6/9/14 "The Gate"

"And then are ye in this strait and narrow path which leads to eternal life; yea, ye have entered in by the gate." - 2 Nephi 31:18

This week I witnessed my fourth car crash in this area. A car backed into a street pole. Something is seriously wrong with these people.

It has again entered that time of year when the birds go crazy and start fighting each other. The mockingbirds are out, though, and I enjoy listening to them.

The South is indeed very religious, but one thing I have noticed is that there are no youth going to the churches here -- only middle-aged and up. By and large the youth of the South are either agnostic, spiritual but nonreligious, or else attend the rock-concert churches such as Elevation, the Cove, etc. Not too many go to the traditional meetings anymore. You know, the ones that require devotion and standards and such.

One of the greatest weapons of the Church's missionaries is our character. People may not know much about us and regard us with suspicion, but they generally trust us to be honest, dependable, and kind. That is a great advantage. They may not know anything about our doctrine but they still regard us as upright individuals.

On Sunday was the baptism of Faith and Madison. This was the first time in my whole mission, 23 months in, where I was able to report at the end of the week that our area had seen a baptism. It was truly a wonderful, ecstatic feeling. When their father was performing the baptism for his younger daughter Madison he got choked up, which got everyone in the room teary. I have never felt the Spirit so strong at a baptismal service.

Elder Arnold and I got a call this past Saturday from President Craven asking us if we would train a new missionary! This is extremely exciting. It'll be the fifth time Elder Arnold has been a trainer and the fourth time for me. I take this as a sign from the Lord to ensure that I continue to work hard during my last transfer. I am excited to meet him tomorrow.

There's no time to write more, unfortunately. I love you all! Hurrah for Israel!

Elder Fisher

6/2/14 "The gift of God"

"But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." - Acts 8:20

Few things can impress an investigator more quickly than a solid fast and testimony meeting at church.

Few things can turn off an investigator more quickly than a bad fast and testimony meeting at church.

We all want our fast and testimony meetings to be solid, of course, but being a missionary and having an investigator there sort of puts you into double jeopardy. 

Thankfully, this past Sunday went just fine. The Newton-Conover ward excels at having short, powerful testimonies so that 20+ people can participate. Though we did have a sweet older brother go off on evolution this past Sunday.

"Atheists say that horses evolved from grasshoppers!" this defender of the faith boldly proclaimed from the pulpit. "That can't possibly be true! For one thing, their knees bend the opposite way!"

***

Last week Elder Arnold and I both ate a Hmong pepper at a member home. This gallant feat of daring led us to be rewarded with a Hmong name by the family. Elder Arnold's Hmong name is "Vaj Vwj," which translates to "Elder King Leader." I, on the other hand, was given the name "Choj Vwj," which translates to "Elder Bridge." 

I'm not sure quite what to think about all this. Apparently, when Hmong people are asked to determine what name would best define Elder Arnold, they see "King Leader." When they see me, they think "bridge." I guess I just radiate a lot of bridge-like qualities, I suppose.

***

There is a man we are teaching who missed an appointment last week. When we asked why, he responded that he is an ordained minister and was off performing a marriage. This was highly surprising, since as he is an auto mechanic he didn't seem like the type of man who would have gone through a seminary to become a pastor.

It turns out that our friend had been on the Internet one day and had seen an ad that said "Become an ordained minister!" Following the link, he saw a button that said "Ordain me now!" and one credit card number and eight bucks later, he's an ordained minister, able to legally perform marriages and baptisms. Our investigator friend's line of authority is probably the only one in the world that boasts an "https://" in front of it.

Some people may balk at this modern method of ordination but it is clearly in perfect harmony with scriptural accounts of biblical priesthood practices, and anyone who says otherwise is clearly an ignorant and close-minded simpleton.

Poor Simon Magus. If only you'd waited 2,000 more years, my friend, your money would've been worth something.

***

Back a few weeks ago, when Elder Dedrick and I talked to the preacher, he asked us what we, as Mormons, believed about grace. He shared an analogy to explain his view of it, and I shared President David O. McKay's analogy to explain our view of it, and since both of them are similar, I'll share both of them to you.

Pastor: Grace is like a drowning man. Jesus is the lifeguard. He swims out to you in the water and rescues you. You just have to go limp in His arms and let Him get you to shore safely.

President McKay: Grace is like a drowning man. Jesus is the lifeguard. He throws out a line for you to grab. You just have to hold on and let Him pull you to shore safely.

Note the difference?

Suffice it to say that the pastor flatly rejected President McKay's analogy. However, thinking back on these two parables, there is one question I want to bring up that perhaps my friend the pastor had not considered: why was the man drowning in the first place?

The point is, we are indeed saved by grace; it is the gift of God. However, if you keep jumping into the water after Jesus has saved you, you won't be saved! Ultimately, there also has to be repentance -- an acknowledgement that the water can hurt you and that you shouldn't go swimming in it. We can only be saved through grace, but we cannot be saved without repentance, either. Jesus will indeed get you to heaven through His grace, whether you want Him to or not, but only repentance, made possible by the restored Gospel and its ordinances, will cause you to stay there.

I am excited for another great week of missionary work with my wonderful companionElder Arnold. The Church is true, and the priesthood of God cannot actually be transmitted via the Internet, despite what modern-day apostasy would have us think. 

Love you all. Hurrah for Israel! 

Elder Fisher

5/27/14 "Cheerfully do all things"

"Therefore, dearly beloved brethren, let us cheerfully do all things that lie in our power; and then may we stand still, with the utmost assurance, to see the salvation of God, and for his arm to be revealed." - D&C 123:17

So, everything cancelled this week. 90% of our appointments fell through, many investigators fell off the map, and even the baptism we'd planned for this past Sunday didn't happen at the last minute.

But, of course, life goes on, in a fruitful and happy way. 

While doing service for a recent convert we noted that there was a stray kitten hiding in her bushes, and the sister we were helping asked us to catch it for her. We never would have been able to find it in there except that, whenever we said "Meow," it would meow back at us. It was like some kind of inter-species game of Marco Polo. 

Elder Fisher was the one who caught the kitten when it lost its cool and made a break for it. He soon discovered that it had claws and hurriedly passed it off to Elder Arnold, who was wearing the gloves. The kitten is now living happily with its new family.

We had just barely sat down in a lesson with a less-active last week when all of a sudden he got a knock on his door. He answered it and then, turning to us with a slightly puzzled expression on his face, he said, "It's for you."

I went out and talked to the man standing outside. His name was Guillermo, a member of the Church from Matagalpa, Nicaragua, who has been in the United States only a month. He had been wondering where the local church unit was and he was driving down the street when all of a sudden he saw two missionaries walk into a house. He immediately stopped his car in the middle of the road and left it with the emergency flashers going so that he could come and knock on the door of that house and catch us.

It was a good lesson for me in devotion. Guillermo stopped the very instant he saw us so that he could talk to us. Shows that the Lord needs us to respond quickly to things He sends our way.

I guess I'm at a loss as to what to say more. It's just been one of those weeks. But the Church is still true! And the work is still wonderful!

Love you all. Hurrah for Israel!

Elder Fisher 

5/18/14 "God gave the increase"

"Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man? I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase." - 1 Corinthians 3:5-6

It is a sad fact of missionary work that if you are working hard, staying obedient, and generally doing your job, the members are probably not going to remember your name.

This realization came to me a long while ago but came back again this past week.

Elder Arnold is a singer. He was Javert in Riverton High School's production of Les Miserables and has quite a good voice. This Sunday the Sister training leaders had a baptism for one of their investigators, a young man, and they asked us to sing, so we did a duet of "How Great Thou Art." It went very well. It also helps that both of the sisters have around 13+ years of piano experience so they are both amazingly good and do piano duets for meetings and such. All four of us have enough musical experience that we can through something together at a minute's notice if need be.

After the baptism we participated in the confirmation of this young man. He is Hmong, so one of our Hmong members did the confirmation in that language. It was a great experience for me. I had absolutely no idea was he was saying, but the Spirit indicated to me that although he was speaking in a different language, it was still the same priesthood.

This upcoming Sunday we are planning to have the baptisms of Faith and Madison, the daughters of convert parents. Their father will be performing the baptisms. If they meet the date, this will be the first time in my entire mission that a baptism will have taken place in my area while I was there. A lot of people I found and taught got baptized very shortly after I left the area, and I had the immense privilege and honor of performing the baptism for Rosita, but this will be the first time in 22 months that a baptism has happened on my watch.

Suffice it to say, I'm very excited.

But with this also comes a realization. Many many missionaries have tried over the years to visit Faith and Madi's parents and get them back to church. I am certain that I am no more obedient than they were, or any more diligent that they were, or any more sanctified in my calling than they were. Yet, for some reason none of them ever got in the door of this family's home. Elder Dedrick and I had just so happened to show up on a day and at a time when the mom was outside and we were able to talk with her and set up a return appointment. Now, jumping forward over a month, the daughters are preparing for baptism.

What changed? It was not our individual skills that got us in the door. It was the Spirit, who softened the hearts of the people involved. If Elder Dedrick and I can really claim anything, it is that we acted on the prompting to stop by their home at that right moment, which was able to get the ball rolling. We cannot say that this upcoming baptism came about because we were better missionaries or more spiritual or anything. God simply allowed us to participate in this story.

I am loving being with Elder Arnold. He is an excellent missionary and we get along well. Hopefully this week will be full of miracles.

Love you all. Hurrah for Israel!

Elder Fisher 

5/12/14 "The Meaning of the Tree"

"Knowest thou the meaning of the tree which thy father saw?

"And I answered him, saying: Yea, it is the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men." - 1 Nephi 11:21-22

This week Elder Dedrick and I witnessed our third car crash together. We had just knocked on a less-active's door and were waiting for them to answer when some guy just drove off the road into a ditch. He eventually maneuvered his wrecked car out and back onto the road and drove off. I have no idea what is wrong with the people here.

Even up to ten years ago, missionaries still taught people using memorized discussions. They were supposed to commit every word of the lessons to memory and recite it exactly when they taught someone. There were several lessons, and all the lessons had to be taught in order, and there were specific commitments for each lesson; for example, people were often invited to be baptized when teaching about priesthood authority. For those of you who have seen The Best Two Years, this was the teaching method still in use back then.

Now things are very different. Preach My Gospel presents lesson material that missionaries are supposed to study and gain a testimony of, but we are given the freedom to present the doctrine in our own words, as directed by the Spirit. We can teach someone about the Plan of Salvation before we teach them about the Restoration if we feel that that is what they need, or we can teach part of the Gospel of Christ in the first lesson, or we can put in a few points of the Word of Wisdom if we feel that's necessary. It's all a lot more inspired.

Over the course of my mission, I've realized that most of the time it is simply best to teach things in the order Preach My Gospel puts them. For a person to understand why they need to be baptized, they need to understand the Restoration. For them to see the need for a Restoration, they need to understand the Great Apostasy, which requires an understanding of the Savior's original church, which requires understanding dispensation cycles, etc. Things make more sense if people already understand the principles behind them.

On Saturday Elder Dedrick and I were teaching a man named Reeon. We were teaching him the Restoration but he kept pressing us to get to the point.

"I feel that you're trying to sell me something," he said, cutting through our explanation of the Savior's earthly ministry. "You're building and building up to something. Just skip to whatever that something is. Skip to the end." 

He wouldn't let us explain what we were trying to get to, so I eventually said, "If I told you that there was a man, a convicted felon, who was executed for trying to stir up rebellion against the government, and didn't tell you any of what had happened before that, then you would never have known that that man was Jesus Christ."

There was a long pause as we all thought about that. Reeon stopped bothering us to skip to the end after that.

A different man asked me about a week or so ago if I had ever doubted that Joseph Smith was actually a prophet. My thoughts are a bit more collected now, but the thought I expressed to him was around these lines:

"I have doubted if Joseph Smith was really a prophet because I have previously doubted the existence of God. But I have no doubt that if there is a God, that Joseph Smith is His Prophet."

***

At around 9:45 PM on Sunday night Elder Dedrick and I got a call from President Craven, telling Elder Dedrick to pack his bags because he was getting transferred! So today we drove down to Charlotte to meet with President. Elder Dedrick got assigned to be my zone leader in Hickory, 15 minutes up the road, and I was paired up with my 17th companion, seasoned zone leader Elder Arnold. Though I've been out two transfers longer than he has, Elder Arnold is a year older than I am, and I am excited to be with him. He is from Riverton, Utah.

Another item of note is that President asked me to take over Elder Dedrick's place as district leader. This will be the first time in my mission that I've had a leadership assignment, so I will be relying a lot on Elder Arnold's experience to help me out the first few weeks.

***

On Sunday I finished reading the Book of Mormon backwards. I had started reading at Moroni 10 and proceeded all the way to the title page. I'm not sure why I decided to do this, but I got a lot of good insights out of it. It also made for some ironic twists to familiar stories. For example, 3 and 4 Nephi now tell the story of a very righteous people, in continual peace for 200 years, who got visited by Jesus, and then afterward there was a bunch of natural disasters where everybody died.

It was powerful, however, that in this backwards readthrough the "end" of the Book of Mormon was the story of the Tree of Life. For whatever reasons it had a much stronger effect on me this time around.

Have you ever wished sometimes that our earthly existence was just the Tree of Life experience? It would be so much easier, I would think, to simply have to find that iron rod somewhere in those mists of darkness and just hold on unto you reached the Tree, than to have to deal with all the confusion and uncertainty of this life. There are so many different paths, so many distractions, that it is difficult to know if you've found the Rod or arrived at the Tree.

I noticed that, although Lehi's dream portrays most of the types of people and situations of life, one thing that is not found in the dream is any sort of method for those people who are at the Tree to go and find and rescue those others who are lost in the mists of darkness. 

As I pondered this, there came to mind the words of the song "Heaven's at Hand," played for a cartoon video portrayal of the Tree of Life dream. Like so many other things, the chorus of this song has come to have much greater significance to me now that I am a missionary:

Don't give up! Don't fall away!

I'm here to help you up again! 

I'm here to help you up and then

Don't look down! Don't look back!

We're here to help each other stay

To help each other every day

Every way!

The Savior is the Tree, the love of God. We, as missionaries or as members, are the ones He assigns to go and find those lost in the mists and bring them to Him. Because He cannot be there Himself, He entrusts us with the great privilege and duty to go and find His family and bring them to safety and eternal life. We are there to help them when they stumble, to encourage them if they fail. We are to do whatever it takes to keep them moving along the path so that they will finally get there to the Tree.

All of the people you meet are either holding onto the Rod, at the Tree, or lost somewhere in those mists of darkness. It does not matter to the Lord if any of us stumble along the way as long as we get to the destination in the end! It is our job tohelp each other back up when we fall. He cannot physically be present to do so, so He needs us to be there. It is through us that the Savior can help these people back up. 

Among the most powerful moments of my mission have been when I have been able to echo those words of the song to a child of God who has stumbled: "Don't give up! I'm here to help you up again!"

What a great calling, that Christ would call you to go and bring those people to Him. 

I know that this Church is true. I love you all. Hurrah for Israel!

Elder Fisher

5/5/14 "If there is a god"

"O God...if there is a God, and if thou art God, wilt thou make thyself known unto me, and I will give away all my sins to know thee..." - Alma 22:18

I was biking on the street this Sunday when I hit a crack in the road and crashed. My front wheel got bent into a lovely figure-8 due to the effect of 240 pounds of Elder Fisherlanding on it. I was surprisingly unharmed but the impact tore a hole right through my shirt. I guess God misinterpreted what I was asking for when I had been praying for Him to make me more...holy.

The crash wasn't really caused by a lack of skill on my part; I just hit a crack. So, when E. Dedrick asked me "What made you crash?" I could honestly reply, "It was the street'sfault."

But where to start about this last week? We spent several hours helping a nonmember stack wood on Wednesday and several more helping a member shovel mulch on Saturday.Elder Dedrick forgot his iPad at the post office last Monday, but the very postal worker we'd talked to on that day bumped into Spanish elders later on in the week and told them to inform us that the iPad was still at the office. The postal worker had figured that all Mormon elders know each other, and by golly, we do. Miracle? Oh yes.

What could I tell you about my mission? I could tell you about the helicopters that we always see flying around, searching for dope. Or how everyone smokes here and not one person has a full set of teeth, or how I'm getting really tired of the smell of marijuana. 

Or how the little daughter of one of the people we're teaching stopped me after a lesson once and said, "You know who you remind me of?"

"Who?"

"Joey Gladstone from Full House."

Or when we were teaching a 50-year old man and his elderly aunt walked in the room and he started loudly cussing her out while she patiently ignored him. It was entirely unprovoked on her part -- he was just holding some ill feelings about something that had happened years ago. We took him outside and talked to him about it, then marched him back inside so that he could apologize. It was quite the sight, seeing this gigantic 50-year old man say that he was sorry, looking for all the world like a 5-year old who was being forced by his mother to apologize for calling someone a bad name.

In the middle of a lesson with our investigator Charles, as I was sitting in a lawn chair under the trees behind his beaten-down trailer, I was listening to his gentle, raspy voice talk about what he'd read in the Book of Mormon recently, regarding his beaten baseball cap and the Hitler-esque mustache on his wrinkled face, when all of a sudden the powerful thought came to me: 

"The Savior died for this person."

...

I could only call it a revelation. 

I find it both amazing and slightly worrisome that this idea had never really occurred to me before. But ever since, I have tried to recapture this thought for every person I see. For it's true, isn't it? Missionaries wear the mantle of Christ, which means that we represent Him, but also that we are entitled to receive any gift or quality we need to represent Him accurately. Included among that is receiving the vision of Christ: being able to see people as He sees them; being able to see them as who they can become.

The Savior died for Charles. And for Allen, the man we're meeting with who's worried about how his adult children are going down dark and painful paths despite all of his best efforts to raise them as Christians, and is torn with guilt, thinking that he's a bad father. To which I replied, "God's children disobey Him all the time. But we would never call Him a bad parent."

The Savior died for Allen. And for Joseph, the man we taught who is not sure if there really is a God, and who, when we invited him to pray, offered up a prayer remarkably similar to the one offered by Lamoni's father in the book of Alma. Or Cedric, the cool gangsta recent convert who taught me how to do a gangsta handshake -- which is, to this day, one of the greatest accomplishments of my mission -- and for countless other people that I do not have the time or the means to tell you about, people who I love with all my heart.

I do not have time to write out the rest of my thoughts, so I'll just save it for next week. What a precious time this is! How I love to be a missionary. This work is true.

Love you all! Hurrah for Israel!

Elder Fisher

4/28/14 "Nourish the tree"

"Now, this is not because the seed was not good, neither is it because the fruit thereof would not be desirable; but it is because your ground is barren, and ye will not nourish the tree, therefore ye cannot have the fruit thereof." - Alma 32:39

This was a week of many strange occurrences. Elder Dedrick and I survived transfers, for one thing, so he will be my fourth companion to last for more than a transfer. We will remain together in Newton-Conover.

One such strange occurrence was Elder Dedrick and I doing service for a nonmember lady. There was a MOUNTAIN of soda cans in her backyard, the acquired Sundrops of ages piled up as a monument to the glory of caffeine, that we had the great pleasure of bagging so that it could be taken to the recycling place and handed over in exchange for a nice green Ben Franklin in the hand. Afterwards we taught her about the Restoration.

Or the zone conference on Tuesday with President Craven. Last zone conference he told all of the zone to prepare a talk on Moroni 10:32 so that he could call on a few of us at random to speak. He got me to speak at that conference, so when we were told to prepare another talk for this meeting, this time on a General Conference talk, I prepared one but was fairly certain that I would be safe. Not so. President called me to speak again.

I used President Uchtdorf's priesthood session talk, "Sleeping through the Restoration," but instead twisted it to talk about "Sleeping through your mission." I originally spelled out a ton of do's and don'ts while preparing it, but I decided instead to just ask the zone a lot of questions to consider: In what ways am I selfish? In what ways do I try to avoid being obedient, or diligent, or selfless? What competing priorities do I have? 

Usually for zone conferences President gives a training the last few hours or so on some practical principle, like finding or something. Not so with this one. In front of the assembled Hickory zone he went into some deep doctrine about grace and resurrection. Partway through, he asks the audience, "When you are resurrected, what age will you be resurrected to?"

A timid voice replies, "Your prime?"

"Your prime?" President says. He rotates on his heels to look at me and says, "ElderFisher, you just barely turned 21 today; is that your prime?"

I paused and said, "Well, I had been hoping that my prime would be a bit thinner."

***

We have seen many highs and lows this week and much activity. I accompanied a musical number at zone conference ("Lead Thou Me On") another musical number at a baptism ("Beautiful Savior") and sang a solo of "This is the Christ" in sacrament meeting. It was hard for me, because I wish I had the kind of voice that could fully express my testimony through that song, but hopefully the effort I showed sufficed.

We see all different kinds of levels of faith here. This week a learned man we had taught for weeks told us that he had to stop meeting with us. Why? Because instead of reading the Book of Mormon to get his answers like we had invited him to do -- and like he'd promised he would do -- he instead looked up a whole bunch of anti-Mormon rubbish and believed it. On the other hand, we had a powerful experience with another man, Charles, because he actually had read when we asked him to, reciting to us the story of Alma and Korihor, Helaman 13:37-39 and quoting Moroni 7:11.

There are so many people and so many stories I could share, because this week seemed to be crammed full of more events and happenings than should be possible with a regular timeline. But I can't tell you about all of them.

Let me just say that it is so important to have faith. I have complete, 100% certainty that if people will read the Book of Mormon and pray about it, they WILL know that it is true. It is a spiritual constant. Reading + Prayer = Answer of Truth. If people do not get that answer, it is not because the Book of Mormon is not true or that the seed was bad; it was because they would not nourish the tree.

How important it is to even just try. Jesus told the Pharisee that if they would onlytry what he taught, they would know for themselves if what he taught was true.

I've only got three months left. I have no intention of sleeping through my mission. Now is the time to work harder than ever before and be even more sanctified than I've ever been. The day is drawing to a close. It's time to go and harvest!

Love you all. Hurrah for Israel!

Elder Fisher