31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #16—Feed Homemade Ice Cream Sandwiches to the Mormon Missionaries

Jeni's ice cream will change your life forever.

Today we made homemade ice cream from the ice cream maker Davey gave me for my birthday. We pulled the recipe for Lemon Cream Ice Cream from a Jeni's Ice Cream cookbook that Dave included as part of my birthday present. 

Here's a little something you need to know about Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream:

As a Masters student at Ohio University in Athens, David used to visit a Jeni's ice cream shoppe in Columbus, Ohio (which is where their business got started), and quickly found out how incredibly good ice cream can truly be incredibly good, in spite of his own quasi-lactose-intolerance. He used to tell me about how someday he would take me there and purchase all kinds of exotic ice creams for me—flavors like Brambleberry Crisp, Pistachio and Honey, Wildberry Lavender, Goat Cheese with Red Cherries, Savannah Buttermint, Black Currant Vanilla, and Salty Caramel. Just talking about the flavors makes you feel poetic.

When David and I got engaged, he found out that the vague specifications I had given him for the ring I really wanted (emeralds—small; nothing raised up...nothing that could snag on a sweater or keep me from climbing a tree; you know, simple) gave him some leftover money that he wanted to blow on me somehow. He decided if he couldn't spoil me with diamond rings, he would spoil me with ice cream. The week after we got engaged in my hometown in Utah, David had to go back to Athens to graduate and I had to go back to Rexburg to teach classes. It was a crummy separation, but we were sort of used to it considering our entire courtship was a primarily epistolatory one (interspersed with the most exciting travel weekends of my young life). It was hard driving back to southeastern Idaho alone, even with my glittery green friend keeping me company on my finger. So it was ultra lovely to be surprised with an entire case with a half-pint of every current Jeni's flavor on my doorstep, in a package filled with super science-y dried ice packaging technology that kept the ice cream safe from its travels from Columbus, OH, to Rigby, ID.

The ice cream lasted me until David and I were reunited again. I had a spoonful of each flavor everyday, like a countdown calendar for when we could actually live in the same town together for the rest of our lives.

The ice cream maker = my new best friend.

Anyway, the ice cream means something. And Jeni of Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream is lovely enough to sell a book with all her secret recipes. And let me tell you—her lemon cream ice cream is killer good. Almost too good to share.

Thick, creamy, cool, lemony, and delicious. 

Our adorable elders, as chipper and goofy as they come. Ah, it makes me envious (except I remember how much work missionaries do all day, and that makes me tired, too. Tired and envious).

But we did share it—with the above two Latter-day Saint missionaries, or elders, who are serving in our area. David is the ward mission leader for our congregation, meaning that he meets with the missionaries once a week and finds out who they are teaching so we can get church members to reach out and make these investigators feel welcome when they visit church (or, even better, to find church members who can come to the missionary lessons and help answer questions. 18- and 19-year-old missionaries work very hard to know their stuff, stay close to God, and keep themselves worthy of doing good and being good, but it is still nice to be able to ask questions to local members with a few more years of life experience under their belts, too).

We love our missionaries, especially for their goofiness (they're still primarily between the ages of 18–23, after all), their optimism, their devotion, their humility, and their desire to live for two years for everyone else but themselves. David and I both served LDS missions, too—Dave served in South Korea and I served in Japan. We both know how hard, how taxing, how exciting, how exhilarating, how loud and quiet and sad and happy and frustrated and glowing and homesick and adventurous and clear and muddy and up and down it can be. We both have had recurring dreams of being back on our missions again, and wake to a sense of responsibility and duty that sort of throws our day off when we realize just how selfish our lives have become in comparison.

Much of the world's picture of Mormon missionaries is nothing more than suits and bike helmets, cheery smiles and endless copies of the Book of Mormon in their backpacks. What most people don't see is the amount of time each companionship spends on their knees, praying for people they genuinely love—people they most certainly would never have met without a responsibility to open their mouths and meet people in every conceivable place and way.

Companionships live on their own, and there is never much money or time to make treats. It is therefore always completely satisfying to feed the elders or sisters good food. Tonight we fed our missionaries homemade lemon cream ice cream with homemade ginger molasses cookies. If there is one thing about missionaries, they love to express their gratitude for everything. So I don't know whether we shared these cookies with the elders because we are nice folk, or if we just really wanted to hear how awesome and "sick" we were for making such ridiculous delicious foods. I gave them a second helping just to hear them praise my master skills some more.

Feast your eyes, folks: Chewy Ginger Molasses Cookies with Lemon Cream Ice Cream. Boo-yeah, as Dave would say.

Seriously, though. I remember a time when I was a sister missionary, on a day that had been very hard. My companionship and the local male companionship had met with our own Ward Mission Leader that morning, and the friction that had risen between myself and the senior companion of the male companionship over English classes we had been co-teaching (as a local free service that also happened to introduce the community to our church building) made itself painfully apparent. Our mission leader noticed and suggested that in order to be worthy of God's guidance, we needed to make things right between ourselves. At that point, the elder I was fighting with said something that set me off and I burst into tears, completely embarrassing myself and frustrating myself. If there was ever a sister missionary I didn't want to be, it was a crying one. The meeting ran out of time before the issues could be resolved, and I left feeling hurt, frustrated, ashamed, and crummy.

My biggest fear was that I had lost the trust of my mission leader, whom I really admired. (It's funny to remember how wizened and mature I found him, as I am surely older now myself than this mission leader was at the time I served in his community.) I didn't want him to think of me as a weak girl or—even worse—a bad missionary. I certainly felt like a weak missionary that day. I felt like if I were worthier or worked harder, I wouldn't have reason to doubt myself or struggle at all.

That evening, my companion and I were planning out the next day's lessons and discussing our different investigators' various questions and challenges, when there was a knock at the door. It is ironic, maybe, that for as many doors missionaries knock on during the course of a single day, they almost never get any visitors to their own apartments. Perplexed, we went to the door and were amazed to see my mission leader and his family standing on our very narrow front stoop. In my mission leader's hands was an entire beautiful strawberry cream cake, and the saran wrap was covered in heart-shaped cards that he and his family had made for us, telling us how much they loved us and were grateful for us. (To understand how incredible this was, keep in mind that most Japanese houses do not have ovens. They almost surely had to bake this cake at the church with ingredients extra expensive in Japan.)

I still have the cards they made (well, half of them. My companion took some, too, I think. I hope). We had them taped to our wall until I finally transferred to a different area in Japan. I remember weeping that night over thick slices of strawberry cream cake, this time with tears of incredible gratitude and fellowship.

If you want to know the truth about me and church, you should know that one of the reasons I believe in Christ's Atonement is that I have no other explanation for that incredible clean, bright, warm, heart-burning feeling that comes from being a part of communities of people that genuinely love and care for each other. Being Christ-like, to me, is realizing that it is worth it to make a strawberry cream cake for two sister missionaries who will likely only live in your city for six weeks anyway, because you love them and you saw that they had had a rough day. It's about seeing people and then seeing yourself and your own potential for being a friend.

I'm mostly crummy at it, especially with qualifying exams breathing down my throat. But hopefully these ice cream sandwiches and the conversations we had over them with these two elders serving very far from their homes are at least a step toward becoming the kind of person that made me feel loved as a sister missionary.

In any case, Thing #16: Feed missionaries some homemade ice cream sandwiches = ACCOMPLISHED.