This week was a big change of pace! I have a very particular view of missionary work. Namely, that it is WORK. So probably my favorite thing to do is leave the house at 10:00 AM, walk the streets and knock
doors and talk to everyone and chase people until 9:30 PM and then teach someone on the phone until 10:00. This is a great way to teach a lot of people and work very hard, and to sleep like a log at night!
But, it is a foolish indulgence of mine. Sigh. So this week I repented, and my companion and I did missionary work the way everyone from the authors of Preach my Gospel to our district and zone leaders to the mission president and his wife to the Holy Ghost has been telling us to do it since day 1; through the members.
I had no idea how important members are to missionary work. Even here in the wonderful South, where people are actually home during the day to answer the door and kind enough to listen and so fervently
religious that they are willing to talk about Jesus to total strangers, members are several times as effective in finding and identifying members of the community prepared sufficiently by The Lord to be actually capable of receiving this glorious message, and infinitely more important even than that in retaining investigators and recent converts. In 10 months I have found with unwavering consistency that nothing of lasting value can happen on missionary work without the direct, willing, and independent involvement of the members. Is means more than just tossing out a few names when the missionaries crack the whip! It means constant, prayerful, dutiful commitment to sharing the gospel with all of those around us. Everyone you know ought to know you are a member of the Church, what that means, and what that means to YOU. Every single one of those people ought to receive invitations regularly, and love constantly.
Goodness was that news to ME! I probably shared the gospel with 1 person in my entire pre-mission life. Dang it! Oh well. I'll repent.
So life goes on here in the belt-buckle of the Bible Belt. People yell put phrases like "We not under no law! We under grace!" and "I know Jesus!" and "Oh no! It's the Jehovah's Witnesses!" at us on a pretty regular basis. Working with the members is wonderful. They are kind and willing and earnest, and need only a brainstorming session or two before they are off finding their own unique ways to build the kingdom. I've gained about 20 pounds in five days, but it is wonderful.
The other focus this week was service. I have had a bad attitude about service projects my entire life and particularly as a missionary, and I will tell you why: they are not hard enough. My image of a service
project is to show up, stand around for about 45 minutes waiting for other people to get there, then to leave again to get the tools they forgot, then to all load up in the car and get the tools we didn't
know we need, then to go get a quick snack, then to try and figure out what we're actually supposed to do (a lengthy mental exertion that requires at least two more snack breaks), then to abandon the attempt
and simply stand around silently playing a dangerous game of "leadership chicken" that ends when one person finally realizes everyone else is just as clueless as they are and gives up and starts giving out assignments to people at random. These assignments are usually things like, "pick up that pile of leaves", or "sweep this three feet of concrete" or "take this to the car" or "go pick up my dry cleaning." Everyone is assigned one or two of these tasks over the course of the next hour and a half, and then we adjourn for lunch, only to reconvene next Saturday and repeat the process.
I was not having any of that. My time as a missionary is much too valuable to me to waste days of it doing SERVICE. I had a pretty clear dea that any missionary who did a service project was the laziest
sort of servant the Lord could possibly tolerate. Then came this week, and the Holy Ghost rebuked me and told me I had to go do a bunch of service. Dang it.
So we harassed everyone we knew into letting us do service for them, and it went exactly as expected. Lots of looking for tools, lots of vague objectives, lots of breaks. I tried very hard to be humble and
find things to do. Sometimes I would just wander off and start weeding the neighbor's yard. I prayed for patience.
One day this process was going on at its normal pace. I was dozing off in the truck after our fourth tool/quick errand run. We arrived at the site and I hopped out. The member we were serving handed me a freshly sharpened machete, pointed at the jungle (there is nothing like it in California. Not even in Northern California. The trees and the hedges and plants and brush and thickets and vines are so thick here that if left untended for years the way these had been, they would completely overcome a house to where you could not see the structure or more than a couple feet into the yard. The foliage was more than twice my height and the ground was not visible) that was his yard, and said "Go for it."
What?
Go for it.
What do you want done?
Cut it belly high, and landscape it however you want. Everything needs cutting, but I only have one machete, so go for it.
Acres of jungle. My machete and me. After about 20 minutes I was sweating so hard it was pouring off my eyelashes and I couldn't see straight. 10 minutes after that I was panting for breath. At some
point my shoulder popped out and I had to be braced against the wall and slip it back in. Then it was right back to work. After an hour the machete had dulled, and we had to go to an appointment. My arms and
legs were covered with blood from a thousand cuts from the briers and thorns and sharp-edged branches that fought bravely to defend themselves, but they were no match at all for my machete and me.
We'll be going back regularly. There were several other things that happened this week that I am excited about. I dug fresh potatoes! I ate a jalapeño pepper right off the vine. We got to visit an aging man
in the hospital and I had the privilege to contemplate upon the wonderful love and kindness that I was shown by many of you reading this letter as I languished in a hospital bed. Thank you so much for your selfless sacrifice of time. Larry, the Southern Baptist we cornered on the street one day two months ago and have been teaching ever since, is scheduled to be baptized on Saturday. When I arrived to
Starke, no one in the entire ward even knew how to turn on the water for the baptismal font, and the knobs to turn the water had rusted over so much they needed to be loosened by wrenches. By Sunday
afternoon, there will have been 5 baptisms here since then. What an amazing blessing. Lightning and thunder storms have been going on. They are so beautiful they take my breath away. I never even imagined storms like these. They knock the power out occasionally. Always an adventure.
But! The highlight was the machete. It brought hope to my faithlessness and drive to my complacency. It reminded me not only of what service can be, but what my mind and our teaching and my entire
life can be. It reminded me what I want and what I'm here to do. Goodness I love service. Goodness do I love my machete and me.
Me making a goofy face and having a laugh, my companion with a family we were teaching, and our nametags. How thankful I am to be a missionary. I love it with my whole machete.
~Elder Jorgensen