Adventures of an LDS Missionary: Lake City, Florida

Hello everybody!

WOW I’m sorry for the radio silence over the past few weeks - I don’t have any good excuses. I’m serving in Lake City right now with Elder Jenkins and it is an amazing place to be!

Who is Elder Jenkins? Hmmn. Try to imagine brownies with vanilla ice cream, with a cup of hot chocolate to the side. With whip cream on top. And chocolate drizzled over the whip cream. That’s Elder Jenkins. He is from Utah, has 15 siblings (no, that’s not a typo), he loves reading, and is a man of few words. He serves more diligently than a server at a 5 star restaurant - he’s always doing something to serve, whether it’s washing dishes, asking me if he can help with anything, asking members if he can help, etc.

Elder Jenkins and I!

Right outside our house. That’s a Hispanic evangelical church, in case you’re wondering. They sing loud gospel Spanish songs every Friday night and I love it.

Florida greenery outside our house!

Lake City is smaller than Stoughton and probably half the total population. Lots of southern white people. Everybody has an accent. This is the real south - Gainesville was the fake south :)

Most of the people here are cattle farmers or work at correctional facilities of prisons outside of town. Hard workers with hands so calloused that it feels like I’m shaking hands with a rock. I love it! Having hands so calloused that they feel like rocks is now one of my life goals, but I’m not going to get there playing viola. Sudden career change coming in the near future...? Maybe yes.

The members in the church ward are great. They’re all super solid, southern families who love the gospel and have pretty deep roots in it. It’s cool to hear their stories about how their families have been here since the 1800’s.

(The following section is an excerpt from a letter to me, Asher's mom, about a major festival the town held two weeks ago, the "Olustee Festival". The small town is invaded by thousands of visitors for one weekend each February. They host a parade, an art and crafts fair, and open stages with live music and food booths. The town runs shuttles out to the nearby historic civil war battlefield, where hundreds of Civil War re-enactors,including horses for cavalry, come together to relive the only major battle fought in Florida during the Civil War. I asked him how the weekend went.)

Parade during the Festival

"The festival was honestly really neat! It was very very very busy!

Lots of booths and shops set up in the streets. Lots of good smelling and good tasting food. If it had been lunch time, we definitely would have gotten some, but it was just as good being able to smell all of it. They had a lot of really neat things that I hadn’t seen other places - super finely crafted fancy leather belts and shoes, lots of huge meat smokers out, it felt very southern. Haha! Some people were super intense and dressed up in their southern civil war garb.

Unfortunately, not many people were super prone to talking about their family history with us. Most of them were just going from place to place and didn’t want to talk. We were able to talk with a few older folks who were sitting down and shared neat experiences of how their ancestors had fought in the war - some of them accepted family history cards with the family search website on it, (https://www.familysearch.org/) but nobody wanted to come to the family history center or let us come and help them with family history. Alas. It was a really good experience though!

I wanted to play viola on the street and see if anybody would let us, so we went to the festival management booth and asked a lady. She looked behind her and yelled for her dad - he came up, and it turns out he’s the mayor of Lake City. I ask if I can play on the street just for fun, not for money or anything, and with his cowboy boots and hat and thick white mustache says “Well dadgum I reckon there ain’t a problem with that. Y’all go right ahead, fellas!”

So we did! I got my viola and played some hymns and “You are my Sunshine” and some folk songs I could remember. I wish that I knew more!!! Agh!!!! You were so right mom, I should have learned folk songs was at home. Yes, mom always knows best. Point it, when I get home, I’ll learn some old school folk music so that I can bring a smile to old people's faces."

We were spending some of our allotted 2 hours/week to do family history, and I was trying to learn more about how our ancestors converted and such. I was looking at James H Walker, and reading about his mission stories.

Above: My great great grandpa James Walker with a majestic middle part while he was serving as a missionary in Holland in the early 1900’s. I’ve been learning more about him the last few weeks and look up to him a lot! I’m afraid that I will never be able to look as regal as he does.

I’ll leave with a short, barely below average haiku and then let y’all get on with your lives :)

Lake City Haiku

Lake City my home,

Few words, many lakes, stray cats,

I love Florida.

If I could describe the hardest part of my life in one word? Trains.
If standstill traffic is frustrating at 4:57 when you have a 5:00 appointment, what about watching a train cut through the entire town for 15 minutes? It gives us great time to read scriptures and make phone calls though, so it’s fine by me!

When a member says that they’ll bring you something for dinner.

I spend 7 days every month and a half with other missionaries from the other small towns in the area to learn from them and teach things that our mission president wants everybody to know. This is Elder Jenson, from California, whom I worked with this week. He is brilliant and knows the scriptures like the back of his hand!

Last month, there was a mission leadership council this last week and accountability was discussed a lot. Since, then, I’ve been really excited about the principle of accountability and the blessings that it brings. At the end of the day, my companion and I will talk about how we did with our goals for a few minutes, then one of us will pray and tell God about the day. It really opens the windows for constant revelation and shows God that we care about the people he’s entrusted us with and that we want to improve. I have started doing it individually and I love it! I think I will continue doing it when I get home - if I have a personal goal to be kinder to others in college, or to compliment people more, or whatever, then I will pray and tell God about specific times I feel I did well and when I could improve. I love love love it - accountability is powerful, and I feel can help us be better disciples of Christ.