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.
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