Proctors on a Mission #16—Kisses at the Temple
If someone told me that the Puerto Rican temple was actually paradise, I’d believe it. Because we come home from our mission November 1, we are trying to memorize every moment, engrave it in our hearts, and particularly the wonder of living 117 steps from the temple.
It’s what happens when we walk through that door that I want to take with me, because I am kissed and hugged several times over. The Puerto Ricans aren’t so distant as we northerners are. They don’t keep you an arms-length away with a handshake. No, you are pulled affectionately right into their hearts. They love you and you know it, like a feeling of goodness and well-being that immediately chases any dim corners away and lights up the world.
It’s like last week. I went to show my recommend at the desk, but immediately the woman there, left her chair, came around the desk and kissed my cheek and hugged me. I met someone on my way to the locker and the love was repeated. Open arms like long lost friends that you have been looking for a long time. In the locker room there were four workers in their pristine white. Each loved me. Most kissed me. Then while I was waiting on a bench to go into the endowment room, another walked across the lobby, took my head in both of her hands and kissed me three times. It reminded me of how my Grandmother Stevens kissed me when I was just a little girl.
Now, if that sounds like too much hugging for you in the states, in Europe or many other places where we pride ourselves on efficiency and a bit of distance, you just don’t understand what is behind all this effusion. I felt through them the pure love of Christ, that this love is possible because we are centered together on Him.
The Spirit began its stirrings, and then its motions of fire, and I felt like the greatest thing I could ever do was to give that kind of purring contentment and sense of well-being to others. All is right with the world in the walls of the Puerto Rican temple
Love and the Missionaries
We also feel a great affection for our missionaries. We love them and sense both how young they are and how much is asked of them. We say to the bewildered missionaries who are young in the mission and still struggling with the language, “How is it going, Elder?” “How is it going Hermana?” They give very game answers, with only the slightest hesitation. “It’s coming.” We know with certainty that it will come and that this mission will shape, sanctify and transform them. What fortifies them for the great work they are doing is love.
We have never been told so many times that we are loved as they tell us. It is in almost all communications. We tell them the same. They tell each other. They are trained to see goodness, so, of course, they see it amply and generously in each other and in us.
That is the language of the mission. It is laced with affection and understanding as we share the connection with each other of giving our all to the Savior. It is as if we are dancing with ribbons of light around the same maypole, our strands crossing and weaving and making an intricate pattern of hope and missionary devotion. But the maypole is actually the Savior, and we are dancing and working in concourses around Him.
Oh, what becomes of these missionaries as the days, and then the weeks, and then the months pass. They grow in beauty and strength before our eyes. See, for instance, this photo where it took five missionaries to help a wheel-bound friend be baptized in the ocean.
Striplings
In our Sunday school class this week, where we teach new converts and investigating friends, we spoke of the Stripling Warriors. This is one of those profound moments in the Book of Mormon as we see the goodness a group of virtuous, young men who are riveted and fixed in the covenant.
“And they were all young men, and they were exceedingly valiant for courage, and also for strength and activity; but behold, this was not all—they were men who were true at all times in whatsoever thing they were entrusted. (Alma 53:20)
Then, as we were teaching, we glanced over and saw Elder Luke Stacey and Elder Samuel Green. These are the Assistants to the President in our mission, whose days are numbered in Puerto Rico. Elder Green leaves Wednesday morning and Elder Stacey leaves the end of October. They are both exceptional missionaries.
We asked, “Do we have striping warriors among us today, who can be so true, firm, steadfast and immovable as they were? All eyes turned to Elder Stacey and Elder Green, whose faces shine with that kind of radiance and dedication. Truly, you can see this light all over them. Their goodness is palpable as they see to every detail to care for those they teach. That is what happens when you yield yourselves to God. He makes so much of you.
Ask them about their schedule for the next day, and they say, “We have an appointment at 1, at 3, another at 5 and one at 6. What happens at each of these appointments? They bear testimony of Jesus Christ again and again, and their souls are quickened by their recurring witness.
Ada Osorio, who was baptized in February, and whom we dearly love, gave the closing prayer. She said, “We are grateful, dear God, that we have another striping warrior to add to your army today, in our dear brother, Craig.”
Craig’s Baptism
This was appropriate because it was Craig Raffucci’s baptism day and he asked Scot to perform both the baptism and confirmation for him.
For the baptism, about a hundred ward members gathered, but something especially made us happy. There on the front row, filling every chair, were the members of our class, all of them so new to the church, and all of them eager to welcome Craig. When the ordinance finished, they were clapping their hands together for joy, just as happened at the baptismal scene at the Waters of Mormon. It was this spontaneous leap of joy.
This group of new ones to the Church have become like a family for each other. They talk often, help each other out, laugh together—and the bond really comes from this marvelous and growing connection they have to Christ.
Truly, every ward should have a class like this to bond their new converts and friends to the Lord, to the Church and to each other. This, for us, is one of the most satisfying surprises of our mission. Of course, we need to nurse a new convert along with knowledge, so the Spirit and understanding grows in them. It’s been a powerful thing to watch the process so closely.
Ernesto and Brown Outs
Hurricane season in Puerto Rico is June through November, and this year, a heavy hurricane season has been predicted. So far, we haven’t seen too much, but Tropical Storm Ernesto came pounding through here recently and we all got prepared. We have lanterns, flashlights, water, food and camp stoves, waiting for the storm and the inevitable loss of power.
Since our power grows dim if you plug in a curling iron, and flickers for no reason, just to remind you not to count on it, we decided to weather Ernesto at a friend’s house with a generator. The only challenge is that his home is near the beach on the northeast side of the island, about thirty minutes from our home, and this was in an area that was hit hardest.
The sky was ominous, dark and troubled the day that the storm was to hit, and then at 3:30 am, it woke us with a thundering sound and ferocity like a freight train. We watched out the window as the torrents fell, but we were completely warm and safe in the house.
It reminded us of what it is like to have the Lord in your life. The storms may be fierce and even a bit frightening, but inside calm can reign, a supernal stillness that is not touched by ravages just outside your soul.
Most of our friends in other places on the island hardly felt the storm, though many lost power. Rather than hitting us directly, Ernesto side-stepped Puerto Rico by 85 miles and then barreled northward to become a Category 1 hurricane.
We all remembered this part of Elder D. Todd Christofferson’s dedicatory prayer in the temple 19 months ago:
“Dear Father, we pray that the presence of Thy temple on this island may draw down Thy blessings upon Puerto Rico, its people and its leaders. In recent years, they have endured storms and natural disasters that have caused destruction, hardship and suffering. Bless them now with a period of calm and respite and with the time and means to recover and rebuild and to prepare for a brighter future.”
For the hurricane outlook this season by meteorologists, we are prepared, but not worried.
However, we do have a thing we must endure with grace—electrical outages, the brownouts, that seem sudden and undeserved, even though they are scheduled. Puerto Rico has trouble with its electrical power grid and one of its major generators is on the skids. Our neighbor learns all about this on the Spanish-speaking news, so she is our source of information about it. We have searched the Internet in vain for news of this. She said it was announced that our power would be turned off every other day for four hours to conserve energy for many months. When she told me, it was the first day for an outage, and sure enough it came.
I hoped she had it wrong, but 48 hours later, at about the same time—5:30 p.m., the power went out again. So now, today is the question. If it goes out at 5:30, the pattern will be clear, and we’d better have our phones and computer charged and ready.
Diving Deep on Joseph Smith
Studying the life of Joseph Smith has been both a great passion and pleasure of ours for many years. Scot’s heroes, even when he was a teenager, were those people who gave birth to the gospel’s restoration.
Now, as we have mentioned before, we are preparing to shoot a series of mini-docs on his life for a YouTube channel devoted specifically to Joseph Smith. We are shooting at the places he knew, using voice actors to give life to the story, and exploring the chapters of his life visually, so people get a clearer sense of who he was and his astonishing connection to God.
We are doing this in part because so many people say they are leaving the Church because of Joseph Smith. Our unspoken response when we hear this is: “Do you really know Joseph? Have you considered his life, his remarkable optimism, his stamina and perseverance, his keen intellect, his profound ability to sacrifice for others or the revelation that flowed through him like a spring and upended all the rigid religious traditions that had blinded and limited man? Do you know how he opened the heavens for all of us to have more direct contact with God?
I love what Truman Madsen says about the prophet here:
Joseph Smith said: “’It is the first principle of the gospel, to know for a certainty the character of God.’ That is more than saying it is the first principle to know that God exists. He doesn’t use the word existence at all in this context. You can’t find one argument in Joseph Smith for the existence of God. Why not? One answer: Because one does not begin to argue about a thing’s existence until serious doubts have arisen. The arguments for God are a kind of whistling in the dark. In the absence of experience with God, men have invented arguments to justify the experience of the absence of God.
“They have built a rational Tower of Babel, from which they comfort themselves with, ‘We haven’t heard from God, but he must still be there.’ But Joseph wasn’t speculating. He was reporting his firsthand experience. Prophets always have.
“’It is the first principle of the gospel to know for a certainty the character [the personality, the attributes] of God, and to know that we may converse with him as one man converses with another.’ That is the testimony of Joseph Smith from beginning to end. He is talking about all of us, now. A man, a woman-it is the first principle for any of us. That is where we begin.
“And lest we should say, as occasionally we do, ‘But his remarkable life and experience is utterly beyond my own,” we should note that Joseph said in 1839: ‘God hath not revealed anything to Joseph [calling himself by name], but what He will make known unto the Twelve, and even the least Saint may know all things as fast as he is able to bear them.’ Even the least Saint, I repeat.
The Prophet continued: ” ‘For the day must come when no man need say to his neighbor, Know ye the Lord; for all shall know Him (who remain) from the least to the greatest. Note that ‘all shall know him’ is different from knowing about him.” (Madsen, Truman G., Joseph Smith the Prophet (pp. 18-19). Deseret Book Company. Kindle Edition.
“Shall we not go on, in so great a cause?”
The post Proctors on a Mission #16—Kisses at the Temple first appeared on Meridian Magazine.
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