Today was Stockton's homecoming! It was such a great day. We started off with the breakfast casseroles. They were great. I'm glad we had enough food for the boys that were here. Stockton had another mission friend, Elder Moller, come early this morning. He drove down from Logan I think. He works the night shift and was still able to make it down here. What great mission friends he has! Stockton and his mission buddies walked to church together. My dad and Cathy sat with us on the front row. Audrey came too. Today was cool because we had a mission farewell and a mission homecoming. Josh Bingham was leaving on his mission to Texas, Spanish speaking. It's crazy how Josh has already done his MTC and has his tag and everything. Josh did great and bore his testimony in Spanish. Stockton did amazing. His talk was a little unconventional. He read from a wiki page about John Stockton for awhile. It was pretty funny, but I was starting to wonder what he was doing. He ended up tying it together and the Spirit was so strong at the end. I had many people text me to say how amazing he was. Even weeks later, that is how behind I am, people still bring up his talk. The next week someone even talked about it in fast and testimony meeting. President and Sister Back came over and talked with us for about an hour today. They said it was the best homecoming talk they had heard and it really resonated with them, especially since they had been a mission president and wife. Burke Staker sent Stockton a long message letting him know what a wonderful job he did. Jamie Staker talked to me later and told me that she and Burke had talked about his talk many times. I'm going to transcribe Stockton's talk at the end of this post. Too bad you can't get the inflection in the written word. Stockton was fantastic. Nicely done Stockton!
Elder Stockton Smith and Elder Josh Bingham
Noelle, Stockton, Connor, Dani
Elder Moller, Elder White, Elder Ramsdell, Elder Warner, Sister Hafen
Elder Stockton Smith
After all the missionary hoopla had calmed down, we played the Ghost game. Jorja was the ghost and her murder was crazy. I think Stockton was the one who figured it out though. Here is Jorja drawing with Stockton's hand to give us a clue.
Jorja & Stockton
Stockton's mission homecoming......
I'm Stockton Smith, I served in the Arizona Tucson mission. It feels like it's been a way long time since I've been up here I guess 'cause it kind of has. I'm glad to be back and be able to see familiar faces and new faces that I met just in my experience on my mission and the friends that I have here. The very first thing that I wanted to start out with is I wanted to share a little story. I'm kind of a story teller, that is just the way I usually like to communicate, just getting really into funny stories. There's was a story that I remember hearing near the beginning of my mission, it was at a conference. Some special stake conference and they had a general authority come to speak. He gets up to the pulpit and walks up and man the guys hilarious. He started telling this story about when he was a mission president and he was in charge of all these missionaries. And he was able to have the experience of being able to just be there, their loving father figure. Being able to help, guide them, give them the support they needed. He shared this experience he had about when he had a certain missionary who was just really, really struggling with anything and everything that was part of a mission. The whole mission experience, he didn't like getting up on time in the mornings. He was just not a happy camper by any means. Man those two butted heads. This mission president and this troubled missionary were just struggling really bad. Eventually it got to the point where you have this missionary that didn't want to get up in the morning. That was the big concern for awhile. This mission president told him, okay dude, look you gotta get up man. This is something that you promised the Lord that you would do. You would serve him, just in this little way in getting up in the morning. And he wouldn't do it. He fought and fought on it and fought on it. Finally, the mission president, after a couple of days, he ends up coming to him and he says, okay I'm going to give you one last chance. And the guy says nah. So he's like, okay, fine. The mission president goes back and he ends up finding his mom's number, the missionary's mom's number. He goes and looks her up and he gets ahold of her and calls her and he's says okay, well, "Ms. Whatever your name is, your son, he's kind of struggling right now and I would really appreciate it if you would give him a call at 6:30 and just make sure he gets out of bed tomorrow." And you can imagine to the missionaries horror his reaction when all of the sudden he wakes up at 6:30 to a call from his mom telling him, "Okay sweetie, you gotta get up and get out of bed." So he gets out of bed and he's not happy about that at all. His mom's so busy and he goes in and he's still so angry at this mission president. He tells his mission president, "How could you possibly do that. My mom is so busy. She took time out of her busy schedule. She already wakes up so early in the morning. How could you possibly make my mom do this?" The mission president sits there and thinks about it and he's like "You know, you're right. Maybe that's not the best route to go is having your mom do this. I tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to make sure that when you go to church on Sunday, I'm going to show up. I'm going to walk in and I'm come in with one of those calendars. Like one of those sign up calendars. And I'm going to pass it around your ward and everyone's going to take it and they are all going to sign up for a day and they are all going to take shifts on calling you at 6:30 every single morning, and they are going to pass it around." And the missionary said, "Okay, I'll get up at 6:30, you don't have to do that." So... I hope that was slightly meaningful in some way. There's a moral in there somewhere. Part of the reason I tell that story is because it just shows that, it just really is a demonstration about how the little things help us in our commitment to the Lord and how the Lord really does care about the little things. Another reason is because I remember after that talk was given I went out with me and my companion, my trainer, we went out and had dinner with our bishop afterwards and they're asking us our favorite part about stake conference. I thought that story was hilarious. I was like, "I think I'm going to give that in my homecoming talk." My trainer gave me a bunch of crap because I was talking about my homecoming talk, like, "This kid thinks he knows what he is going to say in his homecoming talk, it's two years away." So I decided I'd tell that story out of spite just because he said shouldn't and it was stupid, so there's a story I hope it was worth that long, but it was to me.
I just want to also start with a little comment. I just want to say that now that I've gotten that weight off my shoulders, I'm going to start out the rest of my talk here by saying a couple things. One of them is something that I said when I reported to the high council the other day. Really, honestly, I could sum up my mission just by saying, "You had to be there." Really. There's nothing I could say that could really do the justice the experiences I that had and the testimony that I strengthened just being out there. I think the second thing I want to start off by saying is, I'm about to make my mom very happy right now, 'cause I'm about to do something that's very, very out of character for me. See now she's nervous, like, "Oh my gosh, you sang as Kermit the Frog in a talk once, like what are you going to do now?" You'll like this, okay, 'cause you don't have anything to worry about. If you know anything about me, I don't know the first thing about sports. I really don't. It's very unfortunate because my mom grew up with five brothers. Always grew up watching the Jazz play, and BYU football, all the classic teams. My name is Stockton, I was named after John Stockton from the Jazz, and I don't know anything. I thought that I would take a minute to talk a little bit about something I learned about John Stockton the other day. In order to prepare for this talk, I needed to figure out who this guy was that I was named after. So I looked him up on Wikipedia. It's actually pretty interesting. John Houston Stockton, that's his middle name, Houston. Wow. Okay. Born March 26, 1962 is an American retired professional basketball player. He spent his entire NBA career, 1984-2003 as a... looks like he's something called a point guard... as a point guard for the Utah Jazz and the team made the playoffs in each of his 19 seasons. In 1997 and 1998 together with his long time teammate Karl Malone, Stockton led the Jazz to the franchises only two NBA finals appearances. And it goes down a little bit, let's see, what's over here... Stockton is a ten time NBA all star, 2 time Naismith Memorial basketball Hall of Fame inductee. Sounds fancy. In 2009 for his individual career and 2010 as a member of.... I don't know, that's probably cool. In 1996 he was named one of the 50 greatest, awe that's cool! 50 greatest players in NBA history. Stockton holds the NBA records for most career assists and steals by wide margins and is regarded as one of the greatest point guards of all time. So, he sounds like he was.... decent. I'm like trying to figure out like how this all works right, so I clicked on it. It says an assist, this was like mind-blowing, in basketball, for those of you who don't know, an assist is attributed to a player who passes the ball to a teammate in a way that leads to a score by field goal. Okay, a field goal in basketball is a thing I guess, not going to understand that one. Meaning that they were assisting in the basket. There's some judgement involved in assigning whether a passer should be credited.... okay, some commentary here.... the very last paragraph here says the NBA record for the most career assists, the entire NBA, which I think is pretty big, most career assists is held by John Stockton. 15,806. Stockton also holds the NBA single season assist per game record with 14.5 during the 1989-1990 regular season. Dang, okay. Well, he sounds like not a bad guy to be named after. Not bad, I learned a lot today, I hope someone else did too. I promise I didn't just like read the Wikipedia article for no reason, this is going somewhere.
I just wanted to tie in some of my thoughts. I was asked to speak about some of the experiences that I had as a missionary in Tucson and how those experiences changed me, changed my perspective. I do want to start by saying, I can say, I don't think anyone who serves a mission would say this, but it was definitely not... definitely didn't end up being the mission that I expected I was going to serve. I kind of just expected that it would just be a, kind of a almost like a robotic thing, I guess. Just immersed in this door-knocking wonderland. It was not that. Especially 13, 14 months in. It was kind of cool, I got to serve the first half of my mission was the traditional mission experience that you hear about all the time. My second half was after coronavirus swept all the nations of the earth, and oh my gosh, that changed things a little bit. I went in to my first interview when I got into the mission field with my mission president. He spent my entire entrance interview telling me about how horrible facebook was, but he gave it to all the missionaries 'cause he had to, 'cause the mission department told him that they had to have it. He called it a tar baby, right, 'cause it's like those, I guess in like those 30's cartoons, if you've ever seen Brer Rabbit or whatever, like the bad guys make this baby out of tar and then like our young and inspiring protagonist like touches the baby made out of tar and it gets stuck. And that's what happens when missionaries get on facebook, they don't try and be productive, instead they just scroll facebook. That's what he told me in my first interview, and I'm like, okay, well cool. I guess it makes sense, I'm not going to think about facebook. By the time I got home from my mission they were having missionaries be called as special facebook missionaries, specifically to spread the gospel online because of covid. Really, not what I expected by any means. One of the biggest reasons that I really didn't have the mission experience that I thought I was going to was, I ended up coming to discover... I'm convinced and have felt the spirit confirm to me one of the main reasons that I was sent to the mission that I was sent to, and over the course of my mission I came to discover, that the Lord really, really liked putting me with companions who were very, very difficult to be loved. And companions who were very, very hard to love. And, at first, I don't know, first time I thought it was just a fluke, and then it kept happening. I'm like, okay, well, this isn't what I thought I would be focusing on. I mean, you go around and you serve people all day, but really at the end of the day, most of the time for my mission that I had, I ended up really having the realization that the person that I was serving was the one that needed to really focus on loving was the companion that the Lord had given me at that time. I remember the, I'll just share a small antidote of sorts. I was serving down in a city that was called Sahuritta at the time. It's about thirty minutes south of Tucson, and I ended up getting a call from my mission president. "You're going to get a brand new missionary who's right out of the MTC." I met him, and he was no Josh Bingham. I wanted a Josh Bingham so bad, I was so excited to just be able to give this missionary a big 'ol hug and just like really just get him going. Well, it wasn't Josh Bingham. He wasn't there and I was sad. I ended up meeting this missionary. I saw him, and I didn't even know. 'Cause what they did is they lined up all the new missionaries up against the back of the wall, and then they had all the missionaries who were going to be their companions on the other side of the wall and I remember just looking, and there were probably fifteen of them. And I saw the one, and I didn't even have to be told, I just felt like, I knew it was him. I could just see it. And I remember, he comes up to me and I give him a hug, and it was weird. It wasn't Josh Bingham. We got like a five minute snack break where we were able to get to know our new companion. Very first thing he ever says to me was like, "Oh Elder Smith" He had this speech thing going, he was like, I'm like what's up? He's like, "I didn't make a good impression on the mission president." Oh no! So I asked him, "What did you do in the five minutes that you were meeting with our mission president that got you that impression?" So he tells me that he's sitting there, right, he's sitting there in the entrance room and he's says, "Oh, President Browning said to me, he's like 'Elder, I've prayed about it and what I'm going to do is I'm going to be sending you to a biking area." Sahuritta was a biking area that we had just opened up three months before. My friend Trevor over there, he remembers, like we would bike like 45 minutes up one way to get to the area and 45 minutes out because we didn't live in the city, we lived in the valley. Yeah, you could imagine like how that's going to go with this kid, but he ends up talking with my mission president. Now, he was not the most fit by any means. He says to him, "President, you send me to a biking area, I will be dead within nine days." I don't know why that particular number, but he said I will be dead within nine days. The mission president just in the denial faze of grief just started talking, "Oh Elder, you're not going to die in nine days, I promise." My companion looks at him and goes, "Watch, I'm going to defy you." And then immediately gets rebuked by my mission president, "You don't tell your mission president that you're going to defy him." So he tells me this in the first five minutes that I met him and I think my heart sunk a little bit. I.... I.... I cried a little inside, I'm just, oh my gosh. There was a six month period consecutively on my mission that I designated as the war chapters of my mission, just because of who I was around. I remember there was a buddy that I met who ended up coming up to me. He was talking to me. He had met this guy very briefly, my companion, and he said, "You know, when I first met him, you know what I thought about him?" And there was another notorious missionary at the time who was in our mission. He said, "I felt like he was that missionary times 5,000." Like, really, really not something I'd want to do, so good luck pal 'cause I'm glad it's you and not me. Not even a year later I ended up getting Mr. Times 5,000 as a companion also, and that was it's own bucket of fun itself. I remember I was giving this training meeting with a bunch of missionaries and we're sitting there. And this companion, Mr. Times 5,000, he had been out about 13 months, right. And he struggled a lot, but I felt like I wanted to give him an opportunity to try and be the missionary that I know that the Lord saw in him. So I gave him the opportunity. I pulled him up in the middle of this room, there's maybe ten missionaries in there. What I had him do, was I had him do a little role-play. We're asked to do role-plays every week in these meetings. Get up there, I pull him up a chair and he sits down in it. I had another missionary come up. All that I asked my companion to do, kay, he's 13 months out. All I asked him to do was I want you, you got ten minutes to do this however you want, but I just want you to to teach this guy the Plan of Salvation. You know if you are a missionary who has been doing this for over a year, like that should be pretty standard. Well, to boot, you have to remember that for the last thirty minutes as a district, we had been drawing up the entire Plan of Salvation on the gigantic white board that was in the back of the room. Not only had we drawn up the entire Plan of Salvation, but we also had all looked up scriptures for each part in the Plan of Salvation and wrote it up on the white board next to every part that we had drawn up. Not only did we do that, but we purposely wheeled the entire white board over with the entire Plan of Salvation drawn out and scriptures and we put it right next to him so he could teach this little lesson. And I was a little bit nervous about letting him do it, but I wanted to let him have a try. And he sat there for about the whole ten minutes and he ended up just kept bumbling through it and I felt really bad for him. And at the end the ten minute timer goes off and he gets up and he just storms out of the room. He's just so upset. I just remember being there and thinking this is not what I expected to experience on this mission. This wasn't the kind of challenge, I didn't think I was going to have the kind of challenge where I had a companion who wouldn't be able to teach the Plan of Salvation like that. I remember just thinking about it. I was getting close to the end of my mission. I remember just thinking about why has my mission been the way that it has? I've gotten companion after companion after I'll be dead within nine days after Times 5,000 after I didn't have a salad until my mission or any number of things, right. I was just pondering on that, right, it was just really interesting 'cause I had gotten to the point, I'm looking back and I'm like well, I guess this is the mission, this is the kind of mission the Lord wanted me to serve. It was something that took me a little bit to figure out. I remember just thinking about it. And I just remember that as I was, I can't remember what I was doing, it wasn't like all the sudden like whoosh there it was right, like bam, like big message from the Spirit, you know, bam. Over the course of my mission I came to realize that the Lord has needs all across the board that he has asked us to fulfill. I came to really have the confirmation, to really learn for myself that what the Lord wanted for me was to help him with the assist. I thought about that. I just remember feeling like, feeling that the Lord was so grateful for all of my effort as imperfect as it was. I just remember feeling that love from him, saying to me, "Stockton, you've helped me with the assist time and time again. I'm so thankful and proud of you for the growth that you have made." Of course the Lord could do it all by himself. The Lord gave me the opportunity to help Him with the assist. And when I realized that, that was one of the most humbling lessons that I ever learned. Was that my life, and that the experiences that I had in my life. We're not always going to be asked, we're not always going to have the opportunity to be, you know, the big man on stage that gets the ball passed to them and then makes the amazing three pointer and everyone goes nuts. Sometimes we are asked to just help with the smaller things. Sometimes we're just asked to help Him with the assist. And it's just as the scripture says the sower and harvester rejoice together because it's the same work. I remember just, ever sense then, from that moment on just always thanking Heavenly Father. Thank you for allowing me to help with the assist. I will always be forever grateful for that. I would just like to encourage all of you today. Even if it seems like you are going through some of your most challenging times, or you're having an experience that it's not maybe a course that you wish that you were on necessarily at the time, or you don't understand maybe the whole eternal perspective maybe right now, just remember that sometimes Heavenly Father asks us to assist Him. Sometimes he asks us to help with small things or to learn in small ways and to serve in small ways, however small our sphere of influence may be. And I can promise that the testimony of the Plan of Salvation will grow. And you will be able to have the confidence. I know I have had the confidence as well that even if things don't make sense all the time or even if it's not the vision that we imagined ourself having, no matter how small our actions are, the Lord is pleased just because we tried and we helped in any way we can. I know that God lives. I know that the Lord Jesus Christ lives. I know that it matters that He lives and that His Son lives also. I know that there is no other way to have greater joy in this life or the next life other than relying them and relying on the Spirit. I share this testimony with you in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
