Chapter 29: Second Hour At Last

My goodness, I feel like I blinked and the week went by. Or some malevolent interdimensional entity with psychic powers swooped in and stole half my memories. Either way, off we go!

We kicked the week off with exchanges. I stayed in Imperial Beach with Elder Jezik, our district leader, and Elder Rhodes went off to South Bay 3rd (a Spanish area; his brain was definitely fried by the end of the day, trying to follow along with the lessons). As I planned the day out that morning, it wasn't looking like we were going to have a whole lot of variety in what we were doing. The highlight was going to be a lesson with an inactive family, which I was looking forward to, but the rest of the day was going to be checking in on people previously taught, tracting, and visiting unknown member records. Not too bad for a couple hours, but when it's all afternoon and evening with nothing to compliment those things, it's a bit of a monotonous grind, and not ideal for exchanges. However, just before exchanges started, we got a call from a ward member requesting service! We got to help move rocks, weed, and empty bags of sand in his front yard, and it provided the exact contrast I was looking for. That was a nice tender mercy. The visits went really well too. The Relief Society has our ward divided into zones for when we make visits, and we knocked out an entire zone that evening. Lots of moved records identified and some good conversations had.

We drove up to the aptly named Mission Valley on Thursday for Zone Conference. Actually, speaking of apt names, guess what our apartment's street name is.... Elder Avenue! 😆 So, Zone Conference. We had a pretty pleasant set of trainings and messages for this one. Sometimes the mission leaders bring the heat and focus on where the mission needs to improve and what we can do to be more effective missionaries, while other times they have a more gentle focus on uplifting us and reassuring us that our effort is enough. That certainly isn't to say that the two are mutually exclusive or that they are going too far in either case, but it is interesting to see the flow of yin to yang and yang to yin between each of our Zone Conferences.

The theme of the first half of this one was how we can have joy in what we do as missionaries. With my own struggles and the struggles I've seen in other missionaries, I thought this was a deeply inspired topic. We discussed Alma 26, which President Merritt referred to as "Ammon's Psalm", where Ammon expresses his joy in the Lord's work, reflecting on all that the Sons of Mosiah were able to accomplish. We also discussed the dangers of placing too high of expectations upon ourselves, labeling expectation gaps as "joy killers", and talked about how Christ's expectations for us are oriented around the course of our lives, not "right this instant". The talk "Be Ye Therefore Perfect--Eventually" by Elder Holland paired well with this message. In the second half of Zone Conference, we covered a variety of things, including companionship communication, optimizing our areabooks, using social media, and roleplaying teaching commandments. Lots of good tools for us.

I finally got to attend the second hour at church on Sunday! I hadn't had the opportunity this transfer because of General Conference and then Easter Sunday, so it was good to get a little better acquainted with the flow of Sundays in this Ward. I also really enjoyed sacrament meeting. The concluding speaker had us consider how we talk about things like our favorite hobbies. We get excited. We could ramble on and on about them. We want to share them with others. Is that how we feel about the gospel? Whether or not our answer is yes, that's how we can feel as we live it and realize just what it means to us.

On Monday evening we had a dinner lesson planned with the bishop's family and then a lesson with our friend Francisco. Leading up to it though, we got a call saying that dinner would have to be a bit later, so we thought "Why not do both of them together?" The extra company definitely meant our lesson went on a lot more tangents than we planned, but we've been looking for more ways to help Francisco draw closer to the ward, and this was just what we needed. To add to that, a few members of our ward council have also offered to have him over for dinner, so we're excited to see him meet and build relationships with them! We're grateful for the welcoming love they show.

Last thought. Over the course of my life, and especially on my mission, I have heard some pretty remarkable accounts of God acting in others' lives, from sharp promptings to shining miracles to comforting confirmations. I have looked for similar experiences in my own memories, and honestly, few, if any of them, measure up to the standard some testimonies have set. Under deep scrutiny, they blend in pretty well with what normal day-to-day living looks and even feels like. Our living the gospel does not always cause us to see definitively new things in our lives, but we can be assured it allows us to see the same things with new eyes. Combined with Christ's promises, this trust is my foundation.

God be with you,

Elder Tolman

Picture:

Elder Rhodes and I were shocked to discover we didn't take any pictures this week (again, I feel like I blinked and the week went by). So...here's a picture of me getting a mango smoothie at the commissary today! That's all I got 😆. For a little bit of explanation, my family lived on a military post one year and we would sometimes grab Naked juice from the commissary there. Mighty Mango was always my choice, so it was fun hearkening back to that this morning.