Week 89
Thank you so much to everyone who sent me Christmas cards! I really loved them.
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I don't usually do spiritual thoughts but I had a really good personal study yesterday so I wanted to share what I learned. I meditated upon and studied the relationship between doubt and faith and made some new connections. A lot of my insights came from an article on the church newsroom website.
Faith is belief that gives someone power to act.
Doubt is not the absence of faith, it is a challenge to faith caused by adversity. When we suffer doubts it is because there is external or internal pressure in our lives that makes it harder to exercise faith and so we naturally feel less able to believe.
It's easy as a little child to trust your parents when they say it's safe to jump into the pool from the edge, but it's harder when they say it's safe to jump from the high dive. Intellectually you know your parents are trustworthy and they won't steer you wrong but you must exercise the courage to trust them even when you are stressed or afraid.
In the same way, it is easy to trust God when things are going well in your life, but when you are in the midst of a trial it is harder to believe in His promises that everything will really be alright.
While nursing doubts and obsessing on them is still wrong, experiencing doubts does not mean you are sinning, it means that you are experiencing stress that makes it difficult to hold on to your faith.
Doubt is related to us forgetting the evidences of God we have seen in our lives. It means forgetting all the ways He has demonstrated His trustworthiness in the past. It is forgetting the way you felt during your strongest spiritual experiences, just because you don't feel the same things now. God doesn't stop existing or even withdraw from us because we can't feel His presence, but it can feel that way.
You can see many examples of this in the scriptures. Laman and Lemuel, the Israelites, the early Saints in Kirtland. In each case they had incredible experiences, saw angels, passed through the sea, were saved from death, had visions, etc. But they forgot about those things and only focused on their present discontent.
The way to overcome doubt is not to blindly quash and shove them away. It is to Remember your experiences and to apply logic to say, "if God was real yesterday, then He is real today" or "if the Book of Mormon was authentic last year, then it is authentic now." As we do so, and overcome trials of faith, our faith becomes stronger and stronger until we too "[obtain] a good report" (Hebrews 11:39).
"Let us here observe, that a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation.”
- Joseph Smith
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I had a great morning today. I now live in the famous Surprise House, so named because it's an actual house in Surprise that has been loaned to the Arizona Phoenix Mission. It's pretty destroyed from housing missionaries, but it's a lot less like a frat house than it used to be apparently. One of my old companions Elder Bressan took a lot of time to clear it out and remove all the contraband. We still have a forbidden couch though.
In the freezer there was a massive, ugly block of ice crystals that formed around the broken ice machine over the course of what I can only assume is years of accumulated neglect. So I grabbed a spoon and my metal Owala water bottle and spent the morning chipping away at it by smashing the water bottle into the handle of the spoon like a hammer and chisel. I felt like an archeologist, or like an artist forming a masterpiece from the ice. It was pretty fun and our things in the freezer are much safer from freezer burn.
My new area is on the northwestern edge of Surprise, AZ. We have 3 wards again, Willow Canyon, Sierra Montaña, and Sun Valley. The area is really small (Surprise has a lot of members of the church). I've gone from everything being 10-20 minutes away in Buckeye, to our maximum drive now being 8 minutes. This area would definitely be a bike area except there is one exclave of civilization 20 minutes out in the desert called Sun City Festival, or just Festival. Longtime readers will remember how much I loved my exchange back in the original Sun City more than a year ago, and now I have a mini-Sun City all to myself.
It turns out that my current area actually borders my old area out in Buckeye, so I'm still about as far out of civilization as English-assigned Elders can go. In my district are Sisters Fuimaono and Dayley, and their area is Wickenburg/Wenden which is the largest area in the mission. It's so big that they have to have separate houses in Wickenburg and in Wenden because it takes too long in a day to drive between them.
The wards in Surprise have a really strong sense of community and it's awesome to see the potential lying dormant in this area. We're already seeing some honest to-goodness miracles and I feel a lot of optimism for the future.
Faithfully Yours,
Elder C. Calder
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My new companion, Elder Tenney, and I. His original assignment is American Sign Language, but starting next transfer all of the ASL missionaries (but one) are going to the Mesa Mission instead since the ASL Branch meets in Mesa. Elder Tenney got reassigned English-speaking so he will be the last signing missionary left in the mission. He's already taught me a little more Sign, such as
YOU WANT PLAY MINECRAFT
WE GO
AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE (apparently very impractical and rarely used when everyone already knows how to say A S L)
Elder Tenney is from Alpine, Utah and he likes sports. He's only been out for 3 months but he has a great testimony and is really good with kids.
We went over to the Blair family's house and got to take a picture in Brother Blair's M&M room. He told us his M&M habit has gotten to the point that he refuses to buy any more memorabilia, but people keep giving things to him anyway.
Picture with the zone. I'm in Zone 1, which consists mostly of the city of Surprise, AZ. It probably doesn't come as much of a surprise that I've heard a lot of puns in the last week or so.
The Blair's M&M dispenser. They gave us nickels to insert into the machine so we could get some candy.
My new area. You can see Tartesso (aka the majority of the Skyline Ward, in Buckeye) and Sun City Festival on the map together 🥲). The orange lines in the last picture represent the borders of the district. 90% of our land area is the Wickenburg/Wenden area which has Sister missionaries.
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