New Year, 2021

 

The PAST is behind, learn from it. The FUTURE is ahead, prepare for it. The PRESENT is here, live it--Thomas S. Monson

This week marks what we missionaries refer to as a blackout year, which basically means the full year that you are a missionary. If everything goes according to plan (which never happens) I will spend the entire year of 2021 set apart as a missionary. Just when you think you have made a decent chunk into your mission time you actually aren't even a fourth of the way done and your blackout year has hardly started. I really try to not think about that. When I was a kid and Christmas was pretty much over, I would get really sad. Like honestly I absolutely hated going back to school. It got so bad that my mom would always throw a party the night before we went back--to make it a little better. And it always got better. I would walk to class and see all of my friends and realize how much I actually missed seeing them and then usually by the end of the day I was better. This year, I am not in school, so I didn't have to go through all of that. It's still  hard though. Seeing people take all of the lights down, dead trees on the side of the road, a stray candy cane here and there all just haunting representations that the season is over and the whole year is coming to an end. On Monday I didn't really know what to do in the morning, so I basically just started cleaning. That night we had nothing set up so we just went contacting downtown. It was pretty cold but we found an elevator to a parking garage and rode it all the way up to the top floor. It wasn't really a breathtaking view or anything but it was the biggest building I had been into for a long time. It took me back to when my cross country team would spend our "45 minute runs" scaling buildings downtown.

Most people we teach fall into two main groups. They either seek to understand or seek to be understood. We taught someone on Tuesday who definitely seeks to be understood more than anything. Our lessons with him usually involve a lot of listening and getting off track. They have been going really well lately though and one thing he said really stuck out to me. He said that he believes that the more you know the more you are judged. I've never really thought of it that way. Initially I thought he meant that if we all just lived in ignorance, every mistake we made wouldn't technically be our fault. But after thinking about this for a long time I came to realize that the more you know, the less you will want to be judged so it sort of balances out. 

I had a good friend of mine email me last week and I remember asking her why New Year's was her favorite holiday. She said that it was basically because there is one moment where everyone stands up, pops the popper things, and yells "Happy New Year!" I was like dang, I miss that! So we dipped off to the store, grabbed some of the little confetti bois and had a proper New Year's Eve party... at 9pm. I was gonna set an alarm for midnight that night but I slept through it. It was a good night. A really good place to end the year. It is honestly just insane to think about where I was a year ago, how much things have changed. How much I have changed, on my mission and off. I don't know what the world is going to be in 2021, but I do know who I want to be.