Chapter 8: Olathe

 

8/17/2020

Today was a great Pday, we spent a ton on food because we're not being fed by our ward, but it's all right; We called up the mission office and they gave us some extra money for food because they anticipated this happening with the huge increase of missionaries and increased burden on the members. We also had a two hour long dinner with our Zone Leaders tonight, it was just us and them and they wanted to know what we could do better in the future so that we would avoid future "dumpster fires", as they called it. We've had a lot of backlash on our some of the different posts we've tried out, and I was heartbroken because we had to delete all of our posts from that message board. I was pretty sad about that since I had only ever had positive interactions on my posts, but some others in my district have been struggling to make posts that are positive and welcomed by the community, so we had to delete all of our work. Oh well. We also talked to Pack and Fisher afterwards and they facilitated a group cry session where everyone talked about how their lives are hard and everything is horrible right now. Then we went to a gas station and met a guy, he said he'd be interested in learning a little more, so not everything is truly terrible.

8/18/2020

Today was another difficult day, but it did have a couple of highlights. We printed out 50 copies of a photo of ourselves and then wrote some handwritten notes on the back. We wrote a pretty long message for each member, so it was incredible to see just how many we got through, especially thanks to the skills that I had learned from that old-fashioned "writing lines" punishment. I used to write lines for things that I did wrong, and now apparently I'm much faster at writing because of it. Johnson's eyes boggled when he found out I was writing letters twice as fast as he was. When we were shopping at Walmart today to grab those photos, I said in the checkout to Johnson, "I don't know what we're going to do for food next week, this is the last of our money, we won't even have enough to get hamburgers after our district activity next Pday (an event that everyone had been planning and looking forward to). We finished paying and I turned around and a man was pressing a 10 dollar bill into my face. He told us the most Christlike line I had ever heard, "you go eat that hamburger." We tried to refuse and tell him that we weren't allowed to take money but he said, "yes you are, and threw it onto the pile of stuff I was carrying and left." He definitely wasn't a member, but he was an incredible guy, and I hope that I'm as sensitive to others needs when I'm older. We weren't talking loud, but he was listening and ready to help those that were wanting. We had a mission wide devotional today and it was really cool for me because I got to interact on three separate occasions, which was many more times than the usual allotted one interaction per person. I was so excited to have gotten the opportunity to share so much, although I'm sure others are sick of hearing my voice now.

8/19/2020

Today was great! We ran all over Olathe today delivering our handwritten cards. I should have known that ministering to our ward members one by one would have such a profound effect on them, but our results today still blew me away. We set up eight lessons today, and ended up only being able to deliver about half of our cards. We would go to the door and drop of our letter and it almost always ended the same, we would walk away and someone would call out after us, "hey, guys!" and then we would have a shouting match across the street where we would promise to come back soon for a lesson. We had some really  fun interactions, though. On top of all that, we had two lessons to teach that were very important, one was to the Relief Society president, and one was to our Bishop and his wife. Both lessons were in person and ended up having incredible results, now the Bishop and our Relief Society president are very eager to help us (Bishop's wife is awesome, she was already eager to help us). We also planned out and go the supplies to make a video about the Atonement tomorrow, we were asked to record an object lesson, and at first I wasn't very excited because all of the object lessons I've seen missionaries do have been terribly lackluster, it's not their fault though, they're trying to describe something infinite in finite terms, we came up with something pretty awesome, though, I'm very excited to film this tomorrow, because it's going to be an amazing video, it's not perfect, but the symbolism is there, and that means it can be so much more powerful. 

8/20/2020

Today was a great day! We filmed a video about the Atonement, and it ended up being super cool, but pretty long, so we're likely going to film a 30 second version of it tomorrow that we can post on our Montrose Zone board. We had a couple of lessons and it made for an incredible day, both of our lessons were with less active members, so it was really cool that we got to talk to them, because it really fulfilled our goal of reactivating the members. We only have a 10% activity rate so we have a long road ahead of us. We had a district counsel today and right after our district counsel got to do a bonding activity. We had a district lunch today, which was the first activity I've gotten to do in a long time, and all of the Elders were pretty excited about it, especially because it opened the door for mischief; Another district came to the chapel and brought lunch too, we stole their table that was piled with food, it was pretty awesome when they walked in and we saw the shock on their faces as they saw the entire table was gone. I also got to give a blessing to Brother Hightower today. We don't know much about what was going on, but the gratitude in his eyes was evident afterwards when he told us, "it worked."

8/21/2020

Today was another really, really busy day. We were posting for our Zone's Facebook page and it took almost all day to finish the post, but the end product was so good! We made our post with the Bishop and his wife, they were both pretty camera shy at first, but Bishop was a champ and did it in one try which is better than we usually do, and Sister Butzin made such an incredible video, it was worth all of the tries it took us. We were so excited to show them the end product, and they were very excited too when they saw it, it felt good to share in the excitement of making the video. We're really hoping that they'll take the video out to everyone else in the ward too, it would be awesome if they could share in their excitement with each other. We stopped by Makee Anderson today and shared a small thought which was a huge improvement to when we got cussed out last time we were there. We also went by Brother Hightower's because one of our appointments fell through, he made us a dinner tonight which was amazing since our dinner fell through. While we were there he told us the extent of the effects of the blessing we gave him yesterday: He had some pretty big struggles with anxiety, and yesterday was the first time that he had asked for a blessing in "many, many years". We talked to him for a bit about the Priesthood we hold and how it's the fulness of the Priesthood, we promised him that if he exercised faith in this blessing that he could be healed. Then we layed our hands upon his head. I got to be the mouthpiece and afterwards he especially expressed gratitude to me, even though I had nothing to do with it. I didn't think much of it because we were in a hurry, but today he told us that he feels healed of it, those anxieties that have dragged him down for so long are gone. I got to see a woman healed by a Priesthood blessing in Brazil, she was suffering physically and after we took our hands off her head she was crying and told us how she had felt it completely leave her. Today I saw that to the faithful the Lord can heal even the worst of mental battles as easily as physical ones. 

8/22/2020

Today we taught three lessons, and they all went really well, we were really busy and running around all day, but we did an awesome job, and we even managed to drop off some more personalized notes for members too. One of the lessons was with our ward mission leader, I knew he liked talking to us, but today we had to cut off what was supposed to be a half hour long lesson at the hour mark because we were just having too much fun talking to him. The poor guy's been through a lot, but he has an incredible testimony, and stands as the greatest ward mission leader I've ever met. We ended up driving a lot today and managed to find lots of areas that weren't documented properly by our car's mission safety system, which told us to slow down when we were going less than the speed limit. We always have fun when we go to Olathe which was where two of our three lessons today were, because it's nothing but farm fields, and often you get to see harvesters or tractors driving down the street, as if that was a completely normal occurrence. We even heard from some members that farmers will teach their kids to drive that machinery at like, 8 years old, and will often send their kids to school in those tractors instead of driving them. Their must be some law against it, but the police don't seem to care about it, and even if they did, I'm not sure what they could do about it, we've seen the two police cars the city has and they're both usually sitting out front of the station, looking like they could star in a film from the 1950's because of how old they are.

8/23/2020

Today was really fun, we got to take the sacrament to Brother Hightower which was an incredible experience, I think this is the fifth day in a row we visited him, this was a really good week. We had a meeting with the ward leadership and I prefaced it to the other Elders by telling them, "they know you guys, I'm not going to say anything, I'll leave it to your discretion as to what should and shouldn't be said." Then the ward leadership started asking me questions and I accidentally took over, and the other Elders didn't end up saying anything. Oh well. By far the greatest thing we got to do today was having dinner with our Relief Society president, we got to talk to her and her less active son for about an hour, in which time we tried to not scare them by eating too quickly because we were starving. We asked Sister Logan if we could record her testimony which she gave permission for, and then gave an incredible testimony! We were so excited because this was the fifth one, and we were going to try to make compilations of five testimonies at a time which means this is our first and test run of this project. We're really hoping when the rest of the members see the video that they'll be excited to do it too. Everyone has been super impressed with the Bishop and Sister Butzin lately because of their stardom, the incredible roles that they played in our videos. I think it really built their confidence in Facebook, as well as the whole ward's confidence to see their Bishop doing something he wasn't super comfortable with, and still doing an amazing job with it. We recorded a 45 second version of our object lesson for the Atonement, so we'll get to post another video this week, but it'll probably just be a smaller one that we post on our personal and ward pages. 

The scripture that I wanted to share today is a small,  but incredibly powerful one, in D&C 6 we read: 36 Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not. What would happen if we really did look unto the Lord in every thought, what if, in everything that we did, rather than first considering our fears or letting small, fiery darts from Satan attack us, we looked to the Lord with an eye single to Him? We would be impenetrable, full of faith, and always abounding in good works, nothing can be so important as following this counsel, that in all things, we look to the Lord.