I just listened to the final episode of Lee Hale’s “Preach,” a podcast in which he interviewed various figures from different religions about their spiritual life, including how their views changed over time. One of the more famous interviewees was Rainn Wilson (Dwight on The Office) who talked about being raised in the Ba’hai faith. It was also fascinating to hear Lee’s own insights peppered throughout these interviews.
As the show wrapped up (due to an exciting new job for Lee with NPR in DC), he had a final discussion with his producer Tricia Bobeda about things he learned from talking to his guests, and how the show was different than what he expected it to be. Something he said really resonated for me as I thought back to my time as a missionary in the Canary Islands in 1989-1990. He observed that we all seem to have the same types of questions, and that the real gift was the compassion you develop from listening to people talking about their questions. He said that religion evangelizes its own set of answers, but that maybe the questions and listening are the important part, not claiming we have all the answers.
There were so many examples of this that occurred in my mission that I wrote about in my memoir, to the point that it was clear to me over and over how inadequate it was to sell people answers. As a 21 year old, I had no real answers for things I routinely encountered, including:
- What do you say to someone who is a severely depressed single mother and occasional low rent prostitute with no prospects and no support network?
- How do you help the parents of a heroin addict who fear for his life but can’t move away from his drug network?
- What do you say to a woman who is afraid to tell her husband she had a secret abortion and now she thinks she’s going to hell?
- How do you advise a woman whose husband is beating her or cheating on her?
- What do you say to the incredibly lonely person who might be going a bit crazy due to social isolation and poverty?
- What do you say to the young man who was kicked out by his family because he’s contemplating a sex change operation?
- How do you answer a young homosexual’s need for acceptance and love and a meaningful existence without completely ignoring the set of answers you’ve been handed?
- What do you say to the mother of a severely disabled daughter whose neighbors believe it’s her fault?
- What do you say to a family who clearly can’t afford groceries without sounding like the local branch will pay them to be baptized?
- What do you say to the couple who wants to join the Church but whose neighbors have made it clear that if they leave Catholicism they will be ostracized?
- What do you say to the aging father whose children will put him in a home if he joins the Church?
- How do you address a man who laughs in your face when you suggest families are forever because that’s the last thing he wants?
These are the types of questions that motivate people to talk to the missionaries, but they aren’t questions that are answered adequately by the discussions. It’s something I ran into time and time again.
As young middle-class American women, the majority of us did not have the experience or expertise to deal with women or children who were being abused. We had a naïve optimism that greater commitment to the gospel would improve things, no matter what the problems were.
Sometimes, although we recognized there were no specific answers for these types of problems, we thought a general commitment to the gospel would be enough.
We were as naively optimistic about his recovery as they were. Why couldn’t the gospel cure heroin addiction and turn prostitutes into financially stable, respectable Church members?
I also found that local members weren’t great at helping these non-fitting investigators.
The local members were mostly warm, good people who embraced newcomers as much as they could, although like anyone who has their crap together, they found it harder to relate to those who truly did not.
But part of “having your crap together” is also just indicative that the Church’s set of answers fit your set of questions and your life problems. If the Church isn’t for everyone, if it doesn’t have the potential to better everyone, then is it for anyone or are those for whom it works just people that have easier adversities, fewer problems to overcome, or a better support network? Would they be fine without it, too?
I shared the story of a discussion we held with a woman we met who lived in the elders’ area. Our district leader infuriated me because he just wasn’t listening to this woman at all. She strenuously and repeatedly objected to us reading scriptures or following a script because she said she just wanted us to talk from the heart. In response, this elder said, “That reminds me of a scripture!” and opened his Book of Mormon. Grrrr! A funny story, but also often true to Mormon culture more broadly. How often do we “fellowship” people rather than making real friendships? How often do we listen to others’ problems only to give them some canned Church-approved response? How often do we strive to be “good Mormons” by checking the boxes without remembering how to be good people?
Ultimately I concluded that selling others the answers to life’s questions wasn’t the point, similar to Lee Hale’s observation.
To me, this was the point of missionary work, to support and comfort those in need, to help them through difficult trials, to be a friend to them when they needed it most, not just to shoo them into the baptismal font and crow about our great results, then immediately move on to our next conquest.
Maybe this idea that our rote Church scripts can answer others’ questions is borrowed from other conservative faiths, ones that don’t also talk a lot about personal revelation and our unique ability to get divine counsel through prayer. We hear plenty of one-size-fits-all answers at Church, but personal revelation is a more promising approach. In my experience, claiming personal revelation that contradicts the party line still results in community stink-eye.
What if instead of “preaching” (telling others the answers to their questions) we just listened with compassion? What if we saw people and their problems as important in their own right, worthy of our full attention, not just the means to prove that our pre-defined answers are right?
- What questions have you encountered that aren’t easily answered by religion?
- Did you have similar mission experiences or life experiences that taught you the difference between listening and trying to fit a set of answers to situations that they just don’t adequately cover?
- Did you listen to Lee Hale’s podcast? Were there any stand-out interviews you recommend?
- Do you agree that teaching others how to get personal revelation uniquely tailored to one’s own situation is better than “Sunday School answers” or is it still problematic because it can contradict Church culture and policy?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
While I emailed Lee Hale a congratulatory message and look forward to hearing him again, I miss Preach. My favorites were the Live at the State Room event and the interview with Peter Sagal.
I totally agree that the hard issues of real life are not well served with cookie cutter answers.
I really enjoyed all of the episodes of the podcast and was really bummed that it was coming to an end.
Hawkgrrrl – I read your questions and those are hard questions with generally no easy answers. I have to admit as a missionary I had a “1 sized solution for everything.” That one size solution absolutely can help many people with many issues. It can be a GREAT community and support system.
I can’t see myself going on a mission to preach. I could see myself going to help others, including spending most of the time listening and understanding others. Part of that would certainly be helping people help themselves, which certainly would include following their instinct / personal revelation if you want to call it that.
I was also disappointed to see the podcast end, I particularly loved the Jeannie Gaffigan episode and seeing the way her faith matured through difficult life circumstances.
I agree that what the show did well and what we could use more of in our church settings was that the conversation was open to challenging questions and a willingness to humbly listen to each other’s perspective, without having to go home having settled who had the “correct” perspective. A phrase I’ve heard several times is that the church is supposed to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” and I wish we would take this more seriously. So often what we are doing in church is reassuring ourselves that we have it figured out through predictable questions and answers. That approach often bleeds into missionary work when we try to fit other people into those questions and answers we spent our time crafting, rather than understanding them on their own terms and letting that guide us to new questions and seeking answers in our faith tradition alongside them in an act of love.
“Afflict the comfortable” is often understood as making people feel guilty for not doing stuff, a superficial and counterproductive interpretation. In reality it means forcing us to reexamine what we thought we had figured out, challenge us to listen to each other and embrace the struggle of making sense of our difficult and unique circumstances. Our own scriptures are full of this; Jacob only becomes Israel by wrestling the angel, Job confronts God with scathing accusations about life’s injustice in a literal lawsuit, and Ecclesiastes wallows in the seeming meaninglessness of life. Unfortunately our manuals gloss over these books and try to cherry pick uplifting faith promoting instances from them rather than undertaking the challenge of making sense of the book as the challenging and ambiguous text it is. If our church culture could learn to “afflict the comfortable” in official church settings by embracing the complex and conflicting views found in our own scriptures and Ward members I believe we could do a much better going “off script” in our attempt to understand and love people outside our faith and hopefully bring them and ourselves closer to God in the process.
What’s interesting is the idea that the original missionaries were older men with families that were better equipped to answer these questions.
Now that missionaries are a few years above being “kids”, it would be helpful for the mission president to talk to the missionaries and prepare them for these kinds of things and say it’s ok that you don’t have the answers and life is more complex than Sunday School answers to questions.
Wow those mission experiences you mentioned left me reflecting on a lot of the situations I encountered as a missionary. I encountered a lot of situations that left 19 or 20 year old me completely baffled at what to do.
Like The lady we talked to that almost immediately opened up about how scared she was that her husband was coming home the next day. She described how she was being physically and mentally abused. I didn’t know how to help. I told her she had to leave him, find shelter with a relative or something. Talk to the authorities. She was too afraid to leave him. He said he would kill her if she did. He had a gun and she showed me the picture of her husband and his gun. I don’t think I have ever looked at a face and had such disgust as my reaction. He looked like a normal happy guy. He had a gun, but since I’m an American, that didn’t strike me as odd. She forced me to promise to not say anything to anyone. She was too afraid. She just needed someone to talk to. I listened, sympathized and read a scripture or two to try to comfort her. Mostly I listened, I was the only one she had. Not even my companion since he didn’t speak the language well enough to fully understand.
We Baptized a older woman who suffered by from serious health problems. When my companion knocked on her door, she was looking for answers in the sea of fear, confusion and uncertainty she was facing. We taught her the lessons, she read the Book of Mormon and I do believe she felt peace from knowing God’s plan. I also think she was glad to have someone to talk to. We baptized her the same week church was cancelled for the Coronavirus. We were only allowed to invite 3 members to her baptism to social distance in a country that had 2 cases at the time. After I baptized her she was crying. She was afraid of dying of stomach cancer and wanted to be at peace with god. I believe we helped her with that. Although I have talked to her on the phone, I have never seen her since I baptized her. We were quarantined in our house and then evacuated from the country.
Death. We shared with many people who had lost loved ones. Death is a fairly universal loss most could relate to. Except I couldn’t. Not very well at least. My Grandma died when I was young, but besides that, I have never really lost anyone very close to me. I do strongly believe God has a plan after this life, but I found it was hard for me to comfort a mother who had lost her Son. Heck I had just turned 20; I didn’t even have kids.
Preach my gospel teaches missionaries that no matter what a persons problem is, the gospel of Jesus Christ is the answer. I agree. Mostly. A certain part of the gospel can help any given person. Maybe a missionary just being a good neighbor can help. But most of the time the gospel doesn’t solve our problems it just helps us deal with them a little better.
However cookie cutter answers are not the solution. I remember a zone leader asking us all what our favorite candy is. He promised to give us each Reese’s, snickers, skittles…etc. He then gave us each a slice of white bread. Cookie cutter answers aren’t what people want or need. They taste like white bread.
Here’s two simple observations that most of us will feel uncomfortable hearing but you know they are true: (1) young 18-year-old missionaries are often very immature and don’t have any meaningful experience to share with the communities they encounter on their missions (2) most, not all, but most new converts to the Church are economically challenged or challenged in some other major way. Very few well-adjusted folks enter Church membership today. The point I’m making is that the young inexperienced missionaries are a good match for the down trodden who ultimately come into the Church. They are able to connect pretty well.
I don’t know what it would take to get solid, educated middle class families to join the Church these days given the secular values we face and given the Internet. This is the world we live in. And unfortunately, the Gospel Topics Essays notwithstanding, I don’t think the Church can easily defend itself against the information out there that holds back anyone with just a little historic curiosity. Therefore, we are not going to see any growth in the developed world and will have to rely on Africa and the disadvantaged within the rest of the world for any growth. I think our 18-year-olds are up to the challenge but not sure they can handle the West.
I’ve really enjoyed Preach too and will miss it.
Uncertainty has been my favorite topic for the last couple of years. And one of the things that I’ve decided is that certainty can be a pithole or a pair of glasses with pinprick lenses. Certainty ends up defining what we see and how we see it. Too see *everything* and *everyone* around us, we have to let go of certainty and embrace uncertainty and humility.
I served a mission in Germany in the early 1980s. I remember that we met and taught a man in his 20s who told us he was gay. It was first time in my life that anyone had openly told me they were gay. I was naive, to say the least. After patiently listening to our rendition of the First Vision, this man went on to tearfully explain that his Catholic family had disowned him, and basically told him he was going to hell. He was suicidal because of the loss of that family connection and the loneliness of his life. In hindsight, I think he just wanted someone to talk to and connect with, and we had happened upon his door. I think my companion and I sat there with our mouths agape, not able to fathom what we were hearing, not able to know what to say or do, and rather than feeling compassion, were probably scared and anxious to leave. We were so unprepared to serve and help and understand people that didn’t fit into a certain box. There is so much more we could have done in that situation, comfort and connection that we could have offered, but sadly didn’t. Yes, I know there is much irony in this interaction, but I think I was just not open to mourning with those who mourn, and comforting those who stand in need of comfort, even though my walk and talk should have been to do just that.
I would like to think that today’s young people who go out on missions are better prepared to love and comfort everyone, and maybe they are.
My first major faith crisis came on about 10 years ago, after I suffered a significant personal and professional setback that sent me into a deep depression. The standard Church answers weren’t cutting it anymore. Well-intended people tried to offer advice from scriptures, conference talks, etc, but it was no help. My bishop’s efforts to comfort me just made it worse. This led me to look critically at the beliefs I grew up with. Only when I began therapy (against my bishop’s advice) and worked to rebuild my faith in a different way did things start to improve. I came to the conclusion that the Church doesn’t have all the answers, so I no longer expect to find them there.
So it makes sense that I’m not so hot on the idea of young missionaries working as roving unlicensed therapists. Sure, a lot of them could stand to learn more empathy (I certainly didn’t have a clue about these things at 19) but relying on an army of mostly sheltered suburban Utah teenagers armed with scripted seminary answers is not an effective way to help people in very real crises. Put them to work digging wells and running refugee camps instead.
Perhaps we need to be teaching our youth that life is a lot more complicated and messy than we often purport it to be; that life will eventually bring problems that “praying and reading the scriptures” won’t solve. And if you should choose to go on a mission, you will encounter people in all types of crisis, and empty platitudes about “the healing power of the Atonement” are not helpful. This is another reason why missions should be focused primarily on service, so they can see what solving problems really looks like.
Another example:
A couple years ago my dad had terminal cancer. They didn’t catch it until it was late-stage, so it was pretty sudden that my family had to come to terms with his imminent death. Even with a last-minute flight, I was able to get to his bedside only hours before he passed. I asked the hospital staff to send a chaplain, hoping that it would be a professional, non-denominational chaplain who had training and experience at dealing with death and helping grieving family members. Instead, they must have read where it said “LDS” on my dad’s patient record and they sent for missionaries. Two young elders showed up. They were completely out of their depth. They had no idea what to say, and just awkwardly tried to make small talk with my family members (some of whom were no longer in the Church). They offered to give a blessing, but I don’t think that’s always the most appropriate thing to do when the patient is unconscious and not expected to survive another hour. To be fair, they didn’t try to proselytize or assault us with platitudes, but it was obvious that they were uncomfortable and just wanted to get out of there. I know they meant well, and were just doing what they were told to do, but I didn’t think they were at all helpful in that moment.
Kind of a downer post — not because of the post necessarily, but because of the underlying reality. It would be nice if missionary training featured two weeks of social worker training alongside two weeks of proselyting training. But the Church won’t even train bishops in pastoral skills, so it is not at all likely they will do that for young missionaries. And thus it is that young missionaries are only equipped to teach middle class families (two kids, two cars, two jobs) who have no particular life problems and are looking for a church to join, maybe even looking for the One True Church.
Except there just aren’t a lot of people that fit that description nowadays who want to talk to LDS missionaries. Nobody’s looking for the One True Church, just a nice church that feels good and is good for everyone in the family. We offer a church that hates gays and costs a lot of money (tithing). Our missionaries aren’t even equipped to handle doctrinal and historical questions that a “golden family” might ask about the Church after 60 minutes of research on the Internet. It’s fair to ask just what our missionaries are trained to do, other than knock on doors and deal with rejection. It sure seems like the program needs some serious rethinking at this point.
When I was a missionary I wasn’t mature enough to understand difficult questions like these, let alone answer them. I’m afraid my responses were probably meaningless, and add in a partial language barrier and my advice probably was truly worthless. In a very strange situation the son of a very active family in the ward I was serving in kidnapped two sister missionaries in a neighboring mission. He hid them for a couple of weeks, after which he was either found or gave up. This poor family – guilty by association – was devastated by their son and also by the ostracism from other ward members. They asked me for advice and all I could do was read the scripture in DC 122 that says Jesus descended below all things, art thou greater than he??
As a recent bishop I often encountered questions that frankly had no clean “answer.” One example was a women in her early 30’s who had 6 children under the age of 10. She had no college degree and no meaningful work experience. She and her husband were both considering divorce but in contrast to her husband, she had few financial opportunities and no family to lean on. Truly a difficult situation – ultimately she didn’t want the responsibility of 6 small kids and an emotionally distant husband. I felt like all I could do was be a genuine friend and send her to a counselor who possessed tools to help her in a meaningful way. My wife baby sat for her for free frequently.
Also as bishop I relied on a mantra that I read in the biography of David O McKay, written by Greg Prince. McKay didn’t initially want to serve a mission but he decided to go as long as he only taught what he believed. That’s my philosophy now and what I’ve told my daughter who recent left on a mission – only teach what you believe.
part of “having your crap together” is also just indicative that the Church’s set of answers fit your set of questions and your life problems.
This may be the most profound thing I’ve had given to me to ponder in a long time. Thank you. It is one thing to change ourselves to become more like Jesus. It is quite another to feel that we have to change our lives to meet the Church’s cultural expectations or limited ability to deal with difference.
I was also disappointed to see the podcast end, I particularly loved the Jeannie Gaffigan episode and seeing the way her faith matured through difficult life circumstances.
I agree that what the show did well and what we could use more of in our church setting was that the conversation was open to challenging questions and a willingness to humbly listen to each other’s perspective, without having to go home having settled who had the “correct” perspective. A phrase I’ve heard several times is that the church is supposed to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” and I wish we would take this more seriously. So often what we are doing in church is reassuring ourselves that we have it figured out through predictable questions and answers. That approach often bleeds into missionary work when we try to fit other people into those questions and answers we spent our time crafting, rather than understanding them on their own terms and letting that guide us to new questions and seeking answers in our faith tradition alongside them in an act of love.
“Afflict the comfortable” is often understood as making people feel guilty for not doing stuff, a superficial and counterproductive interpretation. In reality it means forcing us to reexamine what we thought we had figured out, challenge us to listen to each other and embrace the struggle of making sense of our difficult and unique circumstances. Our own scriptures are full of this; Jacob only becomes Israel by wrestling the angel, Job confronts God with scathing accusations about life’s injustice in a literal lawsuit, and Ecclesiastes wallows in the seeming meaninglessness of life. Unfortunately our manuals gloss over these books and try to cherry pick uplifting faith promoting instances from them rather than undertaking the challenge of making sense of the book as the challenging and ambiguous text it is. If our church culture could learn to “afflict the comfortable” in official church settings by embracing the complex and conflicting views found in our own scriptures and Ward members I believe we could do a much better going “off script” in our attempt to understand and love people outside our faith and hopefully bring them and ourselves closer to God in the process.
Yeah, Hawkgirl, the ‘conquest’ model. I think we will have to come up with another model for the western world, but it will continue to work in those countries where missionaries are able to preach.
But, Botswana for one in Africa has decided they don’t want the capital flight of the poor being impoverished by foreign churches , and the church is regarded with similar disfavour by other countries.
My first cognitive dissonance with the church happened as a teenager with my parents’ divorce. I felt like my life was falling apart because my family was falling apart. And because my mom and sister were no longer active church members, I feared being cut off from them forever. I became severely depressed. I hated going to Sunday school with others my age, where we would talk about how you can pray when “hard” things happen in life, like struggling to get the grade you want in school. Well-meaning but ill equipped church leaders would simply tell me that God would work out my family situation or that it didn’t matter because one day, I would marry and have my very own eternal family. I had a completely unempathetic temple presidency member tell me I would likely be sealed to another female ancestor instead of my mom, if she couldn’t make it to the celestial kingdom. He said, “you really wouldn’t want your mom to be in a place she would feel uncomfortable, would you?”
And considering other people’s burdens around the world, my life was not hard in comparison. So if the church’s answers don’t even work for middle-class families that experience unfortunate, yet common events, like divorce, we really need to dig deeper or stop pretending we know so much about the eternities.
Did not listen to the podcast but want to now!
The biggest question I didn’t know how to answer on my mission was basically – “who cares?”
When I set out on a mission I thought my job would be to convince people that we had the “Truth.” What I found was that most people didn’t particularly care about Truth for the sake of Truth, and I didn’t really know how to even give them the desire to want to know more or participate. As has been mentioned, most who were interested had hard life circumstances and were looking for comfort and community. Some had friends or family who were LDS whom they looked up to (and felt like had good lives), or they really liked the missionaries or other members. I don’t think that’s necessarily why they joined, but it’s why they were willing to look into it.
I did have some really great experiences on my mission just listening to people. I was mature enough that I realized that there wasn’t a seminary scripture mastery answer to some problems (although I’d often turn to Alma 7:11 to talk about Jesus carrying all our burdens and having perfect empathy for us). I’d tell them I didn’t fully understand their problems, having not experienced anything similar myself, but that God did.
I have super fond memories of my mission but I can’t imagine serving now. I served at a time when the church was either fairly unknown, or viewed as peculiar and maybe quaint but with fondness and respect (outside of evangelical areas, at least). Prop 8 really changed that. When I lived outside of Utah I would often share spiritual things with non-LDS friends as a way to connect (and I would listen, sincerely, to their own views), but there was no chance that they’d be interested in the church because the gay marriage thing was a dealbreaker. In a way that was liberating to be able to share and talk and listen without having an agenda to try to get someone baptized. Probably as it should be!
When I was a missionary 25 years ago, I had all the answers. That arrogance embarrasses me now. I’ve had faith crises and life crises that the Church’s answers made harder. I think the problem is that the Church leaders only ‘teach the ideal’ and expect us to make up the difference. Like we can bootstrap our way into ideal circumstances if we have enough faith. I am not ideal, so the Church doesn’t have much to say to people in my situation other than the platitudes I shared with investigators on my mission. Karma, right there, yessir.
Good thoughts in this post. Thanks for writing it.
Maybe this is just catching me on a bad day. I look back on decades of joys and pains. Being all-in on the covenant path, sacrificing for my family and the kingdom. Serving wherever and whenever asked. We had five kids and adopted two more. Always optimistic that doing the right things would bring the promised blessings. It’s been our privilege to do these things.
And, yes, there have been abundant blessings for me and my family – but mixed with diabetes, birth defects, lupus, paralysis, horrific car accidents, CVID, Hashimoto’s, Grave’s, pancreatitis, social anxiety, depression, mental illness, sepsis, surgeries, drug addiction, leukemia, broken bones, suicide attempts, and the death of two children. Too much to hide from view and pretend isn’t happening.
In spite of a good education and a very good income, the above has left us treading water much of the time. I am very world-weary. Our good ward neighbors have dropped off meals and treats (all very welcomed) – but frankly, we scare the hell out of people. There has been very little companioning, mourning with us, providing comfort, and sharing our burdens outside of our immediate family.
I don’t pretend to know God’s calculus. And neither should anyone else. “It’s all part of God’s Plan” “Everything happens for a reason” “God must have great blessings in store” “Great shall be your reward” “They are in a better place” These things are said to make the well-wisher feel better. A talisman that will keep whatever we have from rubbing off on them.
All of our faith, prayers, obedience, gratitude, and priesthood didn’t stop the rain. Maybe it could have been worse. I still believe God is good – just don’t know how God works or that I have much influence. I don’t think it’s some cruel “Job-esque” situation where either God or Satan are bringing on the hurt. It’s just here’s life: roll the dice, collect $200 if you pass go or go directly to jail – depends on what number comes up. And I am very glad to be going through all of this in these times and in the first-world.
We try to do what we can. We volunteer to sit with families that have lost a loved one. We advocate for marginalized people in communities that overlap with our family’s experiences. Often, this service causes our fellow members to be suspicious of us serving outside “approved Church activities”.
The Church hasn’t given me satisfying answers. It seems quick to take credit when things are going well and equally quick to cast blame when they aren’t.
Maybe this has just been a bad day. Let’s see how tomorrow goes.
As a missionary couple in an eastern block ex communist country in a tough land with wonderfully tough people the thing I thought about most is “ What do they want to know”:rather than “ I’m telling you what you should know”.
This was made more profound when I was speaking to a S&I leader in Italy who said as we discussed these sort of things, He said “You know in Italy we have been seeing visions for centuries”. “The Church thinks that preaching to Italians that Joseph Smith vision was remarkable is not significant. “
Perhaps this could be argued but we ignore culture ,we ignore language nuance in other cultures and we preach and we do not ask what they want to know . The mission program needs to be totally revamped but there are huge vested self interested areas that have their feet on the brakes. If it was reformed maybe it would be more service oriented…..it would need a lot of thought but I was always amazed that in the country I was in , it was really a failure yet as a corporate. Church one would think that lack of success would need evaluation.
As a father with a very troubled daughter ,very troubled I struggle at the terrible injustice that brought my daughter to near death. How do we expect 18 year olds to deal with these complex devastating human tragedies?
It seems ineffectual to give people in the mist of terrible tragedy and overwhelming emotional trauma the stock answers of the gospel like “ if you have faith in Christ he will help you” ….etc.
Indeed there is truth in the answer but you need to be in a mental- emotional condition to receive it….it may take years or not in this life. That has been my experience in living and is true with my daughter.
This relates back to the complex issues of helping ….how do we help? All I know is asking is better than telling!
On my mission, I too faced a lot of those hard questions the post brings up, and I wasn’t of any more use than anybody commenting before me. The one thing I will say for my mission is that it vastly expanded my human experience. You would have thought it would have made me more humble, since I clearly didn’t have answers to everything. But it didn’t, really. I was still pretty arrogant. I knew I didn’t have answers, but I was content with the idea that if people had had the gospel BEFORE they got into those situations, they wouldn’t be in the situations they were in. My attitude wasn’t exactly self-righteousness, as there was no self-congratulation in it (well, there probably was some), but I definitely felt people’s lives wouldn’t have as many challenges if the gospel was and always had been a part of their lives and the lives of those around them. I still believe that to be true, but I’ve also learned both personally and vicariously that bad things happen to good people (and vice versa) and that there’s a lot of suffering in life regardless how righteous one is. As a missionary, I thought that the purpose of life was to learn and accept the gospel. Now, I’ve come to the conclusion that the purpose of life is to experience life, with all its good and bad, and try to grow towards the good (such things like learning to forgive, developing compassion and empathy, and even developing self-discipline and sacrificing for things that matter to us) . I definitely think the gospel is a big part of that, but the purpose is achieved even when people don’t have the gospel, and even when they don’t live it when they do have it. I don’t think this perspective is at all contrary to the teachings of the church. In fact, from my personal experience and interactions with friends at church (all with their own difficult problems), I think that’s what it means to be humble.
Very few 18-year-olds have the capacity for social work, even if trained. Missionaries can show love and give service, but it’d be a mistake to give them the idea they can solve people’s problems, or have the answers to how they can be solved. We should teach them to be compassionate and humble. Preaching the gospel is worth doing, even if it doesn’t seem to answer immediate questions or meet immediate needs.
On my mission I encountered the following:
-a young married couple whose marriage was disintegrating. We visited one day to find the husband had locked the wife in a room after a bad fight.
-an old man who couldn’t walk and lived in such poor conditions it was one step above homelessness.
-a man we were teaching was going through a divorce. His wife told us that the reason was that he raped her sister.
-we baptized a man who was a profound alcoholic. He fell off the wagon about a month later.
-I had a missionary companion with significant mental health issues. He once randomly broke into song in the middle of a discussion.
I think the only thing that got me through these and other experiences was my naïveté. Otherwise, I would have probably given up soon. I was woefully unprepared and not sure at 19 that I could have been prepared. It’s only as I’ve aged that I even realized how difficult some of these individual’s circumstances were. Maybe it was better for me that I didn’t realize how out of touch with the troubles of the world I was. But for some of the people I met I was pretty useless as a resource for dealing with their problems.
Around 2014 I realized Pres Monson was recycling talks. The Russ and Wendy show has done little to repair my faith, while Gregory Prince, John Turner et al have been most informative. A few random thoughts: When my daughter was in rehab, we could visit her on Sunday which was amazingly and surprisingly spiritual, more so than regular meetings. All I could do was pray and hope she would emerge stronger, which has happened. When my mom died, my stalwart father expressed some real doubts about the eternities.
It seems like the folks at SLC HQ are saying nothing behind their face masks during the pandemic although the Church News is running a series of counsel from the Q12.
I remain married to a TBM lady who is unaware of my evolving faith and our other child is on a mission so I hope at some point to be reconverted.