"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step"
--- Lao Tzu (Ancient Chinese philosopher & writer; 6th century B.C. - 4th century B.C.)
What lengths would you go to in order to achieve your aspirations? Have you ever taken a really long time to solve a problem only to find out that it was an easy fix? I have. Many times. This story is one of those times when a challenge became more complicated than it should have been. There is a certain element of faith involved in every story of tribulation. We can hope, but success is not usually guaranteed to be waiting for us at the end of the journey. Things don't always work out despite the hope and effort we put into something. But in spite of uncertainty, we press forward anyway. That is faith. I'm grateful that this just happened to be a time where although it wasn't a straight shot, we got there in the end.
**NOTE: If you wish to get in contact with missionaries of the Church to learn more, you can do so at https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/comeuntochrist/requests/missionary-visit
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ELDER RAMIREZ
Elder Ramirez was my eighteenth companion 20 months in, and I'll remind you that this was more companions than most missionaries would typically have. Elder Ramirez was from Yucatán, Mexico, and had even less time left in the mission than me for his two years to be up. If I had to guess, he must have arrived in the Mission about 6 weeks before I did. Having so many companions was unusual but I gained so much perspective because of it. Elder Ramirez was "one of the guys" but when he needed to be a leader, he was disciplined. Both of us were still District Leaders but like my previous companion Elder Z. (See "Human"), he’d just stepped down from being a Zone Leader (See "Mission Administration"). He was experienced but he never stood on a pedestal with his nose down on others; he always inspired me to be bold but never reproving or overbearing. He instilled in me greater confidence by putting myself out there and not caring about what other people said. We got a lot done together. He was probably one of my favorite companions; a great balance between 'sit back and enjoy the journey' and 'let's get it done'! Like me, he was seemingly at peace with whatever happened so long as we gave our best efforts. He was exactly what I'd hoped for at the end of my mission --- someone who could be my friend and treat me as an equal, especially as a fellow leader who had just as much right and responsibility to decide where to go and what to do as he did.
GO THE DISTANCE
*Note: This post is directly related to the previous one: "Hello".
I pride myself on my memory which is why I can write about all these stories, but for some unknown reason, this is a story about a time when something must have gone in one of my ears and immediately out my other one. It involves a conversation that I remembered nothing about within hours of it happening. I have something of a phobia of speaking on the phone, and particularly because Spanish was a second language to me, I never liked being the one to call people up on the phone. But especially as a District Leader, it was a necessity from time to time. Additionally, we had a limited amount of minutes we could use on our brick of a phone. So I predict what happened was that I called up Aurelia to extract a very specific bit of information quickly, but in doing so, I must have blocked out everything else.
The only way I know about this conversation was that I apparently told my companion about it. Apparently, I learned that Aurelia wouldn’t be home for a period of time. But we were so determined to meet with her so she’d meet her baptismal goal date, as were our Zone Leaders. I must have insisted on visiting her so nobody would come up to me after the fact and interrogate me along the lines of, "Why didn't you try harder?". Or maybe 20 months in, I was tired of taking "no" for an answer? Or maybe I was scared that something would disrupt our progress with her if there was too long of a break in-between visits? I don't know. But she gave us the address of her daughter's house where we would be able to find her for the "foreseeable" future.
There was a catch though. Her daughter's house was just outside of our designated boundaries in Bugambilias! If you didn't know, missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints are supposed to work within their assigned areas unless they have permission to leave it temporarily (See "Mission Administration"). So we probably shouldn't have done what we did, but at that point in time, helping Aurelia towards baptism took priority over anything else we had going on, and we were both District Leaders near the end of our missions who had obviously been entrusted to make our own decisions and had a good record of doing so. It was only going to be this once for the greater good, and if it paid off, the worst that could happen would be a slap on the wrist, if that. In the dusk of our missionary service, it felt as if we had nothing to lose and no time to waste.
We made plans to venture into the foreign territory on foot as always because we didn't have a car or bike. The only navigational tool at our disposal was a single archaic map on our apartment wall and it was certainly too massive and fragile to take to the streets between the six of us. So in my desperation, I did what I thought at the time was clever and I snapped partial photos of the map, honed in on the general area she described which included the name of the street, in hopes of using my camera screen as a sort of mini-map. I remind you that we only had a blue brick phone so taking high-resolution pictures or using GPS or any other apps was not an option. But again, I remind you that these paper maps weren't always up-to-date given the rapid rate of construction in Tamaulipas, and with all the names crammed on top of each other, you can appreciate how hard it was to find your way around on the best of days. These weren't just streets going North to South and East to West; these were streets going in all sorts of angles so you never really knew which way you were facing.
It was Friday, May 6, 2016. To put it into perspective, 63 more days and I'd be home again living the normal life in Utah. The two of us set off at 10:15 in the morning for what we didn’t anticipate to be too arduous of a trek but since we’d never been there before, we wanted to leave room for error. That error was greatly underestimated.
In order to avoid getting lost in the many side streets, I suggested we follow the highway until we could turn off of it and from there head straight towards our destination. If all went well, it would have been the equivalent of walking straight and then a single left and then we would have been there. It seemed simple enough in theory, and I didn't expect we'd get lost since we were going to stay on the same street for most of the walk. So, we followed the dirt shoulder of the wide yet frankly near-untraveled highway. It didn't take long for the morning sun to intensify. The dusty gray road seemed to extend beyond the horizon yet there was hardly a soul to be seen as far as the eye could see. As the sun continued to peak over our heads and with little to no shade anywhere, I immediately began to question my decision. I kid you not, this infinite stretch of hot stone through barren desert wilderness felt more like the highway to hell. But there was nowhere else to go. Either we could waste time backtracking or we could press forward with hope. At that point, it was only hope, not confidence.
At one point, two vehicles pulled over almost simultaneously. One was a newer good-looking vehicle, going towards the direction we just came. The driver had sunglasses on and for some reason, I had an overall bad vibe from him so we thanked him and sent the shady stranger on his way (See "Hitchhiking"). The second vehicle was a beaten pick up truck, but the driver identified himself as a Church member from outside our Area (Las Cumbres which is next door to where I was in San José); Elder Ramirez told me later that he wanted to ride in the nicer vehicle. This second man likewise offered us a ride closer to our destination; thank goodness missionaries are so easy to recognize in our white shirts! We didn't want to inconvenience him but he refused to leave us abandoned in the middle of nowhere, lost. As we talked, it became evident we truly were out in the middle of nowhere. He was pressed for time getting to work but he kindly dropped us off where he told us that we could catch a pecera that would take us the rest of the way (See "P-Days & Peceras"). Again, we were extremely lucky that exactly as he was dropping us off, that pecera came by, which if we missed would have left us in basically the same situation as before. It would have taken forever to course-correct back towards civilization without the help of that man. While I was looking for our turn off that would have taken us straight to our destination, I think it's very probable that we missed that dirt road turn and landed in a couple of neighborhoods over. Goes to show what a couple of degrees off course can add up to. By this point, we weren't in Bugambilias anymore. We were in the next Area over, in "Puertas del Sol".
We boarded the quaint uncomfortable pecera and waited out the ride, peering out the bouncy windows for any street sign that could give us our bearing on our camera screen mini-map. Unfortunately, with the screen being so small, in order to read the street names, you had to zoom in which meant that we couldn’t see the whole map at once. I had part of an elephant (See "What Is Truth? Faith and Science"). I felt like I was in a game of Pac-Man. We took so many twists and turns, we lost all sense of North and South, East and West. After what felt like an eternity, we admitted that we were lost and were drifting deeper into forbidden territory and farther from where we wanted to be. The spirit warned us through unbearable discomfort, allowing us to get as close as the ride would take us but ultimately let us know when the pecera exhausted its usefulness. I asked a lady on the pecera where the neighborhood was. Whereas most strangers would ignore us as missionaries, suddenly all the other passengers were in on the conversation and indicated that we’d passed it and were now heading in the exact opposite direction. Like a game of telephone from us in the back to the driver in front, everyone was yelling, “Baja!”, giving us the smallest chance to literally jump off before the impatient and frankly agitated driver took off down the road. We ran back from whence we came, the summer sun still beating down from on high as noon approached. At least now, we were in a commercial neighborhood. We walked, and walked, and walked, and walked some more. Our morning was exhausted entirely in this search. Our path was like a spiral, gradually closing in but always in undesirable orbit. Not wanting to waste any more time, our pace was quick. To bystanders, it was almost suspicious how quickly we ran down the sidewalk. Just when we thought we knew where we were we'd have to backtrack. We must have run down the same street three times. We found ourselves by the factories in El Periférico which were in surprisingly good condition, even beautiful. Behind the factories to the South, we find ourselves in a suddenly richer-looking neighborhood. At length (which is an understatement), we thankfully found the house Aurelia was staying in, at least an hour later than the three of us had planned for at about 12:45 pm meaning we had spent 2 and a half hours looking for this place!
It becomes clearer why Aurelia was there. There were workers doing some maintenance out front and she was there to watch the house while her daughter was out. Aurelia is in the kitchen blending together some kind of green mystery veggie smoothie when we arrive. She invites us to rest at the table but she's busy and the kitchen is loud with something sizzling on the stove so it's hard to hear. Soon enough, lunch is made and we chat over some well-needed tacos, trying to cool down from our summer sweat with some mystery veggie smoothie that tastes like cucumber and lime among other earthy undertones, rest our weary legs, and try to replenish the calories we'd burned. Despite everything, we later arrived at our scheduled lunch appointment, albeit late, and had burger patties with carrots and spaghetti to further fuel us, and we had otherwise had a fun-filled good yet overly prolonged visit with them.
As I'm trying to conceal most of my frustration at just how impossible it was to find the house, Aurelia nonchalantly mentions she’d be back home the next day! I was confounded! I wondered why she didn’t mention this earlier! When I asked, she insisted that she had. Had I really not listened? It didn't sound like me but I couldn't prove otherwise. Maybe my Spanish comprehension over the phone was just that bad? Had we known better, we would have just waited to visit her when she got back if we realized her absence would be so temporary.
At this point, all that was on my mind now was how we'd get home given how chaotic our excursion had been. When we asked her advice for the best route to walk home, she offered to drive us back! I assumed that the car out front was her daughter's. Or maybe I'd just been so used to people we taught not having cars to get themselves to Church? Or maybe it was her age that I assumed she didn't drive? I don't know. But wait! That isn’t enough? Well, guess what? She didn't have to tell us that we took a long way around but according to her, her home was about a 20 minute walk over some bridge from her house that we had no knowledge of (nor did we ever come across). Yep, that’s right. How were we to know?! The map didn’t show any bridges and we’d never been outside our Area limits before (nor were we supposed to)! Obviously, the map must have been wrong, as they so often were, or there was some makeshift shortcut that nothing short of a satellite image could have shown us. Anyways, my morale was drained dry and I wondered why we’d exerted ourselves seemingly unnecessarily all morning. Things could have been so much easier.
A SENSE OF DIRECTION
I felt like Moses and the Children of Israel who wandered in circles for forty years in the desert wilderness. Why? Because they hardened their hearts (D&C 84:23-25) and the Lord required them to wait and prepare and therefore prolonged their journey. Their detour was a commandment. Forty years is a long time to be wandering, especially when one considers the distance between Cairo and Jerusalem. A person today can theoretically walk from Cairo to Jerusalem in just under a week; a distance of about 735 km (about 457 miles) or 425 km (265 miles) as the crow flies. The latter is about the equivalent linear distance between Salt Lake City to St. George, Utah, or Whakatane to Wellington, New Zealand. That seems like a substantial distance to walk but not so long that it would take 40 years! That’s half a lifetime these days! If you could walk the circumference of the Earth, you could lap the circumference of the globe about 38 times in the same time it took them to get from Cairo to Jerusalem. There are travelers who push themselves to walk extreme distances, for instance, Dave Kunst who was the very first verified person to complete an entire circuit of the earth on foot. He walked 14,450 miles in just over 4 years. Apparently, for both the Children of Israel and Elder Ramirez and myself, it wasn't the distance that was the problem, it was the direction.
It may be cliché but I believe it’s not the distance between us and our destination but the direction we are facing that matters most. Along the same vein, I believe that God is much more interested in our future than our past, thus the miracle of repentance and mercy (See "Repentance"). Jesus Christ gave us the parable of the Prodigal Son, a story of one who lost his way for a while but decided to return home “…When he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him” (Luke 15:20; see also "Ministering to the One"). Such is Heavenly Father's love that as we are en route to Him, He won't wait for us at the door, He will run down the driveway to embrace us as soon as He can. In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, we don't obsess over being perfect in this life, but we do care very much that we are pointed the right way and are on our way (See "More Than Good"). On the other hand, if we are facing the wrong way, even if only by a few degrees, in time we will inevitably end up many miles from where we are supposed to be. It just goes to show that even two degrees off course is still the wrong direction.
Moses and the Israelites weren’t the only ones to exodus. The Jaredites that preceded Nephi and his family many years earlier in the Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ had a similar experience as the Israelites (Ether 2:5). Furthermore, Nephi’s family wandered in the desert for about eight years before they reached the land they called Bountiful and departed across the oceans for their promised land, in the Americas. In that time that they were commanded to flee Jerusalem before it was destroyed, God provided them a sort of divine compass called "the Liahona" that worked according to their faith and diligence. So long as they were faithful and diligent, they were directed towards the more fertile parts of the wilderness, whereas when they murmured, the Liahona did not work and they were lost. (1 Nephi 16:10, 28)
When Jesus gathered with his disciples in the night of Atonement, among the last things he teaches them, He says to them, “Whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.” Thomas, a bit confessed at what He means responds, “Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way?” Jesus responds, “I am the way…” (John 14:4-6). The essence of Christianity and the Holy Bible and Book of Mormon which testify of Christ is that without Jesus Christ, no person could make it back to the presence of Heavenly Father. The purpose of the Atonement of Jesus Christ, that great and last sacrifice (See "Great Sacrifice") was to redeem us from our fallen state and help us attain eternal life (See also "The Return of the King --- Part 1" and "Eternal Life: As He Is") Christ is in fact the only way back to our Celestial home. He teaches us, “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matt. 7:14; see also "One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism"). “And again, [He] showeth unto the children of men the straitness of the path, and the narrowness of the gate, by which they should enter, he having set the example before them” (2 Nephi 31:9). Jesus Christ shows us the way— the only way to live, the way to serve, the way to be eternally happy. Like the people in the scriptures, if we follow Christ, we are sure to remain on the path to our promised land. I don’t know why Elder Ramirez and I figured that the long way was the right way or the only way but it was worth it because of what I learned. Sometimes we make wrong turns in life but the gospel of Jesus Christ teaches us how to get back on the path of righteousness, through repentance. There are no dead ends. No matter how far you feel you've gone off the path, there is always a way back to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
AURELIA'S BAPTISM
Every visit with Aurelia was worth it to see her blessed, converted to the gospel, and become a member of God’s kingdom on earth --- The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. (See "One Faith, One Lord, One Baptism") Aurelia's excitement to be baptized was obvious. At one point, she confided in us that before she met us, she’d had trouble sleeping, only able to sleep a few meager hours per week. But she explained that the more we visited her, the more she was able to sleep until she could sleep the full eight hours per night. What a blessing that was! I have no doubt that it was a blessing, or fruit of the spirit (Gal. 5:22-23), and consequence of the peace it brings. Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace and His gospel brings us rest.
I got to baptize Aurelia on May 22, 2016! Of all the people I ever taught and baptized as a missionary, she was the only one with such enthusiasm that she went ahead sewed her own baptismal clothes! We would have provided the clothing if she had none, but that's just the kind of person she was to go above and beyond.
I asked her why she was so open and consequently excited to visit with us and get baptized. She told me that it was something she felt on that first day Elder Barrera and I met her (See "Hello"). She said that when she saw how much faith we had by promising that she’d come to know that the Church was true, she wanted to know why we were so sure. And it's true. It was a promise I made to her that she would know. Our faith in her gave her confidence in herself. When we set a baptismal goal date with her in that first encounter, she put it on her calendar. She reminded us of it whenever we visited, counting down the days herself. Nothing was going to get in the way. I remind you that we believe in baptism by immersion for the remission of sins by one with priesthood authority (See "Baptism by Immersion" and "Priesthood"). If it is not by immersion, it by definition is not baptism. We took a chair and set it in the water-filled baptismal font for her to sit on. As per her age, like she'd told us early on, we knew her knee wasn’t in the best condition which made the ordinance a little harder but not impossible. The chair was accommodation for her. This was something we discussed ahead of time. Whereas baptism is always performed by a single person. after I said the words of the ordinance and did everything as normal, Elder Ramirez and I who were both dressed appropriately helped her go under the water. With her sitting on the chair in the baptismal font water, I supported her back with my right hand while Elder Ramirez helped make sure her legs didn’t pop out of the water and we leaned her back slowly and carefully under the water and then quickly sat her back up. I knew of other baptisms performed this way in our mission for people confined to wheelchairs. Same idea. It was a success and the only time I had to baptize with a chair.
The water was admittedly chilly entering the font but as I helped Aurelia exit the font, making sure she didn't slip, I asked her how she felt being completely clean from sin at that moment, and the cold was replaced with warmth. I knew at that moment that that was a moment in time that I would remember forever. And it wouldn't have happened if we didn't follow the promptings of the Holy Ghost to go back and offer to help her with some yard work. It seemed like such a small and simple thing at the time but it was the two degrees we needed from God to adjust our course and point us in her direction. And from that small and simple thing came a great one.
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