Week 96 - "Use your head, boy! Use your head!"
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 those two areas. He basically talked about talking with members, but he really emphasized this time on how much missionary work is about love and how we really need to learn to love the people that we work with. He said a lot of things that I felt were really needed. We're still in Phase 1 isolation (meaning we can have limited visits with members, and we can maybe knock on the doors of people we're trying to get in touch with, but street contacting and tracting (the primary sources of missionary work for most missionaries a year ago) are out. So he taught the missionaries about the things we can do, things like looking for people in the area book who were formerly taught and might welcome more teaching from the missionaries, working with members and finding out how we can help them help their friends to come closer to Christ, being persistent when trying to get in touch with people, and so forth. He asked the missionaries to try what he taught afterward and then to return and report. They did so in later calls, and it was great to see missionaries finding success in using those tools and realizing that there are ways for them to be happy and productive. I feel like a lot of missionaries I've met didn't think those were valuable ways to do missionary work and felt that the way to be a missionary was to tract and to street contact. But that's just not the most effective way, and it hasn't been the most effective way for a long time. It even says that in Preach My Gospel, and yet we kept doing it and doing it for some reason. I still don't completely understand why. I guess it's just the picture we paint of missionary work. Elder Washburn and I had a big discussion about it after the meetings. We feel like there needs to be a clearer picture of missionary work to prospective missionaries, because even before COVID-19, it had changed a lot. We just never took to those changes until we were forced to, and it almost took a total reset of missionaries and missionary work. It's almost like everything had to break down and there had to be some level of turnover of new, fresh people for it to work. There were all these incorrect preconceived notions of what missionary work is and should be, regardless of all the options that missionaries had but that many missionaries did not take full advantage of. But that's not to say that all the work done in the months before the pandemic was a waste or anything. I'm sure people were still put where they were supposed to be and where they would be most effective. It just feels like a lot of changes are happening, and for me that's one upside of all of this. We're resetting. We're figuring out how to do things differently. And I get to be involved with all that, which is cool! Hopefully I'll be involved with it more when I get home. We love to all focus on all the highlights, all the good things that happened on our missions when people ask us about them, because people don't want to hear about the bad things, right? But when we do that, all prospective missionaries get is a lot of how great it is and these amazing miraculous experiences people had. And then you get out here and it's largely sort of just... normal. It's sort of just day-to-day a lot of the time (I mean, I don't feel that way right now, because we're super busy and have a lot to do, but I have in the past). Adjusting to Missionary Life talks about accepting some of the boring routines of missionary work. There are boring routines. If we come expecting everything to be exciting and fast-paced and for every miracle to be immediately followed by another miracle, we're going to be disappointed. Maybe we need to be more clear about all of what missionary work looks like. It just isn't all these ideal things we think it is, at least not all the time. But that's just my experience. Regardless, though, that highlights the fact that not everyone has the same experience. I don't know--as Elder Washburn and I talked about it, we really feel that for missionary work to become more effective there needs to be a lot more happening before an elder or sister enters the MTC and gets three weeks of training. There needs to be more, and a more realistic preparation. I don't feel like I've applied anything from any of my mission prep classes as I've served. I feel like I learned it all in personal study and personal experience. For instance, when I joined the missionaries to teach someone in Rexburg one time, I learned a lot. I didn't learn a lot sitting and listening to some teacher talk about what missionary work is like in a classroom. I don't even know if he got us into the missionary handbook or into Preach My Gospel. Maybe there's not much of a way to prepare someone besides personal experience. I don't know--anyway, we feel like a lot more needs to be done to prepare people for missionary work. It would be cool if there was, like, a missionary basic training program you could do before serving a mission that was far more practical and far more focused on Preach My Gospel.
ANYWAY, I guess all of that is the reason for the subject line. Use your head. The Doctrine and Covenants says we need to serve with all our heart, might, mind and strength. I think often, we're like, "HEART, MIND, AND STRENGTH! GET PUMPED!" and we forget that "mind" is in there. Using the intelligence we have is a part of all this. And we all know stuff. We're all smart, just with different things. We've all spent time on stuff, even if it wasn't books or scriptures. We can all do something. That's one thing that's been a little difficult: Getting missionaries to recognize and use their talents. Some people feel like they're just average or aren't interesting and don't know how to use what they love or are interested in to further the work, but we all have talents and knowledge we can use.
Anyway, I can get off my soapbox now. What else has happened this week...We're teaching members about how to run the pages for the individual areas. A lot of missionaries have thanked us for the work we're doing as social media specialists, and it's seemed like it has helped them, so hopefully we're doing some good. We're getting a pair of sister missionaries in the Youngstown area, so that's cool. We'll be able to give them the information of the women we were assigned to teach that we haven't been able to get a hold of or that we think they would connect better with. We also made a cool video with Elder Grayson about how the gospel has helped him. That's here: https://www.facebook.
We took some footage for some videos imitating the "Hear Him" videos that the church has been doing, too, so hopefully we'll edit those together this week, but...yeah. That's basically it. I really can't think of anything else. I'll try to Be more consistent in my journal keeping so that I have something more interesting to refer to when I write these.
Oh, YEAH! I got to visit the Nicholases in Warren yesterday! That was awesome! It was really good to see them again. They've both been members for a year, so now they can receive their endowment and be sealed to one another, though they can't do it in the Columbus temple because it's shut down. But they'll be able to do it someplace else.
Love you all!
Elder Davis
Comments
Post a Comment