Chapter 28: The Words of Christ

 Voila, today marks 6 months in the field for me! I can't say it flew by, but time certainly continues to behave weirdly.

It's been a dense week, primarily characterized by Easter Sunday. We had a special focus on inviting people to church all throughout. In fact, as a mission, we were required to spend at least an hour per day specifically on that, and 4 hours on Saturday. That wove pretty neatly into how we normally occupy ourselves, so it was nothing crazy. We've spent most of our time visiting people previously taught by missionaries ("grey dots" as they're known in areabook), contacting people in our member records to see if they still live there and are still interested, having enormously uplifting interactions and lessons with the Imperial Beach ward, and trying to be as effective as we can through texting and social media messaging.

Photo booth at the ward Easter activity

A couple times we got with another companionship and did "whiteboard finding" where we write a question on a whiteboard and invite people passing by to write their answer. Both times we went to the pier and did Easter themed questions. We had a few interesting conversations from that. Right before one of these sessions, the Sisters were telling us that they had grabbed every type of pamphlet they had to pass out, and they jokingly added "we even brought the law of chastity pamphlet". But then, as we talked to people on the pier, someone asked us about that very topic, so we actually ended up giving it to someone. 😆 We recentered our conversation on the core of our message and swapped it out for a restoration pamphlet, but it was funny that the topic came up at all.

Whiteboard finding with the Sisters

Whiteboard finding with the Hermanas

Forgot to bring pass-along cards with church address on them
+the pen we had smudges easily on pass-along cards
+super windy by the beach
=very occupied hand while we wait for the ink to dry

We've had a couple lessons with our friend Francisco, and he's shown great faith and understanding of the gospel. He's expressed a desire to be baptized, but he wants to be able to attend church consistently first, and his work doesn't currently allow him to. He anticipates getting a different shift in June though, and in the meantime we've been reviewing the Preach My Gospel lessons and focusing on consistent scripture study.

We're also teaching a part-member family that's been striving to attend church more often, and they're very close to picking a date for their daughter Ariel to be baptized! We had a successful and heartfelt "double lesson" with them on Wednesday. It began with us teaching a lesson on baptism, but after that lesson finished, the conversation went on and evolved into an entirely new topic. The family showed enormous courage in opening up about some of the challenges they've been facing in the church, and there was a good spirit in the discussion that followed. We ended by giving two of them priesthood blessings (Elder Rhodes felt suddenly inspired during the lesson to ask if they wanted one). As a missionary I have been learning that priesthood blessings, far from being something that should be restricted to the most dire of occasions, are meant to be offered often. We should demonstrate confidence in and reliance on the authority God has given us.

Ariel celebrated her 9th birthday on Saturday, and we were invited to attend her party. Her family went ALL IN with it. Hawaiian themed with a canopy set up in front of their house, music playing, lots of people, a taco stand with some superb chicken tacos, and a snow cone stand. We went with the Sisters, talked with some people there, and were touched when Ariel's mom told us she was really happy to see us there.

Ariel's birthday party. We saw that the cake was being cut and we were going to avoid the sugar,
but then Ariel personally walked up to each of us and proffered a slice. How could we say no?

We have a military base in our area, so some of the ward members live in military housing. This can make them tricky to visit if they're in a fenced off area, but Elder and Sister Pollock are among the senior missionaries over military relations, so they will sometimes take us on military visits. They'll also sometimes take missionaries to do their shopping at the commissary, which is such a treat cause of the better prices. This week, as they drove us along the Strand to the Naval Amphibious Base on Coronado, we realized that since I have a military ID from my dad's service in the National Guard, we can actually get in ourselves!

Visiting a military family with Elder and Sister Pollock!

Our ward had an Easter activity on Saturday which we got to help set up for on Friday. The real delight though was helping hide Easter eggs for the primary and youth. Elder Rhodes and I each hid a golden egg, and we pride ourselves that they needed hints to find them. There was also a really pretty photo booth with a backdrop looking out from Christ's open tomb.

Photo booth at the ward Easter activity

  

    

Easter Sunday featured an excellent sacrament meeting. We could feel it was going to be good the moment it began, in no small part due to the fact that the opening hymn was I Believe in Christ. As we sang, I just thought "what a perfect way for visitors to have an introduction to our beliefs". And on that note, apparently someone we met on the pier came to the meeting! Elder Rhodes and I were sitting with different people and just missed him, but we were excited to hear about it afterward. The primary sang an enthusiastic rendition of Gethsemane, which matched the spirit of the opening hymn, and we heard two talks that brought to the forefront of our minds the life our Savior lived and the death He overcame. The first of them retold the last week of Christ's life in simple, reverent words, and it was the most engaging and edifying talk I've heard in some time. A straightforward presentation of Christ's life holds the same power any eloquent dissertation on Him could. It reminds me of a principle I learned from performing Shakespeare theater.

The language of Shakespeare is difficult for most people to understand these days, so as I performed through High School, I was directed to use body language and emphasis to make the meaning of the lines as clear to the audience as possible. Sometimes this even went to the extent of pantomiming a line as much as I spoke it. Over time, I was also trained to avoid letting this go overboard with too much gesturing, but the underlying idea was the same: "these lines are confusing, so give the audience clues".

In my senior year, I had the opportunity to compete at the Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, Utah, and receive professional feedback each time I performed. One of the judges said something that stuck with me. For the particular scene I was performing in, he told me to keep the body language as simple as possible, and to avoid gesturing at all. "Let the lines speak for themselves. The power is in the language, and all you need to do is deliver that language clearly and authentically. Shakespeare has done all the work for you." I see this same principle in preaching the gospel.

"Angels speak by the power of the Holy Ghost; wherefore, they speak the words of Christ. Wherefore, I said unto you, feast upon the words of Christ; for behold, the words of Christ will tell you all things what ye should do" (2 Nephi 32:3). While I think "the gospel as phrased by me" has an important place in our testimonies and what we have to offer others, I'll note that this scripture points to "the words of Christ". Not just the teachings of Christ, but His words.

President Oaks' talk this past conference stood out to me as a demonstration of this. To testify of Christ, he simply used Christ's words as they were written. No expounding. No ornamentation with personal experiences and analogies. He let Christ speak for Himself. That talk on Easter Sunday, though it didn't exclusively use scripture, felt a little like "letting Christ's life speak for itself". A simple description of all He did from Palm Sunday to His resurrection was all that was needed to invite the Spirit. This serves as a reminder to me that when I teach, I don't need to debrief and expound on every scripture we share. It's important to ensure our teaching is understood, but a simple declaration of Christ's words may be all that is needed.

After sacrament meeting we joined some members for a late lunch, and they had 2 other families in the ward there, so it went loooong. We're technically supposed to keep meal appointments to an hour max, but....let's think of it like this: we had 3 families there, and we taught a lesson, so it was basically 3 appointments, right? 😉After that we went straight to the bishop's for dinner, and unbeknownst to us, they invited almost the entirety of our district. It was a little bit of a party day, but I'll be more grateful than guilty. 

Guess what happened twice this week? Someone from another Christian denomination walked right up to us during companionship study and started a conversation. The first, friendly as he was, only really wanted to pose critical questions about the standard works and then switch topics when we would answer those questions, but the second shared his testimony of Jesus Christ with us and we had a great conversation about how grateful we are to worship a God who is both perfectly just and perfectly merciful. He even gave me a pen! That made my day.

God be with you,

Elder Tolman

Post-apocalyptic sky

We gathered at the church for district council on Monday,
and as we tried to leave, we discovered both exits to the parking lot
were blocked by mounds of tree branches.
Our meeting happened to align with someone trimming the trees outside. 😆

Post-soccer selfie. We don't have access to a gym, so for our exercise
in the morning we usually get together as a district and play that.