So, uh, it's been a few weeks. I'm still alive. Over the last three weeks, we've laughed and cried. Not bad for a day in the life in a dog food company.
The Elders quorum in La Mesa is awesome. The whole ward is awesome, but specifically the Elders quorum plans the best activities. Sometime within the last three weeks, we had an activity where we met up at a member's home and cooked all sorts of meats. Everyone brought their favorite thing they make to share with the 30ish guys that showed up. I can't imagine a better activity, everyone discusses what grill they used, which pellets or wood they used to smoke their food of choice, and then eating said meats while discussing the Gospel of Jesus Christ together. My dad is no longer in the Elders quorum presidency back home, or I would have sent a suggestion note. I might have heard in Ward Council the next week that they blew the budget... Oh well.
Most importantly from that activity, we were able to invite one of the friends that missionaries taught a long time ago in this area. We went down the list with a prayer in our hearts, trying to decide who we needed to text. We felt pulled towards his name, fired off a text and he said he would love to join us. He pulled up after his work shift and joined the best Elders quorum activity ever. We'll be working with him as he grows closer to Jesus Christ.
So, remember when 2020 was a thing? Yeah, me neither, but COVID has made its revenge attack. There's 9 people in my little district here, and 5 of them got the 'rona. No good! That's a good reflection of the mission, who all succumbed to the symptoms of stuffy noses and positive tests. Unfortunate for them, Zone Conference was that week! Can't miss Zone Conference, that's the missionary equivalent of the NFL opening season game (I think, I've never watched)! Those APs gave me a call at 10:00 the night before the conference and asked if I could throw together a Zoom live stream type beat for it. So Elder P and I spent the next day, bright and early, to set up a few different camera angles. I ran the sound board to mix all the different mics they use for the presentations while Elder P swapped cameras around. Very good, all those people got Zone Conference right to their living room. Lesson learned: get COVID right before Zone Conference. Or don't.
It has been a high priority of Elder P and I to meet with the members here in La Mesa. I was reading in Helaman 5 the last few weeks and had an epiphany (I know, very crazy). Nephi and Lehi were called as the missionaries to leave their home land to go amongst the Lamanites. While preaching to the Lamanites, they didn't really like it so they went the literal army to throw them in prison. Y'all know the story; the guards go down to kill the missionaries but God protects them with a ring of fire. The Lamanites get scared, repent, and then chat with angels. In verse 50, it said they all went out and started sharing the gospel to their friends and neighbors insomuch that more than half of them were convinced of the reality of Jesus Christ. Much wow.
The point being is that Nephi and Lehi were quite ineffective missionaries in the sense of sharing the gospel and causing true conversion. That came from friends, family, and neighbors. Moral of the story? It's the duty and covenant responsibility of the members to find people to bring closer to Jesus Christ. I cannot wait to be in a position where I can make friendships longer than 6 weeks (except I've been in La Mesa for 6 months 💀). There have been some members here that I want to reconnect with when I get home. These people have had the most wild experiences with God and the spirit, and my testimony has been built listening to them.
Last year, I served in Black Mountain. While in Black Mountain, Presi Merritt the entire mission to a Padres game against the Pirates. We all thought he wouldn't do it this year because there was only one game that it could have been, and that day came and went. But, at that one corona Zone Conference he announced that we were going to a Wednesday game! Much exciting, much wow. The week leading up to that game, we were to have a finding blitz. That's where we put all of our focus and energy into finding people who need some Jesus in their lives. President went to the SMSLs for a way to track progress and growth over the week, who then came to me. Here's the pitch: when people have a gospel conversation with someone, they are to send a ⚾ into their zone group chat. And when they add someone to their teaching pool, they send a 🏆. The only problem was tracking it.
The SMSLs asked if Holly (the robot dog, not the actual dog) could track it. She's already in every zone group chat to remind people about uncontacted referrals and other general mayhem, so she would be the perfect candidate, right? Wrong, but the SMSLs weren't playing.
You see, this plan has many problems. Problem one: Holly can't read emojis. How Holly works is that she starts a little Firefox window on her server, reads all the loaded messages in a given chat and stores the last one. For some unthinkable reason, Facebook decided to use images instead of actual font emojis for messenger. That means that Holly isn't programmed to even comprehend emojis, let alone decide what emoji was sent. So, a few minutes of clickity clacking on the keyboard, and bam! Emojis. Problem two: Holly only stores the last message from every chat to compare if the message is new or not. If someone sends a baseball more than once in a row, they'll think that Holly counted it when in reality she didn't. This one was a harder problem, but a few dinner hours later I converted her message cache into a message stack cache. Who needs to go to college for data structures and algorithms? (me probably, please don't go look at the code)
The finding blitz started strong on Monday. People were out there having good conversations with people and the baseballs were coming in. But problem! People were sending in baseballs too fast! These missionaries were inconsiderate of the robot dog and were too good at missionary work. Smh my head. So that night after I got back to the apartment, I frantically increased every hard-coded refresh rate in her program that I could find from 2 seconds to 100 milliseconds and her typing speed from 50 milliseconds to 10 milliseconds per key. That did the job. Or so I thought! The next day, Holly kept discarding unread messages due to incompatible message stack comparisons. No good. I realized that when I added emoji support, she is now accidentally reading emoji message reactions. It made it very confusing, so I did a few things to fix that. I added a little bit of leniency to her cache comparison, added a double sample to make sure she was reading messages correctly, and then a safety return for the last message if the caches did end up completely incompatible. The git log shows my insanity as I tried to come up with solutions to these problems.
Padres game was fun. We lost to Detroit of all teams, but we made it on the big screen this time! Pictures in the album, it was a blast.
All in all, it was a huge success! We had one of the most successful weeks in a long time. If nothing else in my time here in San Diego, I have made an impact this past week. But, of course, the credit goes to God. While my monkey brain could only come up with sub-par patches to Holly's code, I know they were inspired of God. Time and time again, God has shown me solutions to different software problems since the start of my mission. I love being a missionary.
This past week, we met with one of our friends. He took us out to eat, and he's literally one of the coolest people I've ever met. He explained to use his life situation and why he couldn't be baptized, but asked us not to give up on him. He promised us eventually he will join the church once his current life circumstances change. He told us how he came to the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and he said it was through interactions with members throughout his life. The small, but simple, impacts of followers of Christ left a mark on him and he eventually came to learn more. So, I have a challenge for my two readers: find a way to love, share or invite a friend. You probably won't see the impact today, but there is one. I have seen it with my own eyes.
After we finished lunch with our friend, we walked out to his car where we helped him fill up his oil (we didn't really do anything, but he asked for help). As we were standing there, a CLOUD OF BEES appeared out of nowhere. Our friend suddenly tells us to walk slowly over to our car... Both Elder P and I started walking at a snail's pace through a literal cloud of bees. I could hear their wings in my ears and the occasional brush on my arms. But, we slowly made it back to our car and slowly stepped inside. I told Elder P there's no way in heck I'm backing up the car, so we made an illegal back and escaped. That's probably the last time I'll see that friend, but I hope to find out what happens in the future.
Whelp, that's a wrap!
On to eternal perfection
-- Elder Coxson
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