Week 105 - "If I don't... untie my emotional knots... ...I'm gonna explode!"

Hello, everyone.

This line is from Bill Murray's Bob Wiley in What About Bob?

I'm experiencing a lot of feelings, and I'll probably be experiencing more of them in this last week. The largest one is actually just stress--there were a lot of things that we wanted to do, and it never seems like there's enough time for us to get them done. We've sort of been working overtime, even. It's just crazy.

With the Light the World campaign beginning tomorrow, we've got a lot going on. We've assigned missionaries to do challenges several days in advance and make some content about it so we can post it to social media the day of the challenge. Hopefully it will be pretty cool. It's a lot of coordination and a lot of trust in the missionaries. We might have wanted to give them an earlier deadline than the one we gave--missionaries have a lot on their minds and on their plates, so it's easy to forget.

Anyway, then we've got our Hear Him series that we're still working on, which I'm probably not going to be able to finish before I get home. I'm seriously considering just doing the final videos when I'm home and sending them to my missionary friends so they can post them--it would be nice to take one more thing off their plate in the start of the next transfer. I would just need to find a Windows computer--we keep all our software and project files on flash drives, so I just need something to plug into, and then I can finish making things.

I'm learning I have a tendency to overwhelm myself. I think I knew that, but I guess I haven't really processed it. I just take on a lot of different things--I think what it is is that I have a really optimistic view of what a timeline will look like for a project, so I estimate the duration something will take and don't give myself a lot of leeway, because... I don't know. I guess it's that foot-in-the-door psychological manipulation thing where you offer something reasonable and then expand upon it, except I'm doing it to myself and my companion.

On the topic of psychology, we actually had a great devotional last night (mission-wide devotionals are held every Sunday night at 8 p.m.) led by the mission counselor, and he basically just tore down the culture that's all-too-pervasive in the church and in the mission field of unreasonable expectations and working ourselves to death. I'm realizing now that was probably something I should have paid more attention to... but I have this feeling like, "I'm at the finish line! I can just push through to the end!" Anyway, it was really good. He addressed this oft-repeated phrase that "Obedience brings blessings, exact obedience brings miracles," and he was like, "Can anyone explain to me what that means? I don't understand what that means, and no one has been able to explain it to me whenever I've asked." He said he's had missionaries who, as soon as they do something wrong or disobedient during the day, they consider the whole day a wash and just decide that it's not really worth trying because they're not going to experience any miracles. It was an interesting look into some of the problems that some missionaries deal with. I think there were a lot of missionaries that needed to hear it. We have a tendency to beat ourselves up trying to motivate ourselves to do the things that we feel we need to do instead of charitably and lovingly giving ourselves resources that we need in order to accomplish the tasks at hand. And we often expect ourselves to do everything instead of prioritizing what's most important and sacrificing some less-important things. That's definitely a lesson I could learn. I'm definitely a perfectionist to the extent that I feel it's reasonable for me to be, but sometimes that gets me in trouble. I've spent a lot of time on some of these videos on details and things that really probably weren't all that important, but for the sake of the project, they're important to me. I'd prefer to make something that's good and that keeps being good as you continue to watch it over making something that's just OK and that depreciates when you continue to watch it. I have a love of quality things. Whether my efforts result in quality is I guess another question, but the point is that that drives me to put in effort and care to things that I think are going to last.

We were talking with another social media specialist just yesterday, and he was talking about this conflict he's experiencing with trying to maintain his area and keep it running and at the same time trying to do social media and keep that going. Not to be all "Woe is us," but we're also in a situation where it seems like we don't really have a lot of outside help or resources from people that know how to answer the kinds of questions that we have, and so we've put time and effort into thinking about those things and making resources for the rest of the missionaries to help answer their questions, and we're in the process of doing that now as well, so that's another thing that he has on his plate. It's just a lot. We're trying to do a lot of things. My mom asked me on our call last week if she needed to send me a time-turner (if you've read or watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, you'll know what that is, and yeah, that would definitely come in handy. It would come in handy for all of us. There's a lot that goes into upkeep on social media, and when you're a social media specialist you have to balance teaching in your area with motivating your missionaries to create things for social media, and then you have to balance that with just maintaining the page. And then, like I said before, right now we're trying to teach missionaries basic principles and create a curriculum that doesn't exist yet that's at least reasonably engaging, and we don't have a whole lot to model it after. And then Elder Washburn and my job recently has been to set in order the finances involved with social media and keep track of all of that. Our stake president also called us today with a project he wants us to work on, and whenever he calls it seems like he's somehow under the impression that we don't do much social media work until he tells us to, and... yeah. It's just a lot. There's a lot. So when I go home I really want to somehow help out from afar. I don't want to have a permanent non-missionary missionary position with the mission, but I want to make it a little bit easier for everyone to do their job, because right now there's just not a lot of infrastructure in place to make everyone feel successful in social media and also sane.

But on the bright side, our stake president likes donating money to the Facebook page so we can put our content in front of more people, so that's cool. We've also kept our schedule with the Hear Him videos pretty consistently, and we're on track to have our next one up tomorrow. We also got all the filming done for a Light the World ad we want to put up really soon--maybe we can get it all edited tomorrow and start running it. That would be neat.

So... yeah. There's a lot that we've been frustrated by and a lot to be grateful for.

On the topic of gratitude, we had a fun Thanksgiving. The district met at the church, and we had food for 16 people from a restaurant out here called Bob Evans, and it was really good, and we had a TON of leftovers. We also had an additional meal for 4 that we didn't use until two days later. I'll include a picture or two from our feast.

We've also had a few training visit this week. We had one with Elder Bohn and Elder Vaughn, our zone leaders, and that was really fun. Elder Bohn drove for a bit--we went to a house twice for a lesson that ended up sorta rescheduling for later that day and then not working out, but it was fun to just drive and talk. And then we had a training visit with Elder Magleby and Elder Sagahun. I went with Elder Magleby, and that was a good time. We visited a member all the way out in Newcastle because they don't have any elders there in that area, and he doesn't like sisters. He was really cool. It was a very real meeting--he talked about a lot of the difficulties he's faced in his life and how he's really not satisfied with the way things are and wants to change stuff. I think we were able to help him as we just listened and tried to share a few things. So much of missionary work out here seems like you just do it by the seat of your pants. Probably 90 to 95 percent of my visits with nonmembers have consisted of throwing out the lesson plan or just not having a lesson plan to begin with and trying to talk to people and help them resolve their worries and concerns. There was a sister in Chillicothe who once said that missionaries are unpaid therapists. That's basically true for us. I'm not sure if it's because we just don't find the people who are "prepared" or if there are just a lot of people out here who have a lot of problems, or what, but teaching the 42 points isn't something we do super often, or if we do, it tends to be pretty loosely. A lot of time is sort of spent just trying to establish the relationship.

Golly, I keep, like lapsing into all these negative comments. I've loved my time out here, I swear!

The evening of that training visit, Saturday, we also had a devotional with the district that I led. We basically did an activity about finding out your talents and the different things that make up your life and your knowledge and so forth, and then we talked about how we can apply those things in our missionary work. It was really good. We also sort of talked about the foundations of our testimonies, the most powerful spiritual experiences we've had, and I testified that when we share the things we learn from those experiences, the Spirit is very present, and that's one of the most powerful things we can do. It felt really good.

On Sunday we met with a gentleman named Howard who's a recent convert. It was very spiritual. You know those moments where you feel like you're just kind of stopped in time, and your focus is just on the present, and nothing else really matters, and you just kind of sit in those feelings? That's what it was like.

In other news regarding the subject header, my sleep hasn't been great the past few days, and I felt really off yesterday, so I did a mood log for the first time in a long time, since, like, OSU. It's basically a cognitive behavioral therapy exercise where you examine your thoughts and see what bearing they really have on reality, and it helps you to handle difficult emotions and deal with them. So... yeah. Emotional knots.

I'm looking forward to coming home. There are a lot of things I want to read/do/watch/play and people I want to be with that I've missed. It's a nice feeling to finally be at the end, to know there's a reprieve just around the corner. But it is odd. It's certainly surreal. Elder Magleby just left today (I don't know if I mentioned in the last email--he's getting sent back to Mexico for the remainder of his mission--hopefully, anyway, because it would be kind of awkward if he had to go back to the states again because of some COVID shenanigans). The zone leaders and Elder Sagahun took him down to Columbus. He'll take his flight out tomorrow. That's one of the things that's the weirdest. I said earlier on as the end was approaching (I don't know if I wrote it in an email) that it kind of feels like I'm leaving my fellow soldiers on the front lines. You feel a sense of guilt, but also a sense of relief that this isn't where you need to be anymore. But then you recognize all the good things that have resulted from this experience, and you want to stay. And you know that you've made some of the best and truest friends here than you ever had before. It reminds me of Mycroft's line in Sherlock: "You're not haunted by the war, Doctor Watson. You miss it." I'm certainly not dealing with survivor's guilt or posttraumatic stress --I'm not experiencing anything to the extent that those who have served in the military experience--but some of these feelings are sort of what I imagine it would feel like.

Anyway, I've got a lot of emotional knots. I'll probably spend a good deal of time untying them when I get home. I have a lot to process and think about. There are things I want to do and be that I have not been and done yet, and I need to understand some things about myself. Hopefully I'll be able to do that in the next 11 days or after I finish my time here.

Well, toodles. Keep an eye out for my final email. I should send it on the 9th, two days before my flight home.

Elder Davis