Week 35: The Power of the Written Word
Dear Loved Ones,
I can feel myself falling in love with Independence. This week the city held its annual SantaCaliGon festival. Independence was the starting point for the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon Trails. And then there's that one group that got kicked out of here in the 1830s and headed west later. Most of it was pure carnival (rides, funnel cake) but a sliver of it had pioneer crafts, cosplayers, and backdrops. I got to dress up in an apron and bonnet and spend the morning making rag dolls. How very in touch with my roots of me.
The Saturday I idled away making rag dolls was also Fia's former baptismal date before the Miracle at Liberty Jail bumped it up. I'm so grateful it got moved up! I love her and miss her so much. I promised her before I left that I will visit her after my mission in Kansas or anywhere else she ends up living in the future. She has changed my life, I have done my little part in changing hers, and I am determined to be her lifelong friend.
My friend Jake, serving in Brazil, uses the term "friend" in lieu of the now defunct term investigator. (They're supposed to be "people we teach" now. Missouri is worse at using the correct term than Idaho was.) I've adopted Jake's term this past week. Anyone on our to-do list for the day I now call friend, even if neither my companion or I have met them yet.
A YSA ward is a good place to make friends because everyone's young, so I'm on equal footing with everyone. And since YSAs cover larger geographical areas, I'm living the dream. We get a full-time car instead of sharing one. I get to drive around and see the cool old buildings on one edge of our territory and green fields and flat Midwest sunrises on the other. I've fallen in love with the Midwest. I'm falling in love with the visitors' center tour, too. My favorite part of it is getting to talk about the destruction of the Saints' printing press and the Rollins sisters saving the Book of Commandments. I'm a books and publishing girl. I think a lot about how that printing press was the Saints' media voice back in the day and how those both inside and outside of the church are using media today, including my own use. Being able to email all of you is one of my favorite parts of being a missionary. When my dad gave me a father's blessing before I left for Idaho, he blessed me to be able to write good emails home, and I take that seriously. So many missionaries I know write dry week-in-review reports and are surprised when no one reads them after a time. I try to actually put effort into these and be conscious of who will read them, especially because my emails are blog posts as well and members and non-members alike might stumble across them.
I have been a blogger since age fourteen. Since then, writing and writing publicly has been my way of making sense of my own life and thoughts. Because of this, not being able to talk about being barred to serve for three years in my facebooks posts hurt my soul. Now that I'm a missionary and not She Who Cannot Serve, the rules of polite society finally entitle me to talk about both the good and the bad I see from inside a mission-centered culture. A friend of mine who went through a lot of trauma on his mission and recently decided to leave the church started a blog sharing his story and sent me a few posts. Yesterday, an elder I know was bashing on people who "leave the church but can't leave the church alone" and the writings they produce, as if the only reason struggling people write is to persuade others to fall away. I don't think so. I know what it's like to need to be heard. I know what it's like to think my only options were a long, miserable life of silence within the church or an aimless life if I left it. I'm so grateful for the mission call that finally came, that I can serve in Zion and meet people like Fia, that the pain that defined three years of my life and made the church, for a time, a place of anguish is finally gone. If any of you who are reading this are at a tipping point, please. Press on. You can make it here.
Now, I'm going to end this on a weird note but this story is too interesting not to be shared.
Our stake president was invited as a guest speaker at zone conference this week and he approached the pulpit with a book in hand. It was skinny, probably less than 50,000 words, with a yellow cover printed with this glossy look to make it look like gold. The title was The Sealed Book of Mormon. No author's name that I could see and no other features besides horizontal white line running about two-thirds of the way down the cover. At first I thought it was a prop he'd created as part of an object lesson. No. It was sent to him by the First Presidency because it was sent to the prophet by a member of the stake. I investigated a little further and the sisters over the ward of the person who sent it say the sender believes it to be a true book. This is one of the weird side effects of serving in a city full of splinter churches. I wish I could've seen the inside of the book to check the copyright page, but it's going to remain a mystery. The stake president only brought it to the pulpit to treat it as an object of disgust and remind us to emphasize the simple things in our teaching.
I wonder what possesses people to write things like this. Does the author suppose themself to be a prophet or is it some kind of ploy to undermine the church, a la Martin Harris's stolen 116 pages? There's power in the written word. Power for deception. Power for persuasion of truth.
Sincerely,
Sister Smith
I can feel myself falling in love with Independence. This week the city held its annual SantaCaliGon festival. Independence was the starting point for the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon Trails. And then there's that one group that got kicked out of here in the 1830s and headed west later. Most of it was pure carnival (rides, funnel cake) but a sliver of it had pioneer crafts, cosplayers, and backdrops. I got to dress up in an apron and bonnet and spend the morning making rag dolls. How very in touch with my roots of me.
The Saturday I idled away making rag dolls was also Fia's former baptismal date before the Miracle at Liberty Jail bumped it up. I'm so grateful it got moved up! I love her and miss her so much. I promised her before I left that I will visit her after my mission in Kansas or anywhere else she ends up living in the future. She has changed my life, I have done my little part in changing hers, and I am determined to be her lifelong friend.
My friend Jake, serving in Brazil, uses the term "friend" in lieu of the now defunct term investigator. (They're supposed to be "people we teach" now. Missouri is worse at using the correct term than Idaho was.) I've adopted Jake's term this past week. Anyone on our to-do list for the day I now call friend, even if neither my companion or I have met them yet.
A YSA ward is a good place to make friends because everyone's young, so I'm on equal footing with everyone. And since YSAs cover larger geographical areas, I'm living the dream. We get a full-time car instead of sharing one. I get to drive around and see the cool old buildings on one edge of our territory and green fields and flat Midwest sunrises on the other. I've fallen in love with the Midwest. I'm falling in love with the visitors' center tour, too. My favorite part of it is getting to talk about the destruction of the Saints' printing press and the Rollins sisters saving the Book of Commandments. I'm a books and publishing girl. I think a lot about how that printing press was the Saints' media voice back in the day and how those both inside and outside of the church are using media today, including my own use. Being able to email all of you is one of my favorite parts of being a missionary. When my dad gave me a father's blessing before I left for Idaho, he blessed me to be able to write good emails home, and I take that seriously. So many missionaries I know write dry week-in-review reports and are surprised when no one reads them after a time. I try to actually put effort into these and be conscious of who will read them, especially because my emails are blog posts as well and members and non-members alike might stumble across them.
I have been a blogger since age fourteen. Since then, writing and writing publicly has been my way of making sense of my own life and thoughts. Because of this, not being able to talk about being barred to serve for three years in my facebooks posts hurt my soul. Now that I'm a missionary and not She Who Cannot Serve, the rules of polite society finally entitle me to talk about both the good and the bad I see from inside a mission-centered culture. A friend of mine who went through a lot of trauma on his mission and recently decided to leave the church started a blog sharing his story and sent me a few posts. Yesterday, an elder I know was bashing on people who "leave the church but can't leave the church alone" and the writings they produce, as if the only reason struggling people write is to persuade others to fall away. I don't think so. I know what it's like to need to be heard. I know what it's like to think my only options were a long, miserable life of silence within the church or an aimless life if I left it. I'm so grateful for the mission call that finally came, that I can serve in Zion and meet people like Fia, that the pain that defined three years of my life and made the church, for a time, a place of anguish is finally gone. If any of you who are reading this are at a tipping point, please. Press on. You can make it here.
Now, I'm going to end this on a weird note but this story is too interesting not to be shared.
Our stake president was invited as a guest speaker at zone conference this week and he approached the pulpit with a book in hand. It was skinny, probably less than 50,000 words, with a yellow cover printed with this glossy look to make it look like gold. The title was The Sealed Book of Mormon. No author's name that I could see and no other features besides horizontal white line running about two-thirds of the way down the cover. At first I thought it was a prop he'd created as part of an object lesson. No. It was sent to him by the First Presidency because it was sent to the prophet by a member of the stake. I investigated a little further and the sisters over the ward of the person who sent it say the sender believes it to be a true book. This is one of the weird side effects of serving in a city full of splinter churches. I wish I could've seen the inside of the book to check the copyright page, but it's going to remain a mystery. The stake president only brought it to the pulpit to treat it as an object of disgust and remind us to emphasize the simple things in our teaching.
I wonder what possesses people to write things like this. Does the author suppose themself to be a prophet or is it some kind of ploy to undermine the church, a la Martin Harris's stolen 116 pages? There's power in the written word. Power for deception. Power for persuasion of truth.
Sincerely,
Sister Smith
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