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.”
Monday, April 30, 2012
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....
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."
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.
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.
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