Week 12: You're a Burl, Brother Robinson
Dear Loved Ones,
When I was a freshman, my plant science class got a guest visit from the campus arborist. Because apparently our campus has its own arborist. We kept plant diaries and I'd taken a picture awhile back of a funny-looking tree near my dorm. It had a round bulge coming out the side and I wondered what disease it had to make it so deformed. I showed the picture to the arborist and asked him what was wrong with it. He recognized the tree immediately and told me, "Nothing's wrong with it. That's a burl."
No one knows why burls form, but the wood in them is fine quality and prized by woodcarvers.
I mentioned, some time ago, the Robinson family, who had their temple recommends taken away by a bad bishop because their house burned down and they were unable to pay tithing while rebuilding. That meeting with them was the most meaningful experience of my mission up to that point, but we hadn't been able to have a follow-up visit after that. We stopped by the Robinsons' Wednesday night and finally caught them at home. Brother Robinson, it turns out, is cane carver. He showed his canes to me and talked about how sassafras wood gets twisty groves in it because it grows in swamps and vines get tangled around it. So an interference with nature is what makes the cane wood so beautiful. That reminded me of burls. I asked him if he knew about burls, and being a woodcarver, of course he did. I told him, "You're a burl, Brother Robinson." He is so precious to me, but that past bishop judged him wrong, like how I thought that tree had cancer.
Brother Robinson also makes obsidian knives in addition to canes. I don't plan on needing a cane anytime soon, but I've decided I'll come visit Boise after my Missouri mission and buy a knife from him. While we were talking, Sister Robinson, not to be outdone by her husband's craftiness, went and grabbed two rocks. She fitted the smaller one against a gap in the bigger one and proudly announced, "Look what I made! It's a rock eating another rock!"
I think that's hilarious and I've laughed five times while typing it.
We're having dinner with them later tonight and I'm more excited about it than any other event of my mission so far, except maybe going to the temple, Taylor's baptism, and receiving my call.
It's been a long, hard road, but I'm grateful for the work I've been able to do here and the work I will do in Missouri. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's been a blessing to serve a two-transfer mission in Boise, but there are people here I've been able to help. Now, on to my next mission. I will be in the MTC from this Wednesday to April 10th.
Thoughts on teaching styles:
I took a class at BYU called Eternal Families. It was a weird mix of religion, social science, marriage prep, and sex ed. In our sex unit, our professor spent a good chunk of time talking about how damaging certain metaphors for sex are. He spoke of teachers who crumpled flowers, drove nails into boards, or took their class out to the parking lot and hurled china plates onto the asphalt. In every case, the destroyed object was supposed to represent a person's chastity (but really just their virginity). All those metaphors are terrible because they end with someone utterly destroyed. Repentance is absent from the analogy. He told us to never explain sex to our future students or children with any sort of analogy.
I've been thinking about a different damaging analogy I've heard all too often at church. It's the one where past pain is discussed as a backpack full of rocks. People who hold grudges carry it around needlessly, until, la di da, some church lesson tells them they can choose to take it off!
Pain isn't like that. I read an article once about a woman who was raped. Her rapist broke a glass bottle inside her because his goal was not just to pleasure himself, but to cause her the maximum amount of pain. Long after he was gone and out of her life, probably no longer thinking of her, that glass tormented her. She needed several surgeries after the birth of the child conceived in rape to repair the damage he had done to her. Ultimately, she was left infertile. That was her last baby.
Pain isn't a backpack full of rocks. It's the glass inside you. There were choices that woman could make, like the choice to keep and raise her baby, but she couldn't choose to let go of the glass inside her, to take it off like a backpack.
To those of you who are members, please realize that when you belittle the pains of people hurt within the church, you are making more work for missionaries like me. You are urging people to stray from the church. And how often can we succeed when we come to these people as representatives of the church they now distrust? The poet Rupi Kaur said, "You cannot look for healing at the feet of those who broke you." People who have been hurt by the church are reluctant to seek healing from the gospel, and that is a wretched and gloomy way to live.
Weekly tip to avoid mission-centricness:
There's these new mission safety videos I have to watch that bother me. Not just because they're cringy like driver's ed crash videos. Not even because I will have to rewatch them all when I go into the MTC. I can't stand that they keep showing us all these disasters and the cautionary message is "and then he had to go home early from a mission."
Excuse me? Aren't we in a phase right now where people are rampantly tolerant of people who come home early from missions? Where opting out because of mental illness is supposed to be just as okay as quitting because you were physically injured? So why is the big no-no of physical injuries that people got sent home early?
Injuries last longer than missions. My roommate Elyse got into a car crash six days into her mission (she was not the driver) and had to go home, yes, but she also now has chronic migraines and other health problems. That's going to affect her life a lot longer and more negatively than being sent home from a mission. She built a life for herself pretty fast and never seemed bummed about being home, but the health problems will always hurt her.
I also think it's cringy that the death of a missionary is supposed to be worse than the death of any other young person. I've had classmates, friends' siblings, and the children of my mother's good friends die from car accidents, murder, suicide, heroin, and a hiking accident. Do their lives matter less than those of missionaries?
Mission-centric culture is really ugly and muddled if you look at it too long, and believe me, I looked at it as an outsider for a long time. From February 10, 2016 to March 11, 2019. I had a lot of animosity towards missions for those three years. These couple weeks as a two-transfer missionary have often made me feel like I'm behind enemy lines undercover. Especially that one time I showed up at the airport without a nametag and all the nametag people were trying to figure out why I existed when I hadn't been in the MTC with them.
This week's tip to avoid mission-centricness is to talk about physical injury to missionaries as being bad in and of itself and not because it gets them sent home. Starting college a semester earlier than you planned is not a fate worse than third-degree burns.
Sincerely,
Sister Smith
When I was a freshman, my plant science class got a guest visit from the campus arborist. Because apparently our campus has its own arborist. We kept plant diaries and I'd taken a picture awhile back of a funny-looking tree near my dorm. It had a round bulge coming out the side and I wondered what disease it had to make it so deformed. I showed the picture to the arborist and asked him what was wrong with it. He recognized the tree immediately and told me, "Nothing's wrong with it. That's a burl."
No one knows why burls form, but the wood in them is fine quality and prized by woodcarvers.
I mentioned, some time ago, the Robinson family, who had their temple recommends taken away by a bad bishop because their house burned down and they were unable to pay tithing while rebuilding. That meeting with them was the most meaningful experience of my mission up to that point, but we hadn't been able to have a follow-up visit after that. We stopped by the Robinsons' Wednesday night and finally caught them at home. Brother Robinson, it turns out, is cane carver. He showed his canes to me and talked about how sassafras wood gets twisty groves in it because it grows in swamps and vines get tangled around it. So an interference with nature is what makes the cane wood so beautiful. That reminded me of burls. I asked him if he knew about burls, and being a woodcarver, of course he did. I told him, "You're a burl, Brother Robinson." He is so precious to me, but that past bishop judged him wrong, like how I thought that tree had cancer.
Brother Robinson also makes obsidian knives in addition to canes. I don't plan on needing a cane anytime soon, but I've decided I'll come visit Boise after my Missouri mission and buy a knife from him. While we were talking, Sister Robinson, not to be outdone by her husband's craftiness, went and grabbed two rocks. She fitted the smaller one against a gap in the bigger one and proudly announced, "Look what I made! It's a rock eating another rock!"
I think that's hilarious and I've laughed five times while typing it.
We're having dinner with them later tonight and I'm more excited about it than any other event of my mission so far, except maybe going to the temple, Taylor's baptism, and receiving my call.
It's been a long, hard road, but I'm grateful for the work I've been able to do here and the work I will do in Missouri. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's been a blessing to serve a two-transfer mission in Boise, but there are people here I've been able to help. Now, on to my next mission. I will be in the MTC from this Wednesday to April 10th.
Thoughts on teaching styles:
I took a class at BYU called Eternal Families. It was a weird mix of religion, social science, marriage prep, and sex ed. In our sex unit, our professor spent a good chunk of time talking about how damaging certain metaphors for sex are. He spoke of teachers who crumpled flowers, drove nails into boards, or took their class out to the parking lot and hurled china plates onto the asphalt. In every case, the destroyed object was supposed to represent a person's chastity (but really just their virginity). All those metaphors are terrible because they end with someone utterly destroyed. Repentance is absent from the analogy. He told us to never explain sex to our future students or children with any sort of analogy.
I've been thinking about a different damaging analogy I've heard all too often at church. It's the one where past pain is discussed as a backpack full of rocks. People who hold grudges carry it around needlessly, until, la di da, some church lesson tells them they can choose to take it off!
Pain isn't like that. I read an article once about a woman who was raped. Her rapist broke a glass bottle inside her because his goal was not just to pleasure himself, but to cause her the maximum amount of pain. Long after he was gone and out of her life, probably no longer thinking of her, that glass tormented her. She needed several surgeries after the birth of the child conceived in rape to repair the damage he had done to her. Ultimately, she was left infertile. That was her last baby.
Pain isn't a backpack full of rocks. It's the glass inside you. There were choices that woman could make, like the choice to keep and raise her baby, but she couldn't choose to let go of the glass inside her, to take it off like a backpack.
To those of you who are members, please realize that when you belittle the pains of people hurt within the church, you are making more work for missionaries like me. You are urging people to stray from the church. And how often can we succeed when we come to these people as representatives of the church they now distrust? The poet Rupi Kaur said, "You cannot look for healing at the feet of those who broke you." People who have been hurt by the church are reluctant to seek healing from the gospel, and that is a wretched and gloomy way to live.
Weekly tip to avoid mission-centricness:
There's these new mission safety videos I have to watch that bother me. Not just because they're cringy like driver's ed crash videos. Not even because I will have to rewatch them all when I go into the MTC. I can't stand that they keep showing us all these disasters and the cautionary message is "and then he had to go home early from a mission."
Excuse me? Aren't we in a phase right now where people are rampantly tolerant of people who come home early from missions? Where opting out because of mental illness is supposed to be just as okay as quitting because you were physically injured? So why is the big no-no of physical injuries that people got sent home early?
Injuries last longer than missions. My roommate Elyse got into a car crash six days into her mission (she was not the driver) and had to go home, yes, but she also now has chronic migraines and other health problems. That's going to affect her life a lot longer and more negatively than being sent home from a mission. She built a life for herself pretty fast and never seemed bummed about being home, but the health problems will always hurt her.
I also think it's cringy that the death of a missionary is supposed to be worse than the death of any other young person. I've had classmates, friends' siblings, and the children of my mother's good friends die from car accidents, murder, suicide, heroin, and a hiking accident. Do their lives matter less than those of missionaries?
Mission-centric culture is really ugly and muddled if you look at it too long, and believe me, I looked at it as an outsider for a long time. From February 10, 2016 to March 11, 2019. I had a lot of animosity towards missions for those three years. These couple weeks as a two-transfer missionary have often made me feel like I'm behind enemy lines undercover. Especially that one time I showed up at the airport without a nametag and all the nametag people were trying to figure out why I existed when I hadn't been in the MTC with them.
This week's tip to avoid mission-centricness is to talk about physical injury to missionaries as being bad in and of itself and not because it gets them sent home. Starting college a semester earlier than you planned is not a fate worse than third-degree burns.
Sincerely,
Sister Smith
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