Week 101 - "I don't have time for dessert--I'm too busy with this company."

Hey, everyone.

The quote for this week is from Harrison Ford's Linus Larrabee in Sabrina.

SOOO a lot has been happening over the past few days with social media. We've been pretty occupied. We've had a lot of meetings and discussions about different aspects of social media work with different people.

So on transfer day we drove down to Columbus for a meeting after transfers with all the social media specialists. We took the zone leaders with us--we felt like it would be more efficient and effective if we just carpooled--and went on down. While we were there I saw some missionaries I hadn't seen for a while, like Elder Tyson Jones and Elder Christian Lambert, my MTC companion. It was a fun time. Then Elder Timothy and his new companion, Elder Pratt, led a meeting for all the missionaries in social media roles (and some zone-level leadership, too) that we helped out with. We basically talked about the restructuring that we've been doing. Not to bore you with details, but up until this point it's sort of just been a system where every social media specialist is their own island, and we all just do what we think will work, and we maybe communicate with each other (?). There's also been some training and stuff from people in the missionary department, but it's been slow going, and we haven't really felt like we've been on the same page as everyone else--it seems like the social media specialist role was sort of supposed to be a leadership role for one companionship in the mission, and then there were people who were supposed to be page admins. That was the system that we were supposed to have, but it wasn't the system we actually had. So since last transfer Elder Timothy had president's ear and was talking with him about how to change and improve social media, and we finally got a restructuring to happen this transfer. Now there is one set of Social Media Specialists, one set of Finance Specialists, and the rest of the people in charge of the zone pages are Content Specialists (which is basically the same thing as what we formerly called Social Media Specialists). So as far as responsibilities, nothing has really been taken away from anyone per se, but there's some more oversight now and a leadership position or two over the people in charge of social media as a whole. Elder Timothy and his companion, Elder Pratt, are the Social Media Specialists, and Elder Washburn and I are the Finance Specialists. We're basically there to help people out and to answer questions, and people also check with us to make sure they have the budget for different advertising, and we approve those sorts of things and keep track of the numbers and such. We have missionaries tracking their pages now, so that's cool, and we can see the growth in the different pages and see what we need to work on. That's in addition to all the responsibilities we had before, what with trying to help with the area pages in our own zone and trying to maintain our own page.

In addition to all of that when it comes to Facebook, Elder Timothy got president's approval to get a pair of elders and two sister companionships together to spearhead an Instagram initiative for the whole mission. We kinda ate into our prep day hours today trying to make the logo. The Insta account is called ledtolight, and hopefully we'll have a complete version of the logo up on the account by tomorrow night. So that's pretty neat. But that was a whole thing to take care of today. And there's another project we're working on: The last two weeks or so we've taken footage of 12 or 13 missionaries for a Hear Him series, and there have been some pretty awesome interviews. We've got a bunch of footage now, and what we were hoping to do today was complete a trailer for the Hear Him videos that we could post to the page to let people know that a series was starting and to let them know when we were going to be posting the videos. We've already got Elder Bohn's, which we're going to make a few adjustments to, and then we're nearly done with Elder Grayson's (may he rest in peace--he's home now. He went home just after transfers, having successfully completed his mission). We've got one for a lot of different missionaries in the zone, and we'd like to do more if it's successful. It's just been a really good opportunity for missionaries to bear testimony and show the ways that the gospel really, deeply affects them, and it will be a cool witness to the Internet and to themselves for the rest of their lives of the things that they had a testimony of when they were on their mission. Hopefully it helps both the people who see it and the missionaries themselves. It was certainly a chance for them to sort of teach and bear testimony, and chances to do that feel a little hard to come by right now. So we spent a lot of time on that today. We're nearly done. We'll probably run it by a sort of test group after we finish it this week and see what people think before releasing it. But I'm excited for it. I think it's going to be really good. It will be the first series we release on the page! And it's looking pretty great. BUT the problem is that we won't be able to finish it soon (like tomorrow) because... We're going to Mission Leadership Council! We and Elder Timothy and Elder Pratt have got a seat there now so we can talk about social media in the mission and the things that missionaries can do to improve with that and how they can help their missionaries with it and everything. But what that means is that for the second time in a week we'll be driving about 3 hours down to Columbus and then about 3 hours back. But that's OK. I like long drives. Being in the car is one of the few situations during the mission where there's time and an excuse to slow down and take a breath. I've learned to relish the moments where I'm just driving or just sitting in the passenger seat. Pre-COVID it was a very helpful opportunity for me to just take a breath and emotionally prepare or emotionally take a break. I might take to driving as a way to relax or take a break when I get home--I've learned that I really enjoy it.

Oh, speaking of driving, I neglected to mention: After transfers, Elder Bohn and his new companion, our new zone leader, Elder Vaughn, needed to drop some things off to companionships who weren't at transfers, so we stopped at a few places on the way back. We dropped by the Lisbon elders before we left the zone to go to transfers, and we went back to them again on our way back. We brought Krispy Kreme donuts with us from transfers and gave them to the missionaries we were dropping things off with. So it was the Lisbon elders, and then we drove to the Alliance Sisters and the Rootstown elders and then went clear on up to the Ashtabula Sisters. By the time we dropped the zone leaders off back at their apartment it was 10:30ish, and we got home around 11, and then we had dinner and went to bed. So yeah. It was one heckuva day. Elder Bohn was talking to Elder Vaughn about being a zone leader up here, and he was like, "Yeah... there's not really any personal time. We usually don't have dinner until 9," and stuff.

In other news, Elder Magleby, who was with us these last two transfers but is now our district leader, is training a new missionary, Elder Segehun (sa-goon). He seems cool. We've got a cool district. Sister Schramm, who was being trained last transfer, is now training, and Sister Geppert, who Sister Keller was training for only 3 weeks, is now being trained by Sister Bowen, and Sister Keller moved on to be a Sister Training Leader in Warren. So that's pretty cool. That's basically how our district has changed.

Oh, that reminds me: We went Skittle bowling with our district on preparation day last week. I may have mentioned that. That was fun. Today we didn't have any sort of district activity. We just did missionary stuff. But we got a lot done.

What else is there? We're going to be filming our Elder's Quorum President for a video tomorrow, so that'll be awesome. We didn't have church in person on Sunday. On Friday we had a training meeting about cleaning and cars and that sort of maintenance stuff from the office staff, and they advised us to make sure we have certain types of staple foods at our apartments while also letting us know that riots were anticipated after the election (which is tomorrow), and they advised us to stay away from crowds and stuff. Basically it sounds like they're concerned about our safety this coming week especially, so it'll be interesting. I'll let you know if anything crazy happens. We're going down to the Columbus area (Powell) for MLC tomorrow, so... I'm sure we won't be near anywhere dangerous, but it's closer to a big, big city than we are here.

It's kind of a short email, but to be fair, it was kind of a short week from Wednesday to Monday. Time is still going by pretty fast, but I think this transfer will be a good one. We have good plans, and we should be able to follow through on them and help missionaries to be more successful with this new way of missionary work and help things to run more smoothly.

Sorry--no photos again this week. You'll see my handiwork on the Instagram and on our Facebook page soon. :)

Have a great week!

Elder Davis