be creating a trailer for the Facebook page to hype everyone up and hopefully get them excited for the videos, and then we'll be releasing them on a twice-weekly basis. I'm excited. I think it's going to be really, really cool.

In other news, Elder Grayson will be going home tomorrow (or maybe the next day--I'm not sure if he's staying at the mission home for a day). It's kind of weird seeing him go. First of all, we've had a bunch of fun being with him this past two transfers, and it feels like the end of an era, and second, I know that's going to be me in six weeks. It's WEIRD. Last night, after the PBZ (the picture-by-zone -- the document that tells us whether we're being transferred and where we're going) came out, it really slapped me in the face that this is actually my 17th and final transfer. It's surreal. I remember being in this same zone, in Warren, and being at a church building when a bunch of missionaries here in the northern zones were picked up by the assistants, who came with a trailer to load up all their luggage and everything. Elder Gallagher and I picked up Elder Matthews there and had him for the rest of the transfer, because he was dropping off Elder Jaster there. Elder Jaster was on his way home. I remember watching everyone pack up and watching Elder Jaster go and feeling this excitement of what it must feel like to be on your way back home. I don't even remember what it was that I imagined one would be excited about: Maybe going back to family, or maybe going back to the things you loved to do, or maybe just the unburdening that comes from no longer being a missionary. At that point, it was something I was really looking forward to. If I had to go then, I probably wouldn't have been upset about it. But as I've marinated in all of this, I've learned just how awesome it is. Elder Bednar said in a great talk something to the effect that sometimes we mistakenly think that happiness is the absence of a load. He tells a story about a man who went to try out his new truck by gathering firewood in the mountains, but when he got to where he needed to be to start collecting the firewood, he got stuck. Not wanting to waste time, he simply started gathering firewood and putting it in the truck. He prayed that Heavenly Father would send someone, but no one came. He decided to try one last time to get the truck out of the snow, and because of the extra weight in the bed of the truck, he was able to get the traction he needed to get back on the road. There's something to be said for that principle. I don't want to be one who slips and slides or who is stuck somewhere with nowhere to go and nothing to do. As hard as it sometimes is, I would prefer to have a load. Now, I'd be happy to get a little break every once in a while and be able to put the load down, but right now, I feel like I'm going to be sad when this load is gone. A lot of my spare time has been spent thinking about just what I'm going to do when this is over. I mean, I'll get a job and do normal adult things (hopefully I'll be able to decide exactly what field I want to go into and whether I want more higher education), but how am I going to feel the way I feel now? How am I going to be useful the way I am useful now? How am I going to gain a closer relationship with my Heavenly Father? How will I come closer to Jesus Christ? I don't know how--at least, not in the same way as I've been able to here. I've got some ideas, but I'm starting to question what I'll have time for. It feels so good to just be able to forget about worldly responsibilities and focus on helping other people develop a closer relationship to Jesus Christ and be fulfilled. It feels awesome to not have a single worldly care and just be able to focus on this work. It's actually the best feeling ever. I realized during the hard-quarantine-social-isolation phase that all these missionaries and I are in the best place we could possible be right now. Our housing is provided for. Our meals are paid for. Our needs are essentially taken care of. All we have to worry about is serving and participating in this work. That's literally it. It's wonderful. It's a huge blessing. I'm going to miss this. I'm going to miss it a lot.

Elder Sam Collier (hey, are you reading this?) told me in his final transfers that eventually I would feel the same way about Ohio as those who were baptized by Alma felt about the Waters of Mormon. "How beautiful are they to the eyes of them who there came to the knowledge of their Redeemer" (Mosiah 18:30). That prophecy came true. I have to be honest: With the sides of Ohio that I have seen, I didn't think at that time that I would ever really LOVE Ohio or have a special place in my heart for it. But I think about how it will feel to leave, and how it would feel to come back, and now it is very precious to me. I care about this place now. I want the people here to be happy--I always have, but it's different now. I want to be in their service. "Yea, I desire to dwell among this people for a time; yea, and perhaps until the day I die." I think I understand what Ammon meant. I have no idea how he was able to feel the way I feel within minutes or hours of meeting those people--that's a massive amount of charity, but I believe he could have felt such things so quickly. I certainly believe he felt that way about the people by the time he returned wth them to the land of Zarahemla. It's an interesting, wonderful feeling. I guess this is some measure of how Jesus Christ feels about us. He loves us so much that He wants to serve us. He wants to be there to help us and do all He can for us. He desires to dwell among us and serve us. That's really cool.

Anyway, none of these experiences are things I ever could have dreamed of having if I hadn't done this. Granted, the work has been more me-friendly here at the end, and I've been able to put a lot of skills to use that I wouldn't have been able to use before all this COVID stuff happened, so I'm sure that has a major impact on how I feel looking back, but I'm also more comfortable with people and with trying to bring them the blessings of the restored gospel, the knowledge that answers the burning questions they have about God and so forth. I've grown a lot. I like who I am. I like me more than former me. Don't get me wrong--I have charity toward former me--but I'm glad I'm current me. I wish I could tell former me that some of these things were coming, that he was about to be able to feel really, really useful and be able to help in unique ways. I wish I could have told him that that was in his future, so he shouldn't worry about what was going on right then. Yeah, it was hard, and yeah, it would take some endurance and strength to get through it, but he would come out on the other side as more of what he always wanted to be, and then things would get better. And he would be happy here at the end. It would be OK. So he should try to just enjy what he had while he had it, because eventually, it would be over. Only now am I really feeling the strong significance of Kip Hartvigsen's advice not to wish today away, because it's over all too soon. Again, of course, I say that here, at the end of the line, when everything is much easier, but it's still true. My power to do has increased, and I think I would be a more a confident missionary if given the chance to go back. Of course, I would prefer the mixture of social media and in-person work we do now, in case that wasn't obvious, but I would be more capable.

In updates, we got to go back to church this week, so that was cool. It was just one meeting. There were quite a few people. Half of our district is changing this transfer: We're losing Sister Santore-Tovar and Sister Keller to Sister Training Leader positions, Elder Douglass is taking a District Leader position in Canal Winchester, and Elder Grayson is going home. We'll be getting one Elder Vaughn in, and there's a Sister Bowen coming in to be with Sister Geppert, and then Sister Schramm and Elder Magleby will be training. Elder Magleby will also be the District Leader, so that's cool. Today we went Skittles bowling for a final district activity, and then we went to a barbeque place called Barrydyngles with the other elders, and it was pretty darn good, but I still say you can't beat the value at Cockeye's in Warren. And the barbeque MAY be even better there.

Well, that's about it for updates this week. You'll hear from me again soon.

Elder Davis