Week 26: We're Just Background Players in the Fia Show
Dear Loved Ones,
This Friday I discovered you can ship cremated ashes through UPS. I discovered this because I showed up to an appointment with a recent convert whose daughter's ashes were sitting on the doorstep. They come with special black labels so you don't confuse them for an ordinary package. I knocked on the door, and when she answered, my companion and I picked up the box and helped it into her arms.
It was more a comfort visit than a lesson. I shared a scripture, Doctrine and Covenants 84:88, with her:
And whoso receiveth you, there I will be also, for I will go before your face. I will be on your right hand and on your left, and my Spirit shall be in your hearts, and mine angels round about you, to bear you up.
When I finished reading, she said, "Read it again."
I did, and she looked contemplative. "I've heard that somewhere before. Where have I heard it?" She titled her head back. "Heavenly Father!"
She said she prayed to God shortly after her daughter died and those words came to her. She had no idea where they were from until I showed her the source.
I believe in mission miracles now.
That night, we got a call from other missionaries asking how our day had gone. We told them about handing this woman her daughter's ashes and other things we'd been up to that day (more about that in a minute). They took it all in stride and then asked, "Did you find anyone today?"
Really? I told you I handed a woman her cremated child and all you care about is whether I found anyone new to teach? This reminds me of a time in Boise when I was trying to teach the Plan of Salvation to a woman whose seven year old had drowned, but the three members "helping" us with the lesson kept chiming in to talk about their own missions, or their son on a mission in the Phillipines, and "Isn't it so great that these young ladies left their lives behind to be missionaries?" Dead children are, in fact, more important than missions or the fact that I'm on one.
Yes, I knocked a few doors on Friday, but that's not the most important work. I spent most of the day doing Important Professor Stuff. For those of you who missed the email when I introduced that term, Important Professor Stuff is when you forsake your normally scheduled responsibilities to talk one-on-one with someone who really needs you.
That same day, we went to visit an inactive member who has been struggling a lot and arrived just when she found out she was locked out of her apartment. She offended some criminals the other day who got back at her by putting super glue in her locks. We had dropped by the night before and witnessed the people who probably did it lurking around the complex, so we were able to make statements to the police. She had some laundry she needed done while she was at it, so we took it back to our apartment and did it for her while she was waiting for the cops and fixed her some lunch. In my mind, that's a day well spent because we actually got to help people. Knocking on doors is just a means to an end. We also dropped off some clothes to Fia. She wanted to get some dresses for church and missionaries like to abandon old clothes in their apartments.
Fia is so golden. Merriam, one of the cities our ward covers, set up 1,500 flags for the Fourth on Saturday. A sign-up went around at church to help set them up and we committed to come. When we arrived, Fia was already there. She told us, "I woke up at four a.m. because I was so excited." First week at church and she's already commiting to do service projects in the a.m.! I love this girl.
A family in my home ward, the Taylors, wrote me a letter a while back where they said, "No one ever 'converts' another individual; rather, individuals experience a "conversion," or a mighty change, by choosing with their agency, to come unto Christ."
That's so true with Fia.
I've told various missionaries about miracle-child Fia and one of them told me, "Keep being obedient and you'll keep seeing blessings."
That attitude unsettles me. I don't want to view Fia as a blessing to me. Missionaries are supposed to bless people, not the other way around. It strikes me as more than arrogant to believe that Fia dropped out of the sky fully formed in all her scripture-reading, flag-raising, commitment-keeping glory just because my companion or I followed mission rules. Plus, we met Fia through a Bible request, not through praying to find someone prepared to receive us. It's her, not us, who took initiative. There's no causation or coorelation there.
I understand why obedience is stressed so much in missions. Because missionaries are unpaid, the only thing holding missions together is an obedience fetish and a cultural stigma against going home early. And missionaries cling to obedience when nothing else is going right in their lives. There's a document called the Ricciardi letter that's read in multiple missions, maybe even all of them. I was made to read it in both Idaho and Kansas. It's written by a former missionary in England relating his mission experiences to his son. He tells of a time where he spent eight months without having any baptisms. He had to develop this really bitter, stuffy attitude to cope. Here's an excerpt. The typos aren't mine, they came with the document.
"The dilemma of new missionaries is to learn some way of gauging effectiveness and success. It is natural to use number of baptisms as the gauge of success. While number of baptisms is important, there is a far better more valuable gauge: Obedience. I knew of missionaries in my mission who did not live mission rules, were not as committed as I think the Lord desired, yet they baptized.
I really struggled with that because when I left the MTC it was my firm understanding that only obedient missionaries baptize...(in) a tough area, we had taught very few discussions, handed out hardly any copies of the book of Mormon, no investigators to church since I had arrived. It was wearing on me. At that point in time I was called to be a trainer. I thought “what a bummer to have to train a new missionary in such an “armpit of the mission” area (please excuse that reference). My spirits where really low, because I had been working harder than ever, being more prayerful than ever, really obedient, and no one wanted to hear our message. At that same time, I was seeing missionaries in neighboring parts of Birmingham scheduling baptisms. One companionship bragged that they had just come back from three days in Scotland (not just outside our area, outside our mission, WHICH IS AN ABSOLUTE NO NO) on a site seeing outing and they had a baptism scheduled the next weekend. I couldn’t believe it."
I can. Because exact obedience doesn't bring blessings, investigators aren't there to bless missionaries, and people convert themselves. My trainer, Dana Holland, let Taylor (the first person I taught who got baptized) call her Dana instead of Sister Holland. We blasted non-mission music while Taylor drove us around. We left our area without seeking permission from our mission leaders first to hang out in Taylor's dorm room and order Chip cookies (none of this was my idea, by the way). The result? Taylor and Dana were friends. Dana was a support to her when Taylor's family opposed her baptism. All of that was out of keeping with mission rules, and Taylor got baptized.
Taylor gave a really beautiful, articulate talk after her baptism where she said getting baptized didn't feel like starting something new, but continuing a path that she'd been on all her life, ever since she was a little girl who adored Christian music. Taylor converted herself. Dana was her friend along the way. I'm not going to take off to Scotland anytime soon, but I want to be to Fia what Dana was for Taylor.
This Friday I discovered you can ship cremated ashes through UPS. I discovered this because I showed up to an appointment with a recent convert whose daughter's ashes were sitting on the doorstep. They come with special black labels so you don't confuse them for an ordinary package. I knocked on the door, and when she answered, my companion and I picked up the box and helped it into her arms.
It was more a comfort visit than a lesson. I shared a scripture, Doctrine and Covenants 84:88, with her:
And whoso receiveth you, there I will be also, for I will go before your face. I will be on your right hand and on your left, and my Spirit shall be in your hearts, and mine angels round about you, to bear you up.
When I finished reading, she said, "Read it again."
I did, and she looked contemplative. "I've heard that somewhere before. Where have I heard it?" She titled her head back. "Heavenly Father!"
She said she prayed to God shortly after her daughter died and those words came to her. She had no idea where they were from until I showed her the source.
I believe in mission miracles now.
That night, we got a call from other missionaries asking how our day had gone. We told them about handing this woman her daughter's ashes and other things we'd been up to that day (more about that in a minute). They took it all in stride and then asked, "Did you find anyone today?"
Really? I told you I handed a woman her cremated child and all you care about is whether I found anyone new to teach? This reminds me of a time in Boise when I was trying to teach the Plan of Salvation to a woman whose seven year old had drowned, but the three members "helping" us with the lesson kept chiming in to talk about their own missions, or their son on a mission in the Phillipines, and "Isn't it so great that these young ladies left their lives behind to be missionaries?" Dead children are, in fact, more important than missions or the fact that I'm on one.
Yes, I knocked a few doors on Friday, but that's not the most important work. I spent most of the day doing Important Professor Stuff. For those of you who missed the email when I introduced that term, Important Professor Stuff is when you forsake your normally scheduled responsibilities to talk one-on-one with someone who really needs you.
That same day, we went to visit an inactive member who has been struggling a lot and arrived just when she found out she was locked out of her apartment. She offended some criminals the other day who got back at her by putting super glue in her locks. We had dropped by the night before and witnessed the people who probably did it lurking around the complex, so we were able to make statements to the police. She had some laundry she needed done while she was at it, so we took it back to our apartment and did it for her while she was waiting for the cops and fixed her some lunch. In my mind, that's a day well spent because we actually got to help people. Knocking on doors is just a means to an end. We also dropped off some clothes to Fia. She wanted to get some dresses for church and missionaries like to abandon old clothes in their apartments.
Fia is so golden. Merriam, one of the cities our ward covers, set up 1,500 flags for the Fourth on Saturday. A sign-up went around at church to help set them up and we committed to come. When we arrived, Fia was already there. She told us, "I woke up at four a.m. because I was so excited." First week at church and she's already commiting to do service projects in the a.m.! I love this girl.
A family in my home ward, the Taylors, wrote me a letter a while back where they said, "No one ever 'converts' another individual; rather, individuals experience a "conversion," or a mighty change, by choosing with their agency, to come unto Christ."
That's so true with Fia.
I've told various missionaries about miracle-child Fia and one of them told me, "Keep being obedient and you'll keep seeing blessings."
That attitude unsettles me. I don't want to view Fia as a blessing to me. Missionaries are supposed to bless people, not the other way around. It strikes me as more than arrogant to believe that Fia dropped out of the sky fully formed in all her scripture-reading, flag-raising, commitment-keeping glory just because my companion or I followed mission rules. Plus, we met Fia through a Bible request, not through praying to find someone prepared to receive us. It's her, not us, who took initiative. There's no causation or coorelation there.
I understand why obedience is stressed so much in missions. Because missionaries are unpaid, the only thing holding missions together is an obedience fetish and a cultural stigma against going home early. And missionaries cling to obedience when nothing else is going right in their lives. There's a document called the Ricciardi letter that's read in multiple missions, maybe even all of them. I was made to read it in both Idaho and Kansas. It's written by a former missionary in England relating his mission experiences to his son. He tells of a time where he spent eight months without having any baptisms. He had to develop this really bitter, stuffy attitude to cope. Here's an excerpt. The typos aren't mine, they came with the document.
"The dilemma of new missionaries is to learn some way of gauging effectiveness and success. It is natural to use number of baptisms as the gauge of success. While number of baptisms is important, there is a far better more valuable gauge: Obedience. I knew of missionaries in my mission who did not live mission rules, were not as committed as I think the Lord desired, yet they baptized.
I really struggled with that because when I left the MTC it was my firm understanding that only obedient missionaries baptize...(in) a tough area, we had taught very few discussions, handed out hardly any copies of the book of Mormon, no investigators to church since I had arrived. It was wearing on me. At that point in time I was called to be a trainer. I thought “what a bummer to have to train a new missionary in such an “armpit of the mission” area (please excuse that reference). My spirits where really low, because I had been working harder than ever, being more prayerful than ever, really obedient, and no one wanted to hear our message. At that same time, I was seeing missionaries in neighboring parts of Birmingham scheduling baptisms. One companionship bragged that they had just come back from three days in Scotland (not just outside our area, outside our mission, WHICH IS AN ABSOLUTE NO NO) on a site seeing outing and they had a baptism scheduled the next weekend. I couldn’t believe it."
I can. Because exact obedience doesn't bring blessings, investigators aren't there to bless missionaries, and people convert themselves. My trainer, Dana Holland, let Taylor (the first person I taught who got baptized) call her Dana instead of Sister Holland. We blasted non-mission music while Taylor drove us around. We left our area without seeking permission from our mission leaders first to hang out in Taylor's dorm room and order Chip cookies (none of this was my idea, by the way). The result? Taylor and Dana were friends. Dana was a support to her when Taylor's family opposed her baptism. All of that was out of keeping with mission rules, and Taylor got baptized.
Taylor gave a really beautiful, articulate talk after her baptism where she said getting baptized didn't feel like starting something new, but continuing a path that she'd been on all her life, ever since she was a little girl who adored Christian music. Taylor converted herself. Dana was her friend along the way. I'm not going to take off to Scotland anytime soon, but I want to be to Fia what Dana was for Taylor.
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