100% obedient

Disclaimer: This is going to be the most overtly religious of these posts. I am religious. 

If it sometimes seems like I am not, that may be due to frequent frustration with other religious people. It frustrates me when they say things that are wrong, but there is a special frustration when it is something where I feel like I should agree, but kind of don't.

Obedience is stressed a lot to missionaries, and there is a logic to that. These are primarily young people, far from home, and there is a lot of safety that comes from following the rules and procedures that are there for a reason.

It is also possible to become kind of weird about it. 

For example, maybe it feels like obedience that you use your language as much as you can. However, as you increase the amount of Cantonese that you speak between the two of you, and that extra companion who is studying Lao becomes more quiet and withdrawn as she is more excluded, are there potentially some other important violations?

Truthfully, I do not generally think in terms of obedience. When I think in terms of doing what you know to be right, I think of that more in terms of integrity, and then paying attention to others' needs and trying to serve them feels like more of a matter of compassion. Obedience fits in there, but other things are more important to me, without me ever being particularly disobedient. (Though I am not perfect; perhaps more focus on obedience is what I am missing.)

Regardless, in the mission field, obedience is not just the key to your safety, but also to your success. That is why missionaries will get these ideas about being "100% obedient", because then we will get baptisms. 

The philosophical problem with this is the same one the Pharisees had: it is too easy to decide that the key to that is adding rules upon rules, like having to be out the door rather than merely being working once your day starts.

The practical problem for that mission at that time is that there had kind of been too many baptisms already. 

"Too many" sounds like they shouldn't have been baptized, and I don't exactly think that. It's more complicated.

Years before we got there, some missionaries in the area who did not speak Lao or Cambodian or Hmong nonetheless found people who spoke those languages who were willing to listen. They had children translate and they baptized a lot of people with really fast growth. 

On an average Sunday, less than ten percent of our members would be in church.

I have heard very cynical stories about people coming out of the font with requests for furniture. That may have happened, but I don't think it was only that. I have taught people and felt the Spirit there. It is a very easy thing in that moment to feel that this is true and good and that you want to be a part of it.

It is not as easy to maintain that feeling. It is not as easy to break patterns especially when there is strong social enforcement of those patterns. Therefore, when you are teaching people who have not been baptized yet, and you talk to them about attending church and giving up smoking and drinking, they probably know a lot of baptized members who have stopped going to church and restarted smoking and drinking (if they had ever actually stopped, which is not guaranteed).

We'd had some baptisms. People we'd taught and with whom we'd shared great experiences did not always keep going to church. Some did, but there is a lot that goes into it. Transportation was huge. I get why some churches buy buses, but that's not our way.

At times we tried various ways of increasing our contacts so we could teach more people and have more baptism. This mainly ended up with us meeting a lot of people who weren't Lao, where even if they were interested we had to refer them to other missionaries.

That's why my companions were standing outside the door; they thought that would get us to more baptisms. I thought that using our time more effectively would be more likely to get us there. In theory, there were people out there who would be glad to be baptized, if we just found the right ones and taught them effectively.

Concurrent with coming out of my depression was a moment of clarity, and my focus shifted to member work.

Those temporary conversions were not fake; they had felt something and could feel it again. We started focusing on reading The Book of Mormon with different member families, and helping them set goals for that.

I am grateful to Sister M for going along with it. It was counter to our training, except for the part about being guided by inspiration. Probably one thing that helped was that in Modesto we had taught some younger people who did not have parental permission to be baptized. In helping them find ways to keep the fire alive until they were adults, we had some experience with that.

Also, yes, there is effort involved in receiving the Holy Ghost, but we often saw that with the people we talked to --  especially children who were baptized with their families and then the whole family stopped going -- that they still remembered things and responded to them. 

We wanted to harness that, so we started setting up visits and talking to members, and finding out who could read and who needed scriptures. It was a really wonderful time.

We never got chastised for it. Even though it would have made sense for Sister M to train the first incoming sister, we were able to stay together until it was time for me to go home.

Shortly before that, there was a possibility of me being transferred to Merced. That area was picking up. Word was that there would definitely be baptisms there, I found that I didn't want to go. I was where I needed to be, doing what I needed to do, and I wanted to continue with that.

I don't regret that at all, and I did not consider myself disobedient or a rebel. 

I may be a little more skeptical than most of doing things the way they have always been done.