Hi everyone!
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| After my haircut |
I don't know if I'll have time to complete my email this
week. We might have a lesson at 4:30 today, in which case we will only
have an hour or so total of emailing. And I’ll have even less time to write
than that, because I have not kept up on my incoming emails, because we’ve been
so busy. I read some emails from my family, particularly from my father,
who gave some more detailed information about my mom’s ongoing medical
struggles. He also answered a lot of my questions about my college choices.
More on that at the end.
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Looking over this week, we've been very busy. On
Monday, Elder Hardt packed quickly. We didn't have an activity. We
spent the evening mostly saying goodbye to people.
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| with Elder Hardt |
On Tuesday I got my new
companion: Elder Vandehei [Van-dee-high or Van-duh-high]. He thinks the
name traces from the Netherlands. This is the second area he has served
in; his first was Pinedale WY, where he served for seven and a half
months. He enjoyed sports and video games. The transition has gone
well. We get along pretty well.
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| Elder Vanderhei |
We ran into the end of a Relief Society dinner activity and
helped them clean up the tables. We met a few ward leaders, including the
young men’s stake president, who was there for basketball.
Our first planning session, Wednesday, was slow, because
Elder Vandehei asked lots of questions about the people we are working with. It
was good to see the area with fresh eyes. We went out with a priest in the
evening. We walked and contacted people for a little more than an hour
and visited a Relief Society president to see who she thought we should visit. It
was a long day, as were most of the days this week. We were both tired
when we came in.
The weekly planning session on Thursday went very
well. It was simple, fast, and straight to the point. All we need
to do for it to help us is to check our plans throughout the week. We contacted
some of our investigators in the evening, as many of them haven't responded to
their phones. It worked well.
We visited an elderly sister with another member of her
ward, per the bishop's request. She knew the bishop from when he was in
primary. From that visit, I appreciated more how growing old was hard.
The sister wasn't complaining, but I realized how hard it is to take care of
oneself and face the constant pain from being aged as she described how she was
doing in various aspects of her life.
The brother who came with us asked us to give him a
blessing. His wife, we found, left him a week ago. He was still in
the beginnings of sorting through it; we sang a hymn with him to get him into
the right place before giving him a blessing. It was only the second time
that Elder Vandehei had given a blessing. I'm sure he felt somewhat like
I did earlier in my mission.
At another point in the evening, we a member offered us a
ride. After he picked us up, he told us that he wasn't actively attending
church. It wasn't in a surly, rebellious way, nor was it "I'm not
active and I'm perfectly happy with it, thank you very much." I
wondered what his story is. Then, later that week, a couple that having us
over for dinner mentioned the man who gave us a ride as a family that was
struggling and could be shown greater love. His wife had a lot of medical
issues, and they seemed to fallen out of the habit of going to church.
Friday we had a multi-district meeting. They are now called
multi-district meetings instead of zone meetings, because the church changed
the mission policies to allow for meetings that are larger than district
meetings but smaller than zone meetings, since getting a zone together might
involve a lot of travel. However, our mission has permission to hold zone
meetings because the missionaries are so close to one another. So while
they are now called multi-district meetings, they are meetings of the entire
zone, and but everyone still refers to them as zone meetings.
Anyway, the zone meeting training was on baptism and our
purpose. I wrote a lot about it in my journal and don’t have time to
transcribe all of it. To summarize, I know that for me to be motivated to do
something, it helps for me to understand why. I have a hard time being motivated
to do something if I don’t know why. During the meeting, I realized that
I need to better understand a few things about baptism and missionary work.
On Saturday, we planned piecewise, as we were trying to get our
investigators to attend a baptism that afternoon. They didn’t go. So we went
out and contacted people. It felt good to go out—it’s been in the upper
50s the second half of this week. A few weird things happened, like a
truck driving by where they couldn’t see us when someone let out a ridiculous
laugh or a teen trying to throw us off by yelling “Hail Satan” as they drove
by, but I was unphased and waved. That was satisfying. In the evening, we
helped someone move, as we got a last-minute call for help.
Sunday started off with daylight savings time. We had
a constant application of effort through the day. We made it to two ward
council meetings, two sacrament meetings, and three other meetings with just
mission leaders. As Mormons know, Sunday is the easiest time to hold a meeting.
After church, I found that street contacting is easy when
you actually do it. Just open your mouth and talk to people. The
only way to improve is b doing it more. There were a few moments today where I
thought, “I’m glad I talked to that person.” One contact was for two
people at a halfway house; another resulted in a referral to the Spanish sister
missionaries.
I’m find that I’m so involved in the work right now that I
rarely check my email during proselyting time. I’m enjoying my time as a
missionary.
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College thoughts: My dad sent me more information about
colleges, per my questions to from last week. I’m still digesting it all.
I’ve decided that my religious opportunities will never be as good at Carnegie
Mellon as they would at BYU. In Provo, I’ll have greater proximity to
family and more social opportunities with like-minded people. My academic and
career opportunities will be better at CMU than BYU. I now realize that at
CMU I may get a much larger workload than I previously expected from each of my
classes. But I realize that I'm not just going to college to learn in a
classroom. This will be another formative time in my life. That is the
crux of the issue. I feel like the next four years will be an important part
for me as I move into adulthood. It's a lot more trying to define which
one would be right for me, but that requires knowing what I want to do, who I
want to be, how I want to live, how each college is, and so forth.
I worry that I might go to BYU and find that I might not be
able to get the perfect job for me--the one I love and the one that pays well
enough—because I needed the academic opportunities that only CMU would offer.
Likewise, if I went to CMU and it was very hard to find friends that understood
me or shared my standards or uplift me, or staying connected with family, or
dating, or that there was a need I had that required the spiritual growth of
BYU. I can't solidly capture it into words, but I do feel that going to CMU
would certainly close off some things that BYU would bring to me.
I don't think I will really know that I will have made a
right choice or not until I am at the college campus and living life as a student
wherever I decide to go. If I go to one college and find a severe
disadvantage in the area I chose against, I'll be upset. Unless, of
course, I am able to kneel down at some point and pray about where I should go,
and then receive a solid answer. That hasn’t happened yet.
I want to add that my choice of colleges did NOT fill my
week. Quite rather, it was the opposite; I had no time to look at the
materials and think of it before today. So, my thoughts on everything
college just raced ahead of me as I tried to reflect on what would be best for
me.
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LDS nesting dolls!
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