Tag: service

This Stuff Sticks with You

On By Peter WatkinsIn 20193 Comments

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Dear Will:

About a week ago we returned from a two-week trip to South America. My wife, Dana, and I spent several days exploring Buenos Aires before flying to Posadas, in northern Argentina, where our son Seth was concluding his two-year missionary assignment for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was, as you might imagine, an emotional reunion.

Over the next 10 days, we covered a lot of ground. We spent a couple of days at Iguazú Falls which . . . I can’t even . . . it’s just . . . I don’t know . . . there aren’t words. Google it and assume that you still have no idea how magnificent and stupefyingly spectacular it all is. My jaw dropped so hard and so often that I was afraid it would become unhinged and I would be forced to spend the rest of the trip storing my chin in my shirt pocket. It was like that.

From there we went to Peru for a pilgrimage to Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley. So cool. The two-week adventure concluded in Lima with dinner at Central, one of the top ten restaurants on the planet (for good reason). I don’t expect to EVER have another meal like it, in part because I’ll still be paying this one off well into my 90s. But inasmuch as travel is about making forever-memories, Central was all that and then some.

So yeah, it was all pretty great. But for all of the exotic wonder of our various stops along the way, it was all shrug-worthy anti-climax compared to the first evening we spent together with Seth. Once we had loaded his few remaining possessions into the back of our rented Fiat (he had already given the good stuff away), he took us to a tiny neighborhood they call Kilómetro 18, about a 25-minute bus-ride outside of Eldorado where Seth concluded his missionary service.

The roads of 18 are all red clay, the homes simple and functional but not much more. Seth had already told us about how he loved the place, and it was easy to understand why. Everywhere we walked we heard people calling for “Elder Wockeen”; they chased him down in the streets, implored him to visit their homes. THEY LOVED HIM. And it was obvious that he loved them back. When we gathered that evening in the home of the Familia Baez for a simple asado, there must have been 20 or so members of their little community of faith there. Given their limited circumstances, the spread was impressively bounteous (I recommend the fried mandioca), a generous gift which humbled us to be sure.

That evening will stay with me a long time. In fact, I would trade the night at Central, with all of its culinary flair, for another seat at the table of the Familia Baez—no question. The experience at Central I paid for, but as I celebrated that asado with Juan Carlos and Natalia, with Rafa and Daiana and Charly and the others, I felt awash in the pure love of Christ. That sort of feast cannot be bought.

Asado 18

Seth’s shoes (or what’s left of them, anyway) are still stained red by the clay on the streets of 18, and I think that’s fitting. When Jesus sent His disciples out to share The Word with the world, He told them that if, for some reason, a town rejected them, they should shake off the dust from their feet as a testimony against those people (Matthew 10:14). What I saw in Seth, in contrast, was the opposite effect: that when kind and loving people embrace a servant of God and his message, you CAN’T shake them off. What happens there sticks to you, perhaps forever, the discoloration on your worn-out shoes a lovely reminder of where you’ve been, who you’ve met, and how it all changed you. Those shoes are a token of selfless service, a priceless treasure made holy by days spent walking on sacred ground.

PW

My Remarkable, Irresistible Pen Pals

On By Peter WatkinsIn 20195 Comments

Dear Will:

Every Monday my inbox fills with letters from around the world. They come at me from all directions: from Arizona, Utah, Georgia and the Dakotas; from Ecuador, Argentina, and Brazil; from Scotland, Germany, Italy—even Russia. No wonder I love Mondays.

All of these letters are written by talented, charming, twenty-ish “kids” I have known for years. Several of them I have watched grow up since infancy. They are young men and women full of high aspirations and unlimited potential, people who will no doubt make their marks in a variety of professions and in a variety of ways. They will marry well and raise kids that you and I will consider irresistible. Their futures are brighter than most, in part because of the light they radiate.

My pen pals include many of my former students, some close family friends, nephews and nieces, and a few all-of-the-aboves. Each of them is living far from home, for the most part cut off from social media and popular culture, limited to only occasional, distant contact with family and friends. They subsist on hardly anything and don’t get paid a dime for their efforts. Willingly they have offered to go wherever and do what they can to help those around them. For as much as two years they have volunteered to put their personal lives on hold and dedicate their daily 24 to others.

It’s remarkable.

At times my far-flung friends face challenges and discouragement, no doubt with pangs of homesickness thrown in. Their letters describe weird viruses and a curious variety of problems with their toes. They learn to eat things you and I might not recognize as food. They describe bitter cold in some places and incomprehensible heat in others. As I read from week to week, I can see them wearing out their bodies and souls (and soles), lifting up the downtrodden and forgotten, embracing the lonely and unloved, bringing smiles to the sad and hope to the hopeless. In word and deed, they embody Jesus’s useful rule of thumb: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:35).

They all are missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Yes. The ones you see around town with their white shirts and bicycle helmets. The ones who a time or two may have arrived unannounced on your doorstep. What you may not know is that they are also the ones who’ll help the elderly couple move their antediluvian armoire, who’ll bake goodies for the shut-in, who’ll lay sod with the over-extended family in their neglected backyard. They’re the ones who make friends on subways and sing songs in public parks. ALWAYS with a smile, I might add, especially when no one else is smiling. They are the ones who also teach anyone who will listen about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Missionaries do all of that and more.

And when another week of selflessness has come to an end, when they have exhausted themselves riding bikes up and down the hills of Orange or slogging through the muddy backroads of Paraguay, they sit down in a public library or a far-off cyber-cafe and tap out sentences like this one: “I love the mission. There’s no place I’d rather be. There’s no better job than teaching the Gospel. I’m enjoying everything here.”

No matter where “here” is. They are indeed remarkable. And irresistible. No wonder people welcome them into their homes. If you haven’t recently, you should, if only to see how they fill a room with light.

PW

What Would You Do?

On By Peter WatkinsIn 20162 Comments

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Dear Will:

Say you get a new job that will require you to load all of your earthly possessions into a U-Haul and move over 2,000 miles away. Say it’s just you, your wife, and your one-year-old daughter, and all of your earthly possessions fit in less-than-a-U-Haul. And say you don’t know a soul where you’re going. What would you do?

Well, if you’re a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, you’d probably call your bishop. And that conversation might go something like this:

Bishop? My wife and I are moving into your neighborhood from Michigan. We don’t know anyone in the area. So we’re calling you. We hate to impose, but is there any way you could find some people who might be willing to help us unload a truck on Thursday night at 6 pm?

Say it’s your turn to be bishop and you are used to getting the occasional phone call from a stranger asking for help: mothers worried about wayward children, children worried about wayward mothers, the homeless, the hungry, and of course the people who don’t listen to the announcements during services. And say that this week’s Call from a Stranger is young father asking for help on a Thursday evening. What would you do?

Well, if you’re Bishop Watkins you’d send a quick email to Kyle, your Elders Quorum President, and Warren, your Young Men President, who in turn would contact a bunch of other guys. And you would hope that in spite of the short notice and the inconvenient time that Kyle and Warren won’t be the only ones who show up to welcome this family into the Santiago Creek Ward.

Say it’s Thursday and you’ve got an important meeting that night following a long day at the office, but someone asked if you might be willing to provide a couple of hours of manual labor on behalf of someone you’ve never met. And say that as you think about that family and the U-Haul, you remember what it’s like to be newly married and trying to make a small apartment feel like home even though it’s hundreds of miles from anything familiar. What would you do?

Well, if you’re a member of the Santiago Creek Ward, you’d postpone your meeting and drive toward that upstairs apartment still dressed for work. And you’d turn into that apartment complex only to find cars triple-parked and the U-Haul half unloaded already. You’d find young men and old men, three Ellis brothers and a couple of full-time missionaries, a dozen guys or more happily squeezing past each other on a narrow staircase with furniture and lamps and boxes full of various bits of past and future life. And by 6:22 pm the truck would be unloaded, and as you’d pull out of your illegal parking spot you’d pass others still arriving, disbelieving that they could already be too late to lend a hand.

Say you witnessed all of this unfold, and felt within yourself the deep gratitude for good men, faithful priesthood holders cheerfully serving the newest members of our ward family. And say you could see within this familiar scene the embodiment of an injunction that sits at the heart of Christianity: to bear one another’s burdens that they may be light (Mosiah 18:8). What would you do?

Well, if you’re me you’d remember how you have been on the receiving end of this sort of service many times yourself, and you’d pause once more to give thanks for the Church—and for the Santiago Creek Ward in particular.

PW