Monday, May 13, 2024

Chapter 58: Where Hope Thrives

We’re cuttin’ down on length today. It’ll still be long enough to deter the faint of heart/mind from reading—you’ll still earn a medal in my books for making it to the end—but my stores of outrageousness are being emptied elsewhere for the time being. 

The unwritten theme of our work at the GSD this past week: creativity takes time, and that’s okay.

In my mind, “work” is associated with routine actions, calculations, coordination, and physical exertion. While our projects at my main service site involve all of those things (well, if you count sitting still at a desk, sitting still in meetings, and walking around temple square to be “physical exertion”), it’s a pretty interesting set of responsibilities when most of it amounts to “Be creative.” over and over and over again.

A lot of creativity in my life has been exercised in response to inspiration striking me square between the eyes rather than cases where I have to conjure it up at will, so I weirdly find myself missing mindless mundane work. At least then everything is measurable. When everything weighs on editing sentences to be pleasing to the ear and graphics to be pleasing to the eye, you can find yourself running into the same brick wall for hours trying to get an idea to work, only to scrap the whole thing and come up with something that works beautifully in like 15 minutes. You definitely feel buffoonish afterward, wondering why you didn’t jump to that idea 120 blasted minutes ago.

In a conversation this week, I was comforted to discover that I’m not the only one in that wrestle when it comes to media work. Wasteful as it seems, that lengthy journey is a part of the creative process. This probably constitutes an iceberg effect in everything we see other people have made. For anything that looks refined or inspired as a final product, it’s likely that it took a lot of dead ends to make it there. Emily compared it to Elder Holland’s story about coming to a fork in a road and being inspired to take the wrong path solely so he could hit the dead end, realize the other path was correct, and benefit from the knowledge he gained.

We had an awesome district council on Thursday! The service mission leaders hosted and graciously served us nachos. We had a very successful accountability segment for the past week of service goals and held a discussion on the role and application of hope.

Takeaway: Hope dies when you rely only on shadowy impressions from the past. We don’t know the joys that await us. Hope thrives upon recognizing that any fragment of excitement we can experience for the future only points to a much greater reality which God is preparing for us, both in this life and in the next. A fellow missionary helped teach me that back in San Diego. I doubt he even realized impact of his words at the time.

As a zone, we’re also working on ways to build a stronger community and culture of missionaries, and we came up with some awesome ideas that I’m excited to implement.

Friday was a pretty good day for proselytizing. We had a great lesson on the first half of the restoration with Vanessa and her daughter. Vanessa was particularly interested in the power of covenants. We ran into Dean as he was walking around the lake, just in time for him to cancel our lesson that evening for a family event :(. We also had a lesson with a returning member in my family’s ward! We were able to cover the gospel of Jesus Christ pretty comprehensively, and I was excited to hear him ask about requirements for entering the temple.

The ordinance workers going to the Taylorsville temple officially departed from Oquirrh Mountain on Saturday. Somehow, there’s always more people to miss. But! Plenty more to meet! Training at 500% capacity presses on, AND, turns out it’ll be out of the frying pan and into the fire once that’s done, cause we’re going to go from 3 shifts per day at the Oquirrh Mountain temple to 4. That will probably be sometime this summer, so we’ll need a bunch more people for that. Thankfully, there are plenty of prospective ordinance workers on our waiting list, so with a little more fighting for our lives, we should be A-OK. Also, I got to help train a new initiatory coordinator this past shift! I say train, but he was so on top of his game he very well could have done it blindfolded. Not saying I am going to blindfold him next time, but I do think he’d get by better than the average person if I were to hypothetically do that.

Lastly, elephant in the room: we got to start off the new week with Mother’s Day! It was such a blessing to be able celebrate with my ward and family yesterday while simultaneously serving a mission. I’m so grateful for the immeasurable sacrifice, care, and love my mother has given me, for the example she is to our family, and for the way she has woven music and family history into our shared identity. Charity—in the many senses of that word—is a gift from God, but mothers are His foremost means of conveying that gift to us.

God be with you,

Elder Tolman


Customary missionary group lunch at the church office building


It’s warm again! On a different note, the West Office Building really needs something to brighten up the exterior. One manager was gunning to have the whole thing painted somehow, but I think that got shot down pretty quickly.

Monday, May 6, 2024

Chapter 57: Unsuspected Significance

It snowed again! I’ll have to remember to stop joking about that possibility in May / late April, cause Utah always overhears things like that.

Another week gone by! Elder Lee keeps saying “another day, another dollar”, then remembers we have no income, and amends it to, “another day, another blessing”. We got a lot done this week! I’ve had a stronger focus on missionary media projects of late rather than communications projects, though the two are right up the same alley. I still haven’t been able to return to missionary IT work, but I did find time to join the Mission Support team’s weekly devotional on Thursday, so that was good to be a part of!

On the communications side, we recently had a revolutionary technological realization where we came to understand our whole life has been a lie, and we had to make a drastic (which is to say minuscule) change to how we do things. I will say no more on this subject.

A loose end I was scrambling to wrap up at the end of my week’s GSD service was a small media project for Mother’s Day. This week, leading up to Sunday, we want to decorate our portion of the West Office Building for the occasion, so the manager over the GSD missionaries requisitioned a bunch of posters featuring mothers from the scriptures. It took a little finicking to make them look fancy, but the concept was fairly simple. On each poster, we’d have the mother’s name, a painting of them, and a meaningful verse about them.

Finding mothers in the scriptures and verses for them was not hard; what WAS hard was getting images for each of them without violating copyright. SHEESH. I managed to track each of them down eventually, aside from one. Sarah: no problem! Rebekah: check! Rachel? Nothing. NOTHING on the church website or the image archive we use. I combed through church articles, I sifted through galleries, I gave her my blood, sweat, and tears, and her portrait remained as nonexistent as my aforementioned income! To let the Batman theme of last week’s email carry over, I was reenacting the interrogation scene from The Dark Knight with my computer. “WHERE’S RACHEL?!” In the end, I had Hannah take her place, so it was all good.

I ended up staying overtime to complete the project, which I felt a little guilty for, since (a) it disrupts my evening schedule when I do that, and (b) it’s become a habit. But, the project came together, I sent it to our manager for approval, and I was off. On the train ride home, I got a message back from her. She had been out traveling that day, but had remained active on our messaging software. She replied, “Elder Tolman you made my day. These are beautiful. Your best yet!! I am sitting at the airport and I am in tears looking and reading these posters. They are beautiful. This was my Mother’s Day gift from you.” Her extremely complimentary words were a huge gift back to me! I was so glad that such a simple thing like a set of poster designs could bring such joy to someone. In addition to that, I was glad to learn that though the afternoon wasn’t going according to plan, I was spending the time well after all.

Friday was a day of silliness. Vanessa’s daughter was sick and Dean had a family event going on, so no lessons with them 🙁. We did drop by Vanessa’s, talked with her on the doorstep, and reminded her about church on Sunday. I’m not actually up to date on whether they made it, so I’m excited to find out! Beyond those lessons not happening, we went to a member lesson at the end of the day only to discover that they had cancelled, but the text had slipped past the teaching elders’ notice, AND in the would-be lesson after that we discovered we were actually scheduled for Tuesday, not Friday 😆. I didn’t make fun of the elders too much (I don’t have access to their scheduling app, so I count myself as an innocent and slightly amused bystander…well, technically my IT permissions let me sync into any missionary’s app, but doing that outside GSD work seems like dangerous territory).

So, 4 lessons defeated. Silly silly. BUT, I discovered something cool on Sunday. We had a quick unscheduled lesson with some other members soon after the last one didn’t happen, and this family happened to be in my ward. Their kids were headed to bed, so we just said an opening prayer, played a brief gospel-related game with a spiritual thought, asked for referrals, and said a closing prayer. I didn’t really think anything of that mini lesson, but when I returned from the YSA ward on Sunday, my parents let me know that the father in that family mentioned our visit in fast and testimony meeting. He said we had visited at just the right time. One of the adults there who I assumed to be a relative was actually a friend of theirs who had gone inactive in the church. Our reach there was just a bit further than we knew!

Saturday was great! It consisted entirely of helping another ward clean the chapel, working in the temple, and holding a zone game night. We don’t have unified p-day activities, so that last item has been our weekly attempt to build some zone culture. In the temple, I got to spend the full shift as initiatory coordinator, and it went very smoothly. It was good to get back into the groove of things after being in different positions for the past few weeks. Also, the past couple shifts have been a little bitter sweet because with the temple district boundaries shifting as Taylorsville opens, we just officially lost a bunch of workers to Jordan River. Our former assistant shift coordinator came in to do initiatories though, so it was good to see him there.

We had mission leadership council on Sunday with President and Sister Kotter as well as Elder Sellers, one of our Area Service Mission Specialists. We discussed the type of missionaries we need to be as zone leaders and sister training leaders, Elder Hanson (my counterpart from the SoJo Oquirrh area) gave an insightful training on being enough in our calling and on searching for rays of light (inspired by Elder Dushku’s talk from this past General Conference), a sister gave a training on focusing on Christ, and we made plans for our upcoming zone conference.

A comment in Sunday School yesterday yielded an insight I wanted to share. Over the course of many many gospel discussions, you start to pick up on certain verses getting quoted over and over again. Ether 12:27 is one such verse. It makes sense that this revelation is so compelling. It affirms that our mortal weakness, which is a subject of concern on pretty much everyone’s mind, is woven into God’s plan, and is even instrumental to it. I’ve wondered before why this message about weakness is so important to us while simultaneously taking up such a minuscule part of the scriptures. Much of the standard works instead appear to focus on laws, the gospel of Jesus Christ, and God’s promises and subsequent blessings.

Over time, however, I’ve seen that this principle of weakness turning into humility and strength is echoed across all of God’s dealings with His children. It was present for prophets like Moses, Gideon, and many others who felt dwarfed by their callings. It was present for Paul, who learned to be grateful for the metaphorical thorn in his side (I hope it was a metaphor, anyway). And, as someone shared in Sunday School, it was present for a blind man in the New Testament.

“And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth.

And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?

Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” (John 9:1-3)

Jesus proceeds to heal the man, so I think in the past I’ve assumed that last phrase, “that the works of God should be made manifest in him” essentially meant, “he’s blind so I can perform the miracle of healing him”. I’m not a master at interpreting King James Version language, so I won’t necessarily rule that interpretation out entirely, but I can’t help but think, “What if Christ had never crossed paths with this man, and what of the many blind people who never did? Is this purpose only realized at the resurrection when Christ heals us all? Surely the divine intent behind infirmities like this doesn’t come down to just enduring for the sake of God eventually removing them.”

No, I think this little story is Ether 12 in action once again. At least for now, Christ doesn’t manifest Himself in the removal of trials nearly so often as He manifests Himself in the midst of those trials. In fact, difficulty has a curious capacity to enable Christ’s work, just as blindness can be a conduit for God’s wonders. A child of God who isn’t at their '”100%”” amazingly seems to be a more fit servant and disciple than one who is secure and proficient in all they do. There may be barriers in mortal life, but these barriers are reflective. At the right angle, we discover divine light shining off of their surface.

God be with you,
Elder Tolman


I call this poster printer “The Beast”. We’ve had many a battle.


Random office photo!

Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Chapter 56: I’m Batman

Hellohellom’kaywe’regonnagetrightintothis.

What a week! Was it a lot? Was it a little? I don’t even know. But in any case, I’m alive halfway through a new one, and everywhere I go there’s intense boss battle music playing, which clearly indicates I’m in the climax of SOME story somewhere, and now is not the time for lollygagging. Yes, these coming days are revealing themselves to be…*reverb effect* D E N S E. So! Let’s see how fast I can throw words on a page.

I had a birthday this past Wednesday! (Alas! I can feel the prime of my life seeping away like water held in cupped hands. 22 years of age! *shudders* Wo is me!)

On Tuesday last week, Elder Lee and I were scrambling to get some projects done before we headed off to one of the West Office Building conference rooms for a communications training. This was to be the next installment in the series of trainings we’ve been getting from Emily, and the plan was to get a rundown of some communications software. I arrived at the conference room. . .only to discover balloons and cake on the table, more people present than I expected, and “Happy Birthday Elder Tolman” on the whiteboard. Emily and her coworkers had thrown a surprise party! There were totally signs that this was in the works throughout the day, but I, in my infinite wisdom, did not pick up on a single one of them. In any case, I was touched! That was the first time I’ve ever been thrown a surprise party. We were also celebrating our supervisor Matt since he got a job in a different department and would be leaving us at the end of the week.

We had a jolly good time popping the balloons and answering questions on little slips of paper inside. The employees even wrote Matt and I cards. Emily remarked that she was excited to see my reaction to mine, and for good reason, cause when I opened the envelope, I discovered that the card was Batman themed. This was an inside joke of ours following an assignment I had to redesign a logo. I had come up with a few different ideas, and when I submitted them, someone in HR noted that one of them somehow managed to look a lot like the Batman symbol. Important detail: The birthday card came with a removable Batman mask, so I wore it in one of our team meetings later that week. 

We had bunch of leftover cake, strawberries, and raspberries at the end, which Matt and I were assigned management of. I dodged the cake and opted to take the berries, which I spent the train ride home feasting upon. As I did so, a gentleman walked up to me and greeted me in the standard way one greets a service missionary. “Elder, where’s your companion?” We talked through the whole train ride and the topic of conversation transitioned from missions to his work to the fact that he had once been in the national guard. When he mentioned that it was specifically military intelligence he did, I asked if he knew a Colonel Tolman. Turns out he did, and they were deployed at the same time! I got to surprise him by showing the name on my tag.

On Thursday we had a mission-wide devotional where we heard from a church historian who wrote a documentary on Joseph Smith. It was being streamed to the GSD so we didn’t have to interrupt our service, and we had lots of charming technical difficulties (please ignore the fact that we are literally the IT division of this department of the church and yet we constantly struggle to get that conference room to work 😆), but between the distorted/muted/out-of-sync audio, there were lots of great insights on testimony and on Joseph Smith’s role.

That evening for district council, we met as a zone and combined with another zone to listen to Brother Atkinson speak. He has served in various capacities, including as a mission president, temple president, and, perhaps most importantly, as an incredible neighbor to those around him. He devoted most of his presentation to discussing the power of temples, and cited A LOT of quotes from President Nelson regarding the many promised blessings of temple attendance. He’s quite the a storyteller, and he shared some jaw-dropping miracles from his experiences.

Back to the GSD: a lot of missionaries tour the West Office Building as they decide which service sites they want to be a part of. In conjunction with touring, we show them a missionary-made outreach presentation to help give them an idea of what we do. A division of our media team has been working on revising and updating this presentation—a looming project indeed. Sister Farnsworth, a remote GSD missionary, happened to be visiting from Texas, and she and I were selected as the new faces/narrators of the presentation. Thing is, that means all of our filming was confined to the few hours we could spare on Monday and Tuesday before she headed back home, AND the project has been in the development/writing stage AS we’ve been creating it. So, ahhhhh! Delivering lines you’re handed on the spot ain’t fun. BUT, Sister Fry, our script writer, has officially declared that I have a narrator voice, so that’s a good sign! Validation! I just hope it all comes together in the end.

On the communications team, we’ve known for some time that we’re going to have our work cut out for us in May, but at the end of last week, that reality hit me like a brick wall. One moment, I’m peacefully noting just how light my to-do list has gotten, and then in the next, I’ve got an absolute swarm of tasks buzzing around my head. Feels like I’m balancing on the edge of a knife now, but things are working out so far!

On Friday, Elder Siddoway, Elder Chatterley, and I had a couple really promising nonmember lessons! One was with our friend Dean, who is skeptical, but wants to better understand some of his children and grandchildren who are members. The other was with a woman named Vanessa and her daughter, who want to draw closer to Christ and are looking for the best way to come to know Him. I hope they continue to have lessons on Fridays so I can join! It’s a joy to be involved in those discussions.

That evening, with only about 20 minutes left in the day, we were trying to decide on a member to visit and we ended up dropping by the elders quorum president in my home ward. He and his wife invited us in and accepted our offer to share a message. In this impromptu visit, we didn’t go in with a lesson plan, and whenever this is the case, one of us usually takes initiative with a scripture, and then a discussion naturally grows from it. When we sat down, the first thing that came to my mind to ask them about was their son, who is currently serving a mission in Colombia. I expected that we’d just chat a little about him and other topics before transitioning into a spiritual thought. It turned out that he was actually on the forefront of their minds, and they’d been very worried about some challenges he’s been experiencing. We spent the entirety of our time there offering advice and thoughts on the mission experience, and that turned out to be exactly what they needed at the time.

This situation was surprisingly reminiscent of Elder Bednar’s teachings on how we recognize promptings from the Spirit primarily in retrospect. In the moment, all you can do is what you deem to be good, and sometimes later you get a glimpse of just how much you were really doing. Then, the impact of your actions just doesn’t seem to square with how little you understood what you were doing, and the idea that God constantly has a hand in your life becomes just a bit easier to believe.

Now, the trick is to resist the temptation to view serendipities like this as isolated instances of divine intervention. Instead, see them as glimpses into a reality you are constantly living in, but are often unaware of. Recognize that ALL good you accomplish is enabled by God, not merely this coincidence here or that miracle there. Such extraordinary things are set in motion by the same spiritual energy with which you smile at someone, or render service, or offer forgiveness.

Most importantly, as you see this, your heightened perception of goodness does not remain dormant. You find that just as you can access goodness better, goodness can access you better, and it changes you. You see what you could not see before. You feel what you could not feel before. You do what you could not do before. Something wonderful, it seems, is reaching through the good to act upon you. As you sense that, you rely on evidence less, and you are able to trust more.

^If absolutely none of that made sense, just give Alma 32 a fresh read. He’s cooler than I am.

Two final updates:

1. I finished my third week of training temple workers this past Saturday, which means I’m officially trained as a trainer. A mentored mentor, if you will. 

2. This past Sunday, Elder Duran in my zone gave his mission report (a.k.a homecoming talk). He did a fantastic job and has racked up quite the service resume. His sister finished her mission right around when he finished his, so we got to have a double feature sacrament meeting. Whenever I mention Elder Duran to my dad, he jokes about the band Duran Duran. With the two of them sitting up on the stand that day, we did in fact have (one) Duran (and another) Duran present, though no pop rock music was played in the chapel. 😆

God be with you,
Elder Tolman


Our Quotes of the Week board is 50% spiritual, but we take liberty with the other 50%. Also I’m super happy with how this TV slides project turned out! It definitely siphoned off some of my soul.


Egotism 😊


Surprise birthday/farewell party with HR and comms!


Look out, he’s got a knife!


Some ominous yet friendly elders. Last Wednesday they took to just pointing at me and chanting, “Birthday. Birthday. Birthday.” It started small, then I got swarmed.


I'm Batman


Cat on grill. A marvelous sight to see while knocking doors.