Chapter 13: Our Advocate is Born

Here we are in the last few days of 2022! Time really does fly, but at the same time it really doesn't. I've been looking back on events from last winter as if they were only a few months ago, but then I think of events not much earlier than that and they seem years and years old. I'll revise my statement to: time takes its sweet time, but memory blends together. That's been the pattern on the mission. Days and weeks feel looong, but when I look back on them I have no sense of what happened when, giving the illusion that it all flew by. Bottom line: time is weird. Maybe that's all I'm trying to say.

This week started off with exchanges. Elder Creasy stayed in Rancho Peñasquitos with Elder Moulton, our district leader, and I went to Black Mountain with Elder Tausinga, his trainee. It was a pretty new experience being in a companionship where we were both greenies (I'm in my second transfer and Elder Tausinga is in his first), but it was ultimately a refreshing change that helped me push myself. It was also the first time on my mission that I was made the designated driver, and it's been long enough since I've been behind the wheel that it took a lot of adjusting. We survived though! I now know what it's like to drive under the...*ahem*...LOVING supervision of a Tiwi device. Avoiding the little warnings it gives is a bit more challenging than I thought it would be, but I managed to escape with only a couple. Elder Tausinga was a joy to be with that day. He has an enthusiastic all-in mentality, and I learned from him about recognizing spiritual promptings with confidence.

We had a pretty cool moment in one of our lessons where, leading up to the end of the message we were sharing, I began thinking about inviting the family to say gratitude prayers and find a new way to focus on the Savior this Christmas, then soon after I thought about that, as Elder Tausinga talked, he suddenly said "...and I feel inspired to give you guys an invitation" and paused, not having a particular invitation in mind. I stepped in and voiced the one that occurred to me, and we finished off strong. Now, extending invitations and challenges is a pretty standard thing to do in a missionary lesson, but for that particular lesson, we hadn't made any plans beforehand to give one. Initially, I viewed this moment of heightened unity only as a minor coincidence, but afterward, the two of us discussed how if the adversary is indeed present in our lives, disguising divine inspiration in a veil of insignificance must be one of his uttermost concerns.  What seems on the surface a simple event valued only by the whims of our reasoning may instead host a battle between the Source of All Joy and the deceiver. I've continually remained cautious when it comes to declaring what is and is not the Spirit, worried about being overconfident, but that night I asked myself, "What if there is something subtly pushing that caution just a bit too far?"

Other highlights from that transfer included meeting and chatting with a couple friendly people while tracting and setting up a return appointment with one of them. We also had a lesson with an elderly sister (& poet!) in the Black Mountain ward, during which we met her cats Lucy, Murphy, and Otis. The lesson paused many times so we could pull Otis off the counter, and it came to a complete halt at one point when I had to retrieve Lucy from off the top of the fridge to prevent her from knocking Christmas decorations over.  The cat theme of my mission lives on!

Me and Murphy the cat
(to my family: he kind of reminds me of Tux)

Lucy on the fridge

On Friday, we sat down at a park with our friend Perry and enjoyed catching up with him. He's moving to Florida very soon, so his family's been super stressed shipping containers and dealing with sudden flight cancellations. He told us that prayer used to be a big part of his life, and he's noticing now more than ever the absence of that comforting reassurance provided by communion with God. We said a prayer with him there and helped him come up with a plan make it a daily practice. I shared with him that I view prayer as the door to my bed. I can't lay down each night without first "opening the door"--kneeling down and ending my day off alongside God. Likewise, each morning I can't walk away from my bed without passing through that same door. Daily prayer is an anchor, and I'm grateful to have a God who is a master listener. We had the chance to ask Perry if he's interested in meeting with missionaries after moving, and he said yes!

One evening while the sun was setting we noticed a faint haze in the air as we looked over nearby hills. We drove to Brother King's and sat with him on his porch to review the Plan of Salvation, continuing to help him prepare to go through the temple. We talked till past dark, and when we turned back toward the street, we were surprised to discover the entire neighborhood covered in fog! This created a mesmerizing effect with the Christmas lights and street lamps. I wish I got better pictures, but I'll include a couple!

Fog! Where's a mistcloak when you need one?

I hope everyone had a great Christmas! Though the past few weeks in San Diego have been a little chilly, it was a whopping 82 degrees on Christmas Day, apparently making it the warmest in the country! What a surreal winter. The highlight of the day was definitely being able to video call with my entire family visiting together on the other end, but a close second was spending the evening with Bishop Hilton and his family. We've been able to join them for both Thanksgiving and Christmas now, and their rascal-filled home is a prime place to spend the holidays. They also had the Hansen family over from the ward, so there was a lot going on. Right before dinner, we all shared our favorite name of Christ, which was a great way to take the enormous scope of His goodness and personalize it. I chose Advocate with the Father, because He stands in our defense, always asserting that we are worthy of love and opportunities to improve, even when we don't appear to deserve it. Sometimes He has to be our advocate when we ourselves are our own prosecutor. Thank goodness there is someone who will always step into that loving role.

We asked a couple of the Hilton boys what they got for Christmas, and with a slight grimace, they answered "underwear and deodorant". I laughed and told them there will come a day when they'll be overjoyed to receive stuff like that, and candy and cookies will become a source of stress (yes, goodies from the ward have continued to multiply). Good will become bad and bad will become good...in the best possible way 😆. They also received some pretty awesome presents that we loved hearing about, but the kicker in this story is that the Hiltons were super thoughtful and gave Elder Creasy and me presents containing pure gold! Pens, a journal, peppermints, and, you guessed it, deodorant! Hopefully they weren't trying to tell us something with that... They also threw in toothpaste, which had to have been divine inspiration, because I was literally about to run out. We enjoyed finishing the night out with games and a Christmas message.

A mini miracle in the form of toothpaste
(with our compactable 5-foot-tall Christmas tree in the background)

4 out of the 6 Elders in my district playing Kendama at district council

One last thought. It recently occurred to me that while we must be observant where we place our faith, faith is a more sure foundation than reason. I have proven to myself time and time again that I can think myself almost into oblivion, going around in circles, each new circuit more anxious and complex than the last. Faith, though it has no airtight justifying defense, simply is. We have only to look to where it leads and what it creates. There are many unanswered questions we have the right to ask in this life, but when those questions make everything seem dark and warped, we must ask ourselves, "After all is said and done, where does the light shine?" I've seen that light in my family. I've seen it as we've been united in the gospel. I've seen it in living righteously to the best of my ability. What can I say more?

God be with you,

Elder Tolman

Palm tree silhouettes during visits one evening

il.

Chapter 12: Gifts, Edible and Inedible

I'll go ahead and proclaim to all of you an early Merry Christmas! (Better to do it now and add to the hype than next Tuesday to remind everyone that it's over, right?) Enjoy the family traditions and special events that characterize so many of our favorite memories.

Yet another long email for you, so settle into your most comfortable item of furniture.

The ward over here is fantastic, and I've really enjoyed drawing closer to them. Nonmember work, on the other hand, has remained pretty rough, both for the area and the zone. We've been repeatedly trying to reach Susan with no luck thus far, Shawn and Grace postponed our much anticipated final meeting till after Christmas, and tracting has had to become its own reward. We do have a meeting set up with our friend Perry, but he'll be moving at the end of the month, so it'll basically just be to see whether he's interested in getting in contact with other missionaries.

Last week I mentioned that cookie warfare continued among our friends and members. Well it has done nothing more than ESCALATE. I'm telling you, it's a bloodbath. One day, we dropped by a family that presented us both with chocolate advent calendars. Then we visited a really sweet old lady who has had to Zoom in on sacrament meetings since leaving the house is physically demanding. After we chatted with her for a bit and shared a message, she offered us cookies which we, of course, couldn't turn down. What we weren't prepared for was that she had a full plate of them ready for ~each~ of us, and she threw hot chocolate in with that as well. That same evening, we went on a special mission for her to deliver a plate of brownies to Bishop Hilton. She'd told him to drop by and pick them up a couple times, but he kept being too busy, so we took the fight to him. Sister Hilton answered the door, happily accepted the brownies, and retaliated with homemade fudge for both of us. A couple days later we went on exchanges with the zone leaders, and I returned from Scripps Ranch to discover that Elder Creasy and Elder Ulibarri had visited that old lady again and received 2 MORE full plates of cookies. They're all sitting on our counter! Aaah! That's not even counting the 3 other families that have pulled the same trick on us... homemade candy, banana bread, and more cookies. When I look at the increasing mountain of treats, I begin to doubt we can conquer them, but then I remember that through Christ, all things are possible 😆.

(Seriously though, no idea what we're going to do with this much sugar.)

As a part of some of our member lessons, we've enjoyed sharing the prophecy of Christ's birth in 1 Nephi 11. We can find the nativity story not only contained within accounts like Luke, but also in a record that came forth from the Americas detailing prophesies of Christ six hundred years before his birth. This really shows how that event is significant to all times and peoples. Christ's whole ministry and atonement are a part of the gift that He is, but you might call His birth the singular point at which our Father in Heaven truly gifted His Son to us, making Him manifest in the flesh at our side. For this reason, Christmas radiates light.

On Thursday morning, we got to help out with an early morning seminary lesson. The teacher, also a member of our ward, really pulled out all the stops for this one. She set up the chairs like seats on an airplane, arranged the tables like wings, and themed the whole lesson around "flight OT2022", reviewing the last term of Old Testament studies, connecting to "flight NT2023", this upcoming New Testament term. Elder Creasy and I stood at the head of the room as the pilot and copilot with hats and all, delivering a witty script and leading the discussions. Halfway through, the teacher, dressed as a flight attendant, wheeled a cart down the aisle, offering in-flight services of pure life water and fruit snacks. This provided a backdrop to a discussion on feasting on the words of Christ, how "fruits" refer to works, and eternal life (*cough cough* pure life). The lesson drew plenty of other fun parallels, such as how our flight plan is like the plan of salvation, and how the tower directing air traffic is like our "prophet on the watchtower".

Seminary Lesson

We had interviews with President Merritt, and I've just got to say I'm so grateful for his and Sister Merritt's dedication to us. They've both continually offered me helpful insight, and though they have many missionaries to keep track of, I still feel they know me personally. They gave us all little goody bags, and half the zone ate their hot chocolate bombs not realizing what they were. I confess I was halfway though mine before I discovered my ignorance. I just thought "this candy....is not very good. It's literally a chocolate shell with a few marshmallows on the inside." I may not have passed the test, but at least I got 50% credit.

The aforementioned zone leader exchanges happened on Friday. I went with Elder Dixon, and he is awesome. I briefly met him when I first arrived in the mission, and he gave me a strong impression of knowledge, maturity, and dedication to his calling. In spending more time with him, I've confirmed that first impression was very much accurate. What's more, we had some great discussions in which he surprised me by revealing that he had severe insecurities about his knowledge of the gospel when he started his mission, but he turned that around in his personal studies and as he's continually prayed to love his mission. A little ways into our visits in his area, we knocked on the door of a member Elder Dixon had been hoping to set up a lesson with. We waited for a while with no response, and as we walked away, a little disappointed, Brother Birch opened the door! At first, he seemed to me a bit tired and not especially happy to see us, but he and Sister Birch invited us in, and we got a really good conversation going. Eventually, Brother Birch told us about his mission in Peru, and about being a gospel doctrine teacher. He started asking us these deep doctrine questions only to give elaborate scholarly answers. He even brought some astronomy into the mix, telling us about a theory that the star in the sky proclaiming Christ's birth was an extremely rare alignment between Venus and Jupiter over a star that was already there. By the end, he was asking us for our emails so he could send us study materials. Later that night we saw that he sent us 3 documents. The first was 7 pages long, the second was 850 pages long, and the third was 2822 pages long. Guess I'll never get bored during personal study!

On that same exchange, we visited the Stradleirs and had dinner with them. They are the parents of the bishop in that ward (imagine being your parents' bishop 😆) and they're both characters. Sister Stradleir is a jack of all trades and makes shirts, jewelry, and high quality porcelain dolls. We asked how many dolls her kids have broken and she said 4. She's certainly learned a lot about forgiveness and patience. Brother Stradleir has proclaimed himself "Ambassador of Positive Thoughts and Good Cheer" and taken the smiley face as his official symbol. Whenever he has missionaries over, he declares them his deputies and gives them smiley face pins to wear, so that whenever anyone asks about the pins, they can say "I make people happy!" and lead into a discussion about the gospel. Even though I was only visiting for one evening, I was made a deputy as well! I'm looking forward to using his tagline at some point. 

Elder Dixon and I with our pins marking us as
Deputies of Positive Thought and Good Cheer.

We loved hearing from both of them about the awesome things their children are doing. They truly have an incredible family.  Our lesson with them also went really well. We centered it around Christmas and the healing influence of the atonement, and Sister Stradleir shared a wonderful family story with us. She told me I could pass it on to you guys.

Back when their children were pretty young, the Stradleirs struggled financially. Sometimes, it was uncertain when their paychecks would come, and when they did, it wasn't a whole lot. One year, leading up to Christmas, they devoted what money they could to buying toys and stored them in a box in their garage, where they awaited being gifted to the kids on Christmas morning. One day, however, Sister Stradleir came home to discover their garage was wide open, and many of their possessions had been stolen. The box of toys was empty, and her kids were distraught. Pushing forward after this major blow to her family's spirits, she set out to the bank to have her checkbook stamped. Most of this money would be spent on utilities, leaving nowhere near enough to replace what had been lost. However, as she was out running errands, Sister Stradleir looked down at the checkbook to discover that it had been stamped for an extra $500. Shocked, the thought that came to her mind was "Isn't that fortunate!" But, despite how much her family needed this money, she knew the right thing to do was to return to the bank and have the mistake corrected. She arrived to discover that the woman who had stamped her checkbook was under serious heat from her superiors. They had come out $500 short, and had no way of tracing who had received the extra money. Whenever something like this would happen, the fortunate client could easily walk away scot-free. The woman was overwhelmed with relief and gratitude, having been pulled out of a situation that very well could have jeopardized her employment. She offered to take Sister Stradleir out for lunch; a gesture to convey gratitude that, unlike the checkbook, no number could be assigned to. Several days later, Brother Stradleir suddenly received a paycheck for $1000 dollars, allowing them to enjoy far more than they expected that holiday season. "Isn't that fortunate!" Sister Stradleir once again thought. A shining takeaway from this story is of course that the Lord blesses those who have integrity and uplift those around them, but what I felt impressed to affirm in that lesson was this: honesty itself can be a precious gift to those around us.

On Saturday we helped Brother Leavitt in our ward stain the railing on his deck. 

As we worked, I heard his phone go off a few times, and discovered his text tone to be the Star Trek communicator sound, and his ring tone to be the Enterprise intercom sound. All I had to say was "I take it you're a Trekkie?" And we were off, discussing the various Star Trek series. It actually bridged into a complex discussion about God's creation of the universe (for those familiar, the topic changed when Brother Leavitt mentioned he thought the Deep Space 9 prophets' conception of time reminds him of how God sees all things in one eternal round). After we finished on the railing, he showed us his Star Trek tree, where Sister Leavitt had banished his various ship and character ornaments. His original series character ornaments were actually coordinated to light up and talk through the dialogue of one of the episodes, which he demonstrated, so we basically got to watch Star Trek while on the mission. It made me happy seeing Brother Leavitt enthusiastically show off this keen interest of his.

The Star Trek Tree. Spot the Tribble!

Last few notes: an inactive couple made it to church on Sunday! Also, our topic in Sunday school was the law of tithing and someone shared that they once saw an Xbox they wanted on Craigslist, and when he met up with the seller to pay him for it, the seller asked "Do you pay your tithing?" "Yeah." He replied. The seller then said "Ok, you can just have it". We added to our list of blessings that come from paying tithing: "Free Xbox".

During district council on Monday, Elder Tausinga shared something that stuck with me. The idea that we are "instruments in God's hands" is referenced a lot, especially among missionaries, and I always interpreted 'instruments" in a general sense, imagining nondescript tools. But Elder Tausinga used that phrase to refer to musical instruments, and said when someone plays an instrument, it's the music that people actually care about. They could close their eyes to an instrument and just listen, so though the instrument has to be there, it's not what's actually reaching its audience. So it is as God uses us to reach people through His Holy Spirit.

We did an endowment session and initiatories in the San Diego temple this morning! I'm glad to have finally made it after missing last transfer's temple trip while I was out in Imperial Valley. The celestial room blew me away.

God be with you,

Elder Tolman

Me and Elder Horsely after the temple.