Don’t need no coffee round here

One day I was picking up a person at the point of the mountain Maverick gas station. I pulled up in front of the doors of the Maverick station and a young man came out and got in my car. He was a Polynesian and was a happy guy.

I said hi and I asked him where the end of the ride was taking him. We don’t see the whole ride we only see turn by turn instructions of where we need to go and I like to have a vision of where I’m going. I like more than just instructions.

While I was getting the information the lady parked between me and the Maverick decided to back up into my door. This was not part of the plan.

Immediately after I had been hit I asked him to cancel the ride so that he could request another car. I had to do the information exchange so that she could pay for the damage to my car. That took me about 20 minutes and I figured that he would want to be getting on the road.

He told me to take my time because she was so totally responsible and that he wanted to be a witness.. I got out and took all of the information from the lady and gave her mine and then got ready to go. He was still sitting in the same place with a smile on his face.

I thanked him for waiting and asked him how his day had been. He said it had been OK but he was coming home from his first job for just a minute and then he was going to go to his second job. I asked him what his second job was and he said he was a bouncer in a bar downtown.

I told him I could see that, given his stature, and he laughed. I asked him if he was Tongan,Samoan or Hawaiian. He said that he was Tongan and asked me why I wanted to know. I said that way I’ll know whether to say Malo e lelei or Aloha or Talofa. He laughed and said do you know lots of Polynesian people?

I told him that I had served in the MTC with the international missionaries and learned how to say hello in most of their languages. I told him that we had lots of missionaries from Polynesia at the MTC and they were all my friends. I asked him if he had any family or friends that went on missions. He was quiet for a minute and then he said, “I served a mission.”

This was clearly an uncomfortable moment on his part. He then went on to tell me that since he had come home from his mission he had fallen away from activity due to some challenges that he faced but had not lost his knowledge that the church was true. He said one thing led to another and had taken him away from activity and that he felt embarrassed by that.

I could see in his face that he was a good man and felt that he just needed a little bit of a peptalk. He needed to know where to turn. I started teaching him some thing that I taught missionaries many many times about Nephi and his bow. The thing about Nephi’s bow breaking was that it was a blessing to everyone because they had to look to and have faith in God to provide for them. Without the bow breaking they would have believed in their strength and their abilities and their skills. Once the bow broke they had to rely totally on God and his capacity to provide and prosper them.

This was a great lesson for missionaries who in the MTC found themselves in situations where they knew they could not do it. They knew they couldn’t speak the language, or they couldn’t teach, or they knew everybody else knew more than they did but in the end it didn’t matter. What they learned that mattered is that God could provide and they would be successful because of his power and his ability not theirs.

The thing for this young man is that he had forgotten this lesson. He got home and started trying to confront things, challenges and situations by himself with his power and his knowledge and his ability instead of relying on the power and arm of God like he had learned on his mission.

When we started talking about this he lit up and got excited. He was feeling the spirit and you could tell. It was like a long lost friend had jumped in the car with him and they were reminiscing. You could see the light start coming back on in the presence of the spirit.

He said I forgot what this feels like. He said this is amazing! I said, you need to get back to church! How can you have the spirit and make correct choices if you’re not taking the sacrament. He talked about how he had started to become less active one week and one decision at a time.

I said that the bright side is that with Covid no one was attending church at that time so this was the perfect time to come back because he was just as active as anyone else. We laughed.

I said he needed to start relying on the power of God to contend with the hard time and avoid bad decisions. I asked him why he stayed in my car when he should’ve called another ride and I had told him to call another car.

He said he felt that this car is where he was supposed to be for some reason and now he knew that the spirit was going to work through me to help him remember.

I asked him if the spirit helped him understand what it was that he was supposed to do next. He said yes and he was going to start making changes.

I told him that the lesson of Nephi and the bow was one that I learned when I was studying the scriptures after first being called to the MTC. The spirit told me to share it with as many missionaries as I could. He told me that’s exactly what he needed to hear and that I should share it with return missionaries as well. He then thanked me for saying God’s words to him that he needed to hear.

By this time we got to his home and he got out. While he was getting out he dropped some thing, looked back and mouth the words I don’t need that, he turned around and walked off to his home.

I drove off a little way down the road and parked to disinfect the backseat as I do between every passenger in the era of Covid. I looked to see what it was that he had dropped and left because he didn’t need it. It was the bottle of Starbucks iced coffee that he had purchased in the store that day.

I love that he was already making a conscious decision to turn to God. “Let God prevail.”