It's been a second. I'm still here in San Diego, doing the work of God. It's been pretty great! I'll give a few highlights over the past couple weeks.
General Conference: 10/10 review. It gets bonus points for the meta, so maybe 11/10. My wonderful district of 10 missionaries all pulled up to a church building where I made them all pancakes. Pancakes are actually my favorite breakfast food, so I've been working on a from-scratch recipe over the past two years. It was very enjoyable spending time with my favorite people in the world, but better to hear God's will through his oracles.
This transfer I've had the wonderful opportunity to exchange with all the Elders in my district. District leaders exchange with their Elders to learn and improve from each other. In the last three weeks, I've been on five exchanges. Each one of my best friends has shown me how to be such a faithful, motivated missionary. I swear, the missionaries they're sending from the MTC only get better and better. On one specific exchange, I went over to the La Jolla YSA with Elder B. One finding approach that they use over there is to take a whiteboard onto campus and ask people what makes them happy. It's so interesting to see everyone's expressions when they think about happiness, as UCSD isn't a very bright place. If you see the architecture, it's very dreary by design and every student is focused solely on their studies. Watching the Elders and Sisters bring joy into the lives of the UCSD students was a treat.
Another Inspire event has happened in the mean time. This one happened inside and was probably the best one we streamed. Everything just worked smoothly. Setup went well, cameras functioned properly. No Utah server failures occurred. God's hand was truly in this event. I'm looking forward to the next two events, which at this rate will happen before I write my next letter home (sorry J).
On one of my exchanges with Elder H, we had to leave our apartment early in the morning. I can't remember why exactly (it's been three weeks), but we drove over to our church building. A funny thing about San Diego is that the neighbors love hanging around the church. They bring their dogs and throw tennis balls or just walk laps around the grounds. Very interesting, but we met one guy who's even more interesting. He walked over from his house with a cat. Not a dog, but a well-trained cat. Elder H and I most definitely did not believe him until he called his cat (named Danny) over to his side! Afterwards it slowly paced around the church grounds, not getting too far from his owner. So yeah, now I've seen everything on my mission, including a well-trained cat that goes on walks and actually listens to its owner.
On another occasion while entering our church building, we ended up stopping and chatting with another church grounds walker. We ended up talking about his experiences going to church and how he grew up going to a church somewhere yonder. Since moving here, he hasn't really been interested in church. We invited him to attend ours after chatting for a while, which he politely declined. We thanked him for chatting and started towards the door to our church. The third member of the Godhead told me to give him a Book of Mormon, but I told myself that it was silly because he definitely wasn't interested in coming to church (you have my permission to roast me in your replies to this email). We get to the door of the church and I pull out my keys and slide them into the lock. I twisted the key, but it wouldn't budge. It lock was stuck, and I heard a voice in my head said, "you know why it won't open." Awkward. I turn around, walked up to this man and asked if he wanted a Book of Mormon. He said yes, we pulled one out of our car, and then let ourselves into the church to do whatever work we were there for (it was three weeks ago).
I have collected many stories about relying on the spirit, or not relying on the spirit resulting in clown moments, these past few weeks. Doctrine and Covenants 45 teaches us that the five virgins who had oil in their lamps were the ones that let the third member of the Godhead guide them. I hope and pray that I can let the Holy Spirit guide me every single day to fill my lamp for the Savior's return. You can ask me about the rest of the stories later. Maybe I'll save them for when I talk in church. Funny story, an RM spoke in church yesterday, reporting about his mission. I'm taking notes...
The highlight of the last three weeks was Elder Bednar's tour of the California San Diego mission. He traveled all the way from Salt Lake City to tell us what's what. Last Saturday he spent three hours with all the missionaries and taught us how to be better disciples of Christ. Some highlights include: "Nobody cares about Kolob" Stop with the guess what's in my head questions He interrupted the opening and closing hymn to tell us we look grumpy when we sing 1 Nephi 14:14 Taught us through questions instead of sermons No sacrament meeting should be boring if you're learning from the spirit Stop trying to recognize when you're receiving revelation 'Growing your faith' is false doctrine, you can't grow faith. Testimony meeting is not story time or sermon time, the spirit has better things to do
One thing that really stuck out to me was that Elder Bednar would refer to the Holy Ghost as the third member of the Godhead more than any other name or title. I could feel the power behind his assertions as he spoke of this wonderful gift of having Him with us all the time. I want to incorporate that into my own teaching.
These are just the things that I picked up from my time listening to Elder Bednar. It's interesting that everyone I talk to pulled different things from his discussion, but everyone I talked with felt the spirit teach them things they need to do better. I know what I need to do and study going forward. I'm looking forward to it. Critically read Alma 32 and Hebrews 11.
Whelp, that's all he wrote. No more things to write about. There probably is, but it must not have been important because I definitely can't remember anything else. Hope you have a great week!
On to eternal perfection!
-- Elder Coxson
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