Monday, October 30th, 2017:
Even though today was p-day, Elder Parnes and I got
started planning at 7:30 am. Elder Opificius had asked us to send him our goals
for November (our mission president asked all companionship to set goals for the
upcoming month) so we spent our planning time setting those goals.
Laundry took about two hours. Shopping took a while
because a recently returned missionary showed up and wanted to talk. The
transition home has been hard for her. I hope she can find a purpose soon.
Emailing went well, but I didn’t have enough time to collect and send photos.
Over the weekend Elder Parnes was told he was being
transferred to Murray. My new companion is Elder Heyward from Alabama.
After laundry and shopping, Elder Parnes packed while I deep cleaned. We
got out of our apartment a little late due to dinner. Elder Parnes wanted
to pack more, not believing he could do it only in the time he had tonight and
tomorrow morning.
For our evening appointments, we went on splits. I
went with a ward missionary and had a lesson with Simeon, Madelin, and Hannah.
The plan was for them to lead a discussion of James 1-3 with us. Although I
told this in advance to the ward missionary, I realized that I could have used this
morning’s planning time to prepare more for this lesson. The ward
missionary seemed especially worried that the investigators might have
additional questions to make a long lesson for us. Fortunately, they
decided to finish the Plan of Salvation discussion from last visit. It
still took a while, which gave Elder Parnes time to say goodbye to everyone he
wanted to. His lesson with Olivia had finished within 30 minutes.
Tuesday, October 31th, 2017:
We had a slow start today. Elder Heyward got here
at 9:30 and settled in. I introduced him to the area and said my goodbyes to
Elder Parnes.
Elder Heyward came into this area with many new
ideas. I’m trying to go along with him, as I know we could use a change
of pace, but sometimes his ideas conflict with what I think a specific person might
need. We're trying to balance it out between my greater knowledge of the
area and Elder Heyward's new perspective; it hasn't been emotional so much as
finding what would be best, which is a large relief.
We were unable to go out and see anyone because
after getting all settled in (including trying to get hold of Elder Heyward's
bike), we had a temple trip. Halloween is a special time for missionaries
in Utah; the missions all around don't want them proselyting because so many
people dress up as missionaries for Halloween, and the missions don’t’ want
real and fake missionaries out at the same time. So our mission got a rare
opportunity to have all the missionaries in the valley attend the SLC temple in
the same session. Elder Cannan sat right behind me for most of the time,
which was cool. President and Sister Hillier hosted a doughnut social in
the bottom floor of the conference center parking lot (I would guess in part so
that all the missionaries could stay reverent in the temple, knowing they had
time afterward to talk). We headed home after the social.
Since transfers just happened, the brand new
missionaries in the field are on their first few days. One of them who talked
to me during the doughnut social got wide-eyed at learning I had been out 16
months. It's funny; I didn't realize I was at such a point yet.
Wednesday, November 1st, 2017:
Our daily planning was like an overgrown hedge this
morning. We took about an hour and a half as I ran through the area and
lists of people we're working with. It wasn't unproductive, given
transfers, but we weren't as efficient because we didn't have a day fully
scheduled with activities.
After going to the care center and helping their
relief society meeting run smoothly, we studied and met with a sister who
handles biographies of us for the Canyon Rim stake. We had lunch,
received Elder Heyward's bike from a member, and continued to visit people.
There was one family we contacted a week or so
ago. Susie has connections to the Northern Viginia area and knew Tony
Favero. When we stopped by this time, her parents were just pulling in to
drop off the grandkids. As we talked, the grandparents got a call from
Susie, who had received a call from her children. They were concerned at
being home alone when some strangers (which would be us) knew it. The
grandmother seemed worried as she told us to have caution in working with her
daughter and granddaughters. Elder Heyward was enthusiastic in planning
how to start working with the family once he learned the kids were not
baptized.
We did talk to a few other people, but with no immediate
results. I have to remember that the things I do can have effects beyond
what I can perceive right away, though.
Elder Heyward has scheduled many meetings in an
effort to connect to the wards and pick the area up even more. He continued
this through the week until he had scheduled meetings with every bishop and
WML. He also asked each young men's president to send him a list of the
active priests so we could ask them to come with us in the evening, mainly to
drive us around, but also so they could see what a mission might be like.
Thursday, November 2nd, 2017:
We started weekly planning, but it wasn’t a normal
session. I had already described the people we’re working with, so we reviewed
that and planned a few things. I told Elder Heyward about how I can be
discouraged–I believe I don’t get depressed so much as discouraged–and also
told him about how my thinking process can be very complex.
We visited the principal of the seminary building
at Skyline High School. There’s only one nonmember taking seminary there; she’s
a special case, far out of our area, so we wouldn’t teach her.
Walking and biking around can be good because we
get to talk to many more people, but I feel often times it’s not productive.
I’ll still do it, though, because there are always good reasons to talk to
everyone.
I’ve met a long-time returned missionary who said
that he became very good at getting in the door with people at door approaches.
He said that, no matter what, the investigator was always more prepared when a member
(not the missionary) made the introduction to the church. I've been really
stuck in trying to figure out how to do missionary work the best way I can.
What I have noticed, as I have talked to Elder
Heyward, is we approach missionary work from different perspectives.
Elder Heyward is much more straightforward in his thinking, which can be both
good and bad. I think that having him as my companion is going to bring
an entirely new set of challenges but also present new ways for me to
grow. One vital thing is that he has a different view than I do on our
purpose and missionary work in general when it comes to heeding what others
think. That's an issue I've been mulling over for a while. I will
certainly write more about this in the future, but I think this will be a theme
of the transfer. This may be what I need the most right now. I just
need to learn more before I spill out the whole issue and what I think about
it.
Our evening was jumbled. After stopping by
Madelin to introduce Elder Heyward, we had a lesson with Matt, Emily, and Heather
fall through on us again. (We don't think it registered as a set appointment in
their minds.) So we visited two other investigators before making it to another
lesson. We haven't seen Jim in a while, but having finally nailed down an
appointment with him, we were surprised to find he read a lot of questions
online and asked us many different things. Some of the questions were
antagonistic in nature, but Jim seemed to be genuine to what he described: he,
as a scientist, liked to test the strength of ideas. He found a lot of
questions and wanted to know the answers. Some of his questions would be
easily answered by the Plan of Salvation, which we were going to teach, but due
to how unexpected his behavior was and how short a time we had, we weren't able
to do very much for him besides give him a plan of salvation pamphlet.
He's going to Antartica until February to collect meteorites in the ice; while
we can't meet with him, it should give him some time to cool off.
The next lesson we had was with Kiki, Gong, and
Tina. We learned that Tina and Gong were confused as to why the
formalities of our religion (prayer, attending church, and so on) were
necessary when other philosophies could just as easily help them be better
people. With their confusion framed into a question, we explained some of
the answer--if God is real and has told us to do specific things to be able to
get to heaven, we really need to do so! It's not just about being a
morally upstanding individual, but that theme is notable, and plan to touch on
it more in the future. Elder Heyward has the impression now that they are
not ready. He was willing to trust me when I told him that we were trying
to figure out what was holding them back and we should keep working with them.
Because we ran over time with our lessons, we were barely
able to get to a meeting that one of the stake presidents asked us to attend.
All the bishops were there to meet with him in a large council, so we were able
to see them all at once. More importantly, they knew Elder Heyward was
new in the area. We weren't able to get to the final meeting we had
scheduled with a WML, but we were able to reschedule.
Friday, November 3rd, 2017:
We had good correlation meetings today. We also
managed to fit in a good lesson. One thing I've seen Elder Heyward do is
schedule things closer to each other so that we keep meetings and lessons
focused and effective. It can be a hard time crunch, but it lets us get
more done.
District meeting covered the mission tour training
again. The whole mission has been abuzz with it. I think Elder
Duncan captured what the best type of missionary work would be--full of
purpose, well planned, and every action done with intention--which would completely
change our mission if we could only implement the principles he shared.
We are putting in the miles with our bikes.
It's nice, as Elder Parnes couldn't bike too much. However, Elder Heyward
got a flat tire near the end of our day. It put a wrench in our plans.
One man we talked to while biking was agnostic.
I tried to talk to him like I talked to other people, but he didn't choose to
accept what we said. I at least hope to offer some new insight to people
like him so that perhaps, one day, he could rethink things.
Our evening went pretty well--we were able to teach
one person [Timmy] who had previously eluded us for a while, among other
things--given that we weren't able to plan many things for it. Our issue
is that we try to use the 13 steps of planning, but by the time we get passed
our investigators we're pushing into the rest of our day. It requires
tight focus and being on the same page, things we don't have down yet.
Saturday, November 4th, 2017
Our days are busy. I haven't had
time to write my journal all week, but now I'm running out of time at
emailing. Here's a breakdown of what happened:
We didn't have a packed Saturday
planned as we left the apartment, but right off the bat we saw a family moving
in and helped them. They are less-active members, but they live right
across from the church building. It'll be a fun time for them.
We sat down with the 15th WML to
discuss Tristyn and Staci. We've fully charted out what we should do with
them now and are all on the same page. It was a longer meeting, but worth
it.
Next, we called and contacted people
for about an hour. I typed up lesson reports and fixed our schedules to
accurately reflect what we did earlier in the week, as we slacked on that
recently. Sometimes, we have the mentality that it's better to go and
talk to people in person rather than handle things we need to get done.
However, I've brought that up before.
We biked a lot, again.
We caught John, the Agnostic man we met
a month back, right as he was being dropped off at home. It doesn't seem
like he remember our challenge for him to read the Book of Mormon from last
time, so we may not keep working with him.
We then saw Madelin home while en
route, so we said hello. I shared about the hymns.
Elder Heyward's bike went flat again,
so we got home before heading to a church building, where we called more people
and reported on more things.
Sunday, November 5th, 2017
Elder Heyward executed an idea to bear
our testimonies in as many different wards as possible. I wasn't sure
about the idea, considering that it might not be appropriate to the spirit of
sacrament, but I decided to trust in Elder Heyward as he did this. I don't
know how the ward and stake leaders feel, as they respond with smiles. I
know they think it's an odd idea, but no one has outright rejected it. We
planned on getting to all of them (7 in the first sacrament meeting hour then 5
in the next two hours), but only got to three during the first block and three
more during the second block. In the third block of sacrament meetings, a
recent widow took the stand before we did and talked about her husband for a
while, so we only got to bear our testimonies in that ward. Elder Heyward
complained about how the sister took so much time. I saw that she really
was bearing a testimony as she talked about how grateful she was to the ward
for their support through her life and the light her husband had. I share those
two things to show how Elder Heyward and I contrast. I'm still thinking
on our differences.
Our lesson fell through with Timmy,
which was disappointing. I can tell Elder Heyward is eager to work with
that family.
After Sunday dinner, we returned to our
apartment. We hadn't planned yet. Once again, I became
discouraged. This developed into what I still believe would be
depression. I talked to Elder Heyward about it; ultimately, what helped
me get back on my feet was when he told me our meeting that night was with a
stake president, not a stake high councilor over missionary work, so it
couldn't be rescheduled easily. I got up and we biked over, had a good
meeting, and returned home.
The way I would describe my reaction to
my companion: Wary. Curious. Cautious. Bothered.
Excited. Unsure. Happy.
No comments:
Post a Comment