Monday, September 10, 2012

Porvenier

It kinda cool being like a traveling zone leader and getting to know all the missionaries better and seeing how their areas are doing. It's been real successful for us. But now more and more companionships are asking us to come do work visits to visit tought investigators or help their fechas stay strong and I kinda feel this pressure to come in out of nowhere not knowing anything and just make all problems everywhere go away and make every area be successful.

I think that's the best thing about being a missionary though. You never don't know what to teach when you're set apart to represent Christ. No matter what the problem is the first thing that needs to be done is have more faith in Christ, then repent, then make or keep covenants, then get the Spirit, then persevere. Every single time. It's a good lesson to learn.

There have been several times in my mission where I have these reality checks, knee to knee with a forty year old guy whose life's fallen all about him and realize I'm a twenty year old kid whose never really done anything at all. So, who am I to tell him how to fix his life? And then it becomes oddly comforting to remember the way that President Beard told me after I got set apart, "No one really cares about Doug for the next two. Just be Elder Brian." And so we just teach the doctrine of Christ. And it works every single time. And people's lives change. It's a really cool experience. It's like this name tag is just a really big mirrior. And my only job is to angle it right and reflect the gospel at people.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

A Day in the Life





Concilio went good. May was a rough month for the mission so we talked a lot about plans to step up in June. Pretty sure we'll have a better month in June despite starting the month in with changes.
Change week is always hard because all the new missionaries don't know their zones or the investigators really well but I don't think it will hit us too hard. At least it shouldn't if we've all been keeping are stuff up to date ("stuff" being area books and baptismal calendars and various other things you don't really care about). We've been training a lot this last month on rendir cuentas and verification (I cannot for the life of me remember how to say rendir cuentas in english...) and more that a couple times I've found myself saying something about "I've asked you to do this before" or "Who did you expect would do it for you" (except in spanish and more gently...) and I had to look back over my shoulder to see if Dad was standing there. Missions really are little mini-lives. Real weird. Elder Wright goes home this week. The rest of his group leaves today but his parents came so he'll be kickin it with them around here for a week and then go home around sunday.

Really weird to see guys go, the outside world is a scary place.

Anyways, I got a package from Grandma and Pops this week. Those guys we're definitely Johnny on the spot with the supply drop. Swedish fish, Pistachios and sour patch kids; exactly what my study sessions have been lacking. Which for some reason reminds me... This last week we had a ward activity. We had a fulbito tourny with basketball and volley and a little ring toss game I set up to win drinks and then we had the other missionaries come with their wards and do a waterballoon toos. It went real good. But somehow during the past month we've been planning my ward completely spaced the small detail of requesting money from the church budget. ie. I ended up bank rolling the thing.
 The good news is I'm a chungo ex-Financial sec and know where to go for cheap goods. So I bought somewhere between 60-70 drinks/prizes for like, 20 bones. holla.

Monday, April 30, 2012

When the Universe Looks Traceless

We had another experience Sunday when a sister from our ward came up to us after a meeting and explained that her niece had schizophrenia and that she wanted us to come and give her a blessing (what she really did was draw a cross in the air with her hand and ask us if we could come “do our thing”). I’m afraid the sister originally thought we would be casting out some kind of spirit and even asked us if her niece’s sins could have caused the problem. We explained the story in John 9 and the purpose of some of our trials. When her niece finally came we gave her a blessing of health and Elder Richards shared a personal experience from his family. 


The spirit was extremely strong in the lesson and by the time we closed the sister that originally asked us for the blessing talked about how her niece was “an angel” and so close to God because of her innocence. The ability to put tribulation into an eternal perspective is something I’ve always struggled with, and I guess everyone else as well, but I learned from this lesson how that change of perspective brought by the spirit can change the manner in which we bear tribulation, our attitude while we do it and the products that tribulation work in us and everyone around us. 


I have this weird habit of repeating quotes over and over in my mind and for a while now it seems like I’ve been waking up with either the poem Invictus or a quote from The Screwtape Letters where C.S. Lewis says, “[The devil’s] work is never more in danger than when a man, no longer desiring but still intending to do God´s will, looks round on a universe from which all traces of Him have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.” I think it’s a basic part of our own, personal plan of salvation that we have these moments, however much they may vary in degree. I remember missing a spelling test in third grade in the same week I accidentally offended the 8-year old girl of my dreams and I thought the universe looked pretty traceless. Since then, I’ve had a few more of those moments, and they seem to have increased substantially by degree, but in principle I guess it’s still the same. I’m grateful for the knowledge that someone far better than I’ve ever been had that same moment to a degree I can’t understand, and that He has promised to help us through our own diluted experience.”

Dear Muggles,


I’m still here till Tuesday. Can’t leave Richards in the lurch on change day, you know? It’s actually gotten uber crazy. The ever-reliable LAN airlines cancelled our flights to Lima that connects all the returning missionaries with their international flights all over the who-knows-wheredom. Apparently Monday is the day some supposed saint did some purportedly saintly thing and blah blah blah something about a magical door. So, to commemorate that great act of Christianity/Door-Human relations everyone will stop doing less useful things (like staffing airports and hospitals) and go consume liver pulverizing amounts of alcohol and play some fulbito. 


In the spirit of venting my stress, let me explain one of my favorite Peruvian medical discoveries. What you must never do is play fulbito or exercise or get really hot and then go open a fridge. If you do, you will die. On the spot. Just fall over dead with the open box of juice still in your hand. And everyone knows someone that this happened to. Never mind that the guy was 5´6, 245 pounds, cholesterol of 385, had just downed 4 liters of booze and ran around just as fast as his little Mario legs could carry him for three and half hours. No, no. Twas the hastily opened fridge door that got him. Almost as good as the one about how rubbing an egg on a sick person will suck the bad out. I actually like that one enough that I used to give missionaries permission to let their pensionistas rub eggs all over their heads and stuff. Absolutely hilarious. And legitimately worked like 60% of the time. Anyways, today I’ll spend all my time rearranging travel plans I had been meticulously arranging over the past month and a half....

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Guest Blogger - Hermana Turk

Doug made his debut on the misson presidents wife's blog:
http://terryandjanetturk.blogspot.com/2012/04/dr-douglas-s-brian.html

We love Dr. Doug.
Here's what he had to say about the change going back out in the field,

"President called me into to his office this week and asked me if I’d accept a new assignment as a zone leader at the end of this change. Whhheird. I guess President thought the financial-to-personal secretary change works out okay because he’s calling Elder Richards to move to Personal Secretary. 


Training him shouldn’t be too terribly hard. But it’s a lot to take in. So today and tomorrow I’ll probably just be setting up reminders and schedules for the next 6 weeks to keep him from most of the stress I had. The thing about the Personal Secretary learning curve is that while you’re making all your nooby mistakes, foreign missionaries are losing their residency or missing plane connections or some sicky gets lost in the clinic because you’re not there or any number of combinations of those things. But he’ll be aight. 


So I guess I’m gonna go be a zone leader now. I don’t know where or who my companions gonna be but… should be cool. I’m gonna get to do stuff in my own area. And not do phone calls from 8:45 to 10:15 every night when I could have been making/eating dinner. But that’s good and bad news. Because incident to making my own food I’ve dropped like 10 kilos. Well, that and Elder Wright’s fascist-like insistence that I do P90X with him on the daily. So that’s the news. I’m a little bummed to leave the office. It’s cool to be involved in everything that goes down in the mission and have so much interaction with President, but I’m stoked on being a real boy again. 


We’ll see how it goes I guess."

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Jacob Cinco & Priorities


What’s up, muggles?

Happy Day After Christy’s Birthday Day. Make it the best one ever. The deuces. Real real old… Seems weird that she’s never gonna stuff me in the dryer again (at least for a while) or drive me to high school zombie-style with her forehead on the steering wheel looking through the gap between the dash while bumping Brandi Carlile as loudly as little Pedro could crank it. Anyways, Love you sister. Have fun getting married this year. One day when SerPost stops being in huelga I’ll send you the bracelets I purchased you when I was up in the mountains.

This week was pretty good. If I could possibly say something less consequential I can’t think of what it is. But it was pretty good. We had Concilio with the zone leaders and went to play soccer and this crazy Frisbee/dodgeball game Sister Turk invented. It was intense. And I definitely won’t brag about how my soccer team threw down another dynasty win streak. President taught from Jacob 5 and it was a solid 25 minutes of revelation-fest. So I’ve been in there reading since Wednesday. It’s got way too much to say but the first thing I realized is that I’ve been crossing my analogies pretty much my whole life. Specifically, Lehi’s tree vs. Zenos’ vineyard. First of all, I guess I just always assumed that fruit from Lehi’s tree would be the same as fruit from Zenos’ tree. But false. Fruit from Zenos’ trees doesn’t represent the same eternal life/love of God combo that it does in Lehi’s tree. I’m gonna truncate this train of thought right here and just say that when I realized that the fruit on Zenos’ trees represents covenants and the ordinances of salvation it made a lot of other things way clearer. Anyway, that was really cool. Here’s the other thing I learned. I’m not gonna explain the scripture chain from Jacob to Genesis to Moses and through D&C but it was a pretty cool process. I ended up thinking about Adam and the commandments in the Garden. I always saw them as this big contradiction of Don’t eat the fruit and multiply and replenish. And maybe it was in some ways. But, I realized it wasn’t so much a contradiction in terms as it was just more than he could do. Too much was asked of him and he simply couldn’t do it all. So he had to make a choice based on what would really be best for the whole plan (and maybe a little expedited by the fact that his wife was already peacing out). And then I kept finding this theme throughout the lives of all the prophets. From moving a nation through 40 years of straight whining to crossing oceans in Pre-Incan submarines to establishing the kingdom of God throughout the world with nothing but a book and 30 members to “be ye therefore perfect.” It is always too much to ask. It is always more than we can do. And it is never an accident. So it seems like much less of a surprise to me that we all have absolutely too much to do. School and work and church callings and family issues and untrimmed hedges and the outrageous price of hamburger meat. It’s just too much. And I don’t believe it’s a byproduct of the times. I’m convinced that God has, and always will, give us too much to do. For, He would see our priorities. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from President it’s the meaning of the phrase “consistency to the purpose.” And if you forget what the purpose is you can waste an awful lot of time on school and work and untrimmed hedges and even the church callings.

Beto's and Missionary Work

Heyo.

So this week... I'm going to attempt to employ some positive language here but, if this week was a breakfast item it would be one of those outrageously sized breakfast burritos from Beto's. They sound good, they look pretty good, they even smell okay sometimes, but halfway through you find cold potatoes, uncooked eggs, some of Beto's sideburn hair, and a deep fried band-aid. And then, just in this moment of great alarm, the screaming of your upper digestive tract reminds you that you're now 4500 calories closer to an early grave in the sea of low density cholesterol. And that's all I have to say about that. Suffice it to say, things did not go as planned with the group of prorrogas in Lima.

But in other, less artificially preserved news (< double entendre), we're seeing a lot of miracles in PeruLand. President had a phone call with Elder Waddell a while ago and Elder Waddell told him we're one of the top five most rapidly growing missions in the world. Intense. President is thinking about raising our yearly goal from 1800 to 2000. or 2012 baptisms in 2012. We're stoked. We'll see how things go in the next few months. It's weird how things stack up though. In the same week we finish one of the most successful months ever (during a 4-week change month) we also have four missionaries show up with crazy cysts, three of which have to be operated on, an endoscopy that reveals exactly nothing, migraines, infection-causing contact lenses everywhere we look, pinched nerves, detached muscle, expiring Chilean residency, unrenewed Interpol paperwork, non-refundable Lima flights for "personal paperwork," lost patriarchal blessings, even more lost personal identification, missed international flight connections and a missionary going on his 5th ingrown toe nail in as many months. Doesn't it ever just rain?

Fear not little family. I am happy. Just a little worn. Luckily we've got Conference, which by the way has been killer so far. So we rest on our sword for a while and then do work. For Conference we go watch the first session with President and Sister Turk. President makes eggs and some monster pancakes with fruit and ice cream and other cardiovascularly responsible things. So we're pretty well set up for conference weekend. It'll be good.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

An excerpt from an extremely typical conversation in the life of a missionary:

Me, "Hey guy, how are you?"
Guy, "Oh hey, I'm good."
Me, "Awesome. So you're not at school/work today?"
Guy, "No, I'm just kickin it."
Me, "Well hey we're missionaries. Can we come in and teach you how to live a happier, more meaningful life?"
Guy, "Mmm I don't really know. I have to wash my pants..."
Me, "Well, pants are important. Is there anyway we could help you wash your pants and then teach you how you can live with your family forever?"
Guy, "Ooo I don't know. They´re really dirty. Besides, I need to make some rice."
Me, "Okay, well it sounds like you´re really busy with rice and pants right now. Maybe we could come back later to teach you how you can be freed from the long and short term effects of sin."
Guy, "Well, that sounds good. I'm almost not really here that much though(direct translation). Sometimes I leave my house."
Me, "Well, I bet we could plan a time in the future when we can both be here."
Guy, "I don't know, sometimes my door is closed (more exact words)."
Me, "Okay well ,what could we do to solve that one?"
Guy, "Well, I could leave it open if I knew when you were coming."
Me, "Sounds fantastic. Let's do that. So when should we come by."
Guy, "Wait, are you gonna come here?"
Me, "We were hoping."
Guy, "Oh well I have to go to Cajamarca for..forever so... it could be hard to find me... almost I'm not here very much."
Me, "I see. Well, good luck with your pants."

Thursday, March 1, 2012

… I wrote you a letter forevs ago and never sent it. I’m gonna write in some excerpts from it right now.

                “Hey Seester,

It’s me. Elder Brian… Dude, today kinda sucks. I don’t feel super good and … (blah blah blah) … people bug me I want to go watch soccer and eat McDonalds or something. These are the days in the mission you don’t ever hear about. Probably because they pass and you don’t ever remember them (I´ve actually already forgotten this one). Anyways, I was thinking about how at home on such a day I would whine about it to you and then start being really overly cynical and laugh about it and move one. Little harder in letter form but I’mma give it a try. So in order to understand the situation you have to understand that my companion, thinks he’s a Navy SEAL. What does that mean? That means he gets hopped up on protein shakes every morning and does overly-aggressive exercises while grunting loudly, the purpose of which appears to be nothing more than learning how to grunt more loudly than the day before. Probably to frighten his enemies before he pounces upon them and gives them an old fashion eye gouging. Now the secondary problem to this is that he seems to mistake every Jehovah’s witness or Adventist we find in the street for a Soviet Terrorist whom he must defeat Jack Bower style with arbitrary biblical arguments while I just stand back and try and keep him from going for the eyes. It’s like I’m living in this ridiculous God’s Army pun gone much, much too far. So I don’t like that. I also don’t like when he burns helpless Hermanas or old ladies in the street for having the audacity of owning an opinion without checking with him first to be sure it coincided. What I´m saying is I miss my last companion and wish I could put on a few verses of “Where is the Love” and have Fergie’s dulcet tones soothe his angry heart. This is mainly all I have to whine about. …. 

 So there’s a letter you never got. Most of it anyway. DisfrĂștala.

Elder Brian

Monday, January 30, 2012

Don't Underestimate the Details

Last week this missionary known for some obedience issues called me at like 11:15 at night to tell me he needed to go to the clinic. I dragged myself out of bed, took a cab over there with him and sat there in the clinic in the world’s most uncomfortable plastic lawn chair and talked with under qualified doctors while this other missionary promptly fell asleep in his hospital bed. And that’s where I stayed, until about 6:30 in the morning. At which point I was told that he just had some bad gas. I remember thinking, “Is this really what I came to Peru to do?” And that really bothered me. Till my dad wrote me a letter. Like 3 hours ago. Turns out in his mission he spent a lot of time in the office when he was a missionary in Korea. He had no time to proselyte and spent most of his time fixing the mission car to get ready for trips throughout the mission for training. One day before a trip he spent the whole day doing tune-ups on the car and thought, “Is this really what I came to Korea to do?” I hadn’t told him anything about my clinic story before he wrote that letter or how I was feeling in the office, but I think he saw it coming. And he explained how now he can realize the importance of his missionary service; both the time spent serving investigators and the time spent serving missionaries  I think we underestimate the details of our lives. I’m realizing a little more all the time that the experiences and circumstances of our lives are guided for eternal purposes. I believe that we are always divinely guided. So don’t underestimate the details of your life. Aight? That’s all I have to say about that.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

January 7th

Hey Fam.

It seems I defeated you again this week in the email race. Hmm. You know when you're starting an essay or something and you have absolutely no idea how to get into it? So you just sit and look at the screen for several minutes rereading the first line. That's what I'm doing right now. Usually it's caused by lack of thesis. Could be the case.

This week didn't really have a big over riding theme. Elder Andersen went up to Huamachuco this week to do some work visits. I was super bummed I couldn't go. I'm not allowed to leave Trujillo in case something goes down. Lame. But get this. Last time I went on a work visit with Elder Andersen we went out with the East zone leaders. So I go off with one zone leader and he with the other. As we're walking down a street on the way to a reference I hear someone yell my name from a window. Which is weird cause I'd never served in that area in my life. Then I see two of President Salinas' kids from Huamachuco come running up to their big gate thing on the street. Hadn't seen them in like three months. I guess they were living with their aunt to go to school down here. Anyways, coincidence is God's way of staying anonymous, right? 

So it was just Elder Richards and I in the apartment for a couple days while Andersen and Davila were in Huama and Vera and Escobar went to Chimbote. (pause here while I go read the email you just sent me.) Ha... fat cheeks. But mine were so much worse. not even comparable. But still funny. So then Richards and I go into the office all excited because we figure we're gonna get done and get out proselyting for once. False. One hour into the chamba the power cuts. Pretty common occurance here in Peruland. So we go downstairs and discover our little electricity meter that´s set in the concrete all aflame. Don't ask me what was on fire, everything in this country is made out of concrete and brick. So the door guy gets a screw driver and just starts poking randomly at things through the little opening where you read your meter. Well turns out that wasn't actually the most effective plan so we popped the box open and flip the breaker.... long story short Elder Richards and I have to sit in a dark office all day waiting for the electric company to come. It was terrible. But then the next night we got a really awesome reference in our area. Things tend to balance out. Except for Peruvian building codes. 

In other news. We got our surgery done this week. Pretty uneventful. I pretty much play doctor like non-stop now though. After a lidership consejo last week I just got swarmed by missionaries with all their plethora of strange medical questions. I literally stood there and turned in circles from one person to the next writing down medication names and answering weird questions for 30 minutes. It was madness. And then once I escaped it was just to go to the clinic to see the EEG results. So medical stuff is a little out of control right now. So President talked to one of the IFR's this week and found out that, by number of missionaries, we are the largest mission in all of south and central america. And that being the case, we're assuming in all the world. I'm sure we'll drop in number the next few months but for right now it's pretty intimidating to keep track of all this. President gave me a good pep talk this week though and I think we'll get by.

I am... out of things to say.

Seacrest out.

Elder Brian.

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Grace--Learning Heaven

So I’m officially done with my bang up job training Elder Richards. Now I sit and watch my Hijito fly. Except I keep going back to do his job too. Generally not because he needs me to. Just because it’s refreshing to do things when I know what I’m doing. The personal Secretary gig is definitely super confusing right now. Normally it just feels like I’m waiting for disasters to strike and then frantically try to save the day. So I’m pretty stoked on the theoretical day when I stop working reactively and toss some proactivity in there. I’m not sure if proactivity is a word. It really ought to be. For right now I’m getting prepped for a Sister to get her gall bladder out while simultaneously helping an elder get an EEG in the middle of Backwardsville Peru and in the mean time dodge/diffuse the profusion of all the lesser (slightly whiny) complaints that 200 some odd missionaries can throw out.  Get your game face on folks.

Hope you guys had a good Christmas. Mine was super awesome. Something I learned this week: Remember the parable of the bicycle? Dad does ask him. Well I was listening to a talk and reading some stuff and I decided that, as good as that parable is, some people misinterpret and it tends to perpetuate a misconception about grace. Everyone always seems to want to battle us about grace. How we’re trying to earn our way to heaven. Not true. We’re not earning heaven. We’re learning heaven. We’re practicing for it. Of course we’re saved by grace, but the bigger question is if we’ve been changed by grace. The scriptures make it extremely clear that no unclean thing can dwell with God, but no unchanged thing will even want to (see Alma 36). So this is where the bicycle parable comes in. Some people seem to think that our small obedience and righteousness (the few coins saved in the parable) are needed to fill the gap that stands between us and perfection. That Christ will fill the gap after all we can do. The truth is that we don’t fill any part of that gap. When Christ invested in us, he paid in full. He didn’t pay it except for a few coins. He paid it all. It is done. Christ then turns to us and offers his own requirements. These requirements are not to appease justice. They’re to help us change into more heavenly, Christ-like beings. I heard it said somewhere that, “heaven will not be heaven to those who haven’t chosen to be heavenly.” Example: remember going to EFY and there was always that one kid in your group whose parents made him come and then by the end of day one he called up his mom and shouted, “get me out of here!” Happens all the time. Why is it so awful for him but so many other people have excellent experiences? I used to have this idea of heaven where I was sitting there nervously in a chair and Jesus was there looking at his clipboard shaking his head, informing me that I’d missed it by 5 points, then me begging him to take another look at my essay questions and so on. But I don’t think that anymore. I don’t think it will be the unrepentant sinner begging “Please, let me stay.” He’ll probably be saying, “Get me out of here!” What we are asked to do here is not to appease justice or to qualify in some mystical account for Christ to fill our gaps. Grace is not a booster engine that kicks on after “all we can do” is reached. It is a power received daily as we continue in our weakness to do “all we can do” in any given day or moment. If Christ didn’t require this practice we would never become what we need to be. This perspective is easy to see in things like learning the piano, but very difficult to see in learning heaven. When kids mess up and hit wrong notes in piano no one says they’re unworthy to keep playing. We just expect them to give a continuous effort. It´s all a part of the learning process. Grace is not the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s the light that moves us through the tunnel. It is not a finishing touch; it is The Finisher’s touch. It is not the absence of God’s high expectations; it is the presence of His power. When we depend on grace we don’t discover, as some would say, that Christ requires nothing; we discover why he requires so much. 

So there you go.

-Elder Brian