Remember a couple decades ago when it seemed like every General Conference had at least one talk about losing yourself in service to others? The Elder’s Quorum doubled as a moving company. Sisters were supposed to put everyone else’s needs ahead of their own. The teaching is still there, certainly, but it isn’t preached and taught every month the way it used to be. I like to think that the Church leaders heard enough about burnout, and how people took advantage of the helpers, that they decided to stop beating that particular drum.
Does Church membership affect how often people reach out to help? Or is the willingness to help someone more of a personality trait? Do you pay it forward? Or let others struggle because you had to struggle?
Let’s say you went through a rough time. I’m not talking about a high-level, life-changing tragedy, like cancer, or a terrible car accident. Just your basic hard, miserable time.
Stuff this level: The furnace died the same week that you lost your job. You got diagnosed with a chronic illness that requires a special diet and you don’t know how to cook, or the food you need is much more expensive than what you’ve been eating. You’re pregnant with a toddler and the doctor puts you on bed rest. Things are rough financially and you and your family are surviving on pancakes and ramen. Your mother-in-law criticizes everything you do and it’s bad enough that you dread the holiday gatherings.
Or what about a hard time at work? Billing hours as a young associate was one of the most stressful experiences of my life. Or, say your manager is a control freak who doesn’t like you and you got written up for clocking out five minutes early even though you showed up twenty minutes early — stuff like that all the time. Your job is short-staffed because the owner noticed it’s cheaper to pay one employee to work overtime than it is to hire two employees and you’re gradually wearing out. The office politics are out of control.
And now you’re through it. You survived. No one helped you, not really, you just powered through it. You switched jobs, got a promotion and a raise, learned to cook, your baby was born healthy and you recovered fine, you paid back the home equity loan you took out to replace your furnace, your mother-in-law left on a mission. You breathe a sigh of relief.
Years later, you meet someone who reminds you of yourself during that hard time. They’re also struggling with something similar to what you struggled with. But now, you’ve got the means to help (this factor is important — it won’t cause you a hardship to help). You can afford to give your nephew and his family $100 weekly for food; you can stand up for an in-law when your mom won’t say one nice thing; you have a professional connection and can get someone a better job; you can spend several weekends to teach someone to cook for a chronic illness; you can babysit for a young mom who is on bed rest; you’re on a committee at work and can reduce billable hours for new associates; you’ve got authority to fire a control freak manager that no one likes.
Keep in mind the things that are NOT part of this hypothetical: you don’t live with the person who needs help; they didn’t ask for help; they aren’t expecting you to help.
What do you do?
Do you think one of these options is more Christlike than the other? Does that matter?
Do you help someone who is struggling in a situation that you just had to endure?
Or do you figure that it builds character to struggle, and if you had to live through it, then so do they?
Wheat & Tares 
I took care of a dying parent for 5 years and now I have what I believe is called “caregiver fatigue”. I call it PTSD. I have “service”. I hate the word. I hate hearing it in Church. I want to punch leaders in the face when they tell us to do more. It didn’t make me happy. It exhausted me and wiped me out. I have resigned myself that I simply do not have Christ-like personality and never will. And, if that’s what it means – giving of yourself until there is nothing left – I have no interested in going to the Celestial Kindgom.
And another thing. A few years ago there was a story going around the Church about a woman with cancer that mowed other peoples lawns. I now have cancer and I’m not mowing anybody’s f#2@ing lawn. Yes, this whole service thing hit a nerve.
I am afraid I am more with Lily that I would like to be. Several times, I have had people demanding that I serve them, when I was probably more in need of service than they were. And it was always church related.
I’ll give one example. I was only 25, so, too young to boss around bishops. I was Relief Society president. Think the kind of young sweet compliant Molly Mormon. The ward was very divided, about half military (mostly from Utah) and half proud Southerners. And the two halves held each other in contempt. My husband was gone a lot for military travel and so was our bishop. The bishop was gone so much that the coordination between B and RSP was not happening. I never once had the one on one meeting with the bishop I NEEDED to coordinate welfare. So, we are talking a walking disaster of a ward with a bishop who is gone so much he cannot keep up with anything, who is having some serious marital problems.
I got pregnant. Two live births, three miscarriages, so, I had a tendency to miscarry early. Every pregnancy put me on bedrest at least once, sometimes more. So, I was having some bleeding that looked like a miscarriage and doc says bedrest. I said I have been through this a few times now, so he says then you know what to do, bed rest till the bleeding stops or the miscarriage happens.
So, as RSP, I had people calling me with “sister X just had her baby” “family X needs a food order” “there is a funeral” and “sister Y is having pregnancy problems and needs bedrest and there are 4 children to be taken care of. So, I am on the phone trying to coordinate all this, my two preschoolers are running amuck, I am supposed to be lying down. Nobody will take Sister Y’s brats because they are undisciplined heathen. So the brats get dropped off at my house by their father because he needs to go to work and now I have 5 children running amuck and I am supposed to be in bed. He absolutely refused to accept that I could not babysit his children and that it was HIS problem. Yeah, should have called CPS and told them he left his kids with me when I told him absolutely not. But like I said, I am the sweet compliant type and he for sure thought his priesthood outranked me.(MCP of the Mormon variety)
I tried calling people in the ward to tell them the problem. I tried to refuse to babysit her children when I was supposed to be on bedrest just as much as she was. But my “calling” was such that everyone in the ward just expected me to fix everything. I got nothing but shrugged shoulders about what I could do. Nobody was willing to take the brats. Bishop was out of town as usual. My counselors refused to take the children, they refused to take the funeral planning.
I was risking MY baby’s life to give service to sister Y because, well, she was in pretty much the same shape as me, only she has defied doctor’s orders and got pregnant with a prolapsed uterus. And she was not willing to find anyone to take her own children and the children’s father was too selfish to miss work. But I was supposed to give service to all these people, when I needed service just as badly as any one of them did. They just expected it as their right. Because I was RSP and it was my job.
I finally called a friend who was one of those women who *will* call CPS because she doesn’t take crap even when it is dumped on her door step. She took all the children and took care of the phone calls and told people off. Yeah, I think she told a bunch of people off.
No, I think I will give a second example. I was RSP, same ward. I had a teen babysitting my two children, and I think this was before I got pregnant with my third. So, before the story above. So, I get home from doing the Relief Society stuff and go to take my baby sitter home. But she says, “your pupils are not the same size. One is huge.” I assure her I will get it checked. I have my list of all the church stuff I need to do that day, as in NOW, and I try to pawn it off so I can go to the base hospital and have my eye seen. Things like taking the food order over to the 90+ couple. But as in the above story, nobody is willing to do what they see as my job as RSP. They just don’t see it as charity helping but doing someone else’s job. As if I am paid. So, after two hours on the phone trying to get my schedule free so, I can go over to the hospital, the mother of my babysitter calls. It is my friend, we will call her Sally, in the story above and she asks if I am at the emergency room yet. I told her what I had, and she just took over. She picked up my children, picked up the food order, took everybody and dropped me off at the emergency room and took over as RSP and bullied her way around, until everything was taken care of.
But I just could not get people to help because they saw ME as the one who was supposed to help others. Even saying, look, this could be a brain aneurism didn’t get them to comprehend that I needed help. But Sally was the ward bully I guess. I am the sweet kind that is preferred for RSP and nobody ever called Sally sweet. But she is one of the kindest women ever.
The church has a good idea with we need to be willing to help each other. But assigned people to do that service sometimes is *not* a good idea. The people in the ward saw it as my job to give all this service and it was like they could not even comprehend that I was in need of something myself. I was not a person to them, only a RSP. I was not going through the right channels because I was the one they called to GET help.
There are also too many conditions tacked onto Mormon help. I will let someone else argue that point.
In reading Anna and Lily’s comments above, it just reminds me that while the church strongly reinforces and enshrines the patriarchy, it absolutely cannot function without ample unpaid women’s labor. This is going to be a problem for the church, as places where the most LDS members live are high housing-cost areas, and access to housing increasingly requires, by default, a two-earner household. This means less availability for unpaid “service” labor by women without extreme burnout. We see this in the culture wars and the women-on-women conflict between the trad-wife ideal and the evolving “joyful juggle” pivot.
Lily and Anna, I am right there with you with regards to Church service and the things women are expected to do for free and without a break. The free caregiver stuff is traumatizing. I’ll skip all the details, but I recognized PTSD symptoms when a bishop tried to call me into the nursery (I may have yelled at him and burst into tears right there in his office). Being an unemployed single mom with three little kids left a mark, even years later.
AND
I was hoping the difference between the sort of service expected from stay-at-home women and the sort of service expected from men-with-careers would show up in the comments. And it did. The service expected from women is exhausting and never-ending. Taking care of a parent for five years? Wow, that is so much work. Anna’s RSP duties were overwhelming.
The examples I gave in the post were mostly (not the babysitting) the type of service that men would do. That’s easy service. I noticed that once I went back to work full-time, the things that people needed from me were rewarding and short-term. Sure, I can write a reference letter! Oh, did that manager come down hard on an assistant who didn’t deserve it? Why yes, I will go give him a piece of my mind and insist that he doesn’t talk that way to that woman ever again. You need some extra cash? I can do that. Cooking lessons? Yes again! But don’t anyone ever ask me to watch kids. Or take in more than one meal to someone else. I loathe watching other peoples’ kids; and cooking for others is something that I do rarely (maybe once a year).
As my life has oriented more towards the sort of service people expect from someone with a career, I’ve noticed that service really is rewarding. It isn’t exhausting to send my friend $100 weekly. I offer to write recommendation letters. I drove a neighbor to a doctor’s appointment. I sent a restaurant gift card to someone who just had surgery.
The Church leaders who praise service are not the ones who are taking care of someone else’s children; or taking care of a dying parent; or feeding a whole bunch of people. Those tasks are draining drudgery. People should be well-paid to care of children; to handle hospice care; to feed the masses. And they should have paid vacation and sick days, too.
Okay, so, what do you think of the idea that female-coded service is a whole different thing than male-coded service?
edited to add: I do not mean to downplay the misery that was the Elders Quorum Moving Company.
A milder example from well over ten years ago. My visiting teaching companion and I were both living in homes that were in need of some redecoration, and we both had primary age or younger children at the time. One of the ladies we visited was elderly and lived in sheltered accommodation. For some reason she got it into her head that it was appropriate to ask us, as her visiting teachers, to paint her kitchen walls. To us, her kitchen looked great. If her kitchen needed painting (it didn’t) well ours were considerably worse. Yeah, we didn’t paint her kitchen. I don’t recall how I managed to back off that. But it wasn’t before I was having actual nightmares about it, such was the stress the request caused.
Helping someone coming behind you is always a good thing to do. Obviously, we are all constrained in different ways in how we can help others. Some of us have more capacity to help than others, and those situations change over time. We have to find healthy ways to balance the inverted pendulum between burn-out from only focusing on others and the Ebenezer Scrooge state of caring only about ourselves. We also have to allow each person to set those boundaries for themselves and respect their decisions about when and how they can help others.
I suspect I’m not alone in this, but sometimes I have an instinctual reaction that because I did something that sucked that others should have to as well. These namby-pamby missionaries that get to call home any time they feel like it is one that comes to mind. And then I try to step back and remind myself that wanting someone to suffer just because I did is a pretty terrible way to go through life and I try to do better.
Personally, I miss helping people move. Either no one is moving in and out of my ward, or everyone pays professionals to do it for them these days. It was a way to get people together to help someone else, it had a well defined scope, and if they were moving in it was a way to instantly get to know them a bit. I was the beneficiary of that help many times and I’m not sure I’ve repaid that debt to the community yet.
Generally, I’m not good at seeing ways that I can help people. It doesn’t come naturally, and I probably haven’t spent enough time trying to develop the skill.
That story of Anna’s combined with Janey’s comment reminded me of probably the worst “service” experience of my entire life. I was on maternity leave (Janey’s 100% right that when you have a career, people are far less demanding), having just delivered my second child two days earlier. It was a fairly easy delivery, but I was still recovering and bleeding quite a lot, but I was home (thanks to our stellar US health-care system that didn’t even want me to stay ONE night in the hospital, let alone more). The person with the “need” wanted to do a temple session but needed babysitting for her two kids because it was the summer so they weren’t in school (they were around 8-10 years old). Normally, kids that age are not very difficult, but I was kind of pushed into this with assurances that it wouldn’t be very long and they were self-sufficient and blah blah blah.
When they showed up they hadn’t been fed, so I had to make them lunch. Then, the day continued. The hours ticked by, and while they weren’t extremely difficult, I really needed a nap. I expected their mom to pick them up after maybe 3 hours, given the length of a temple session plus drive time. At least SIX HOURS LATER and she hadn’t shown up, and thanks to the no-cell-phones in the temple thing (a fine enough rule, but not in this case), I had heard nothing and did not know what in the hell was going on. It was starting to get to be dinner time, I was bleeding through pads, and I needed to rest. I finally had to call my husband to come home early from work to help. He was pretty livid that she left me hanging like that. I had to lay down the rest of the day. After NINE HOURS she finally showed up to get her kids, chirping about how wonderful it was because they had needed extra help in the initiatory so she got to do all these hours of EXTRA SERVICE. (While I was laying on the kitchen floor sobbing and bleeding, calling my husband to come home from work early.)
There’s another weird story that I utterly refused to participate in when I was in the RSPresidency. A sister who was honestly the biggest demander in the ward was having some health problems that prevented her from driving. She was already getting free childcare assistance in the evenings from ward members because she kept adopting additional kids that they were struggling to take care of. Due to the driving issue, she asked that women in the ward drive her to and from work at her high-paid career for an indefinite time period. There were women driving 20 minutes to take her to work every day, but they could do it because it was just time which is free. Why couldn’t she take an Uber? Not because she couldn’t afford it.
Anyway, that also reminded me of another type of service that wards have all too frequently asked–for someone who does something for a living (e.g. photography) to do it for free. I mean, in essence, what is the volunteer church cleaning but the wealthy church getting something for free that it could totally pay for? This can apply to any field, really. I’m sure accountants have been asked to do the books for people as well. It’s not always low-skilled, piecemeal or freelance work that’s being requested. I also am not keen on the free ward moving services IF the person can afford to pay a moving company. A friend of mine who ran an in-home healthcare aide business said that his main competitor was the Relief Society. I often pointed out to other people in wards I’ve been in that when we use volunteers to do things that local businesses do, unnecessarily, we aren’t just hurting local businesses, but we are also putting volunteers at risk. Doing in home health aide work may not require medical training, but these businesses pay a lot to insure their workers. Wards don’t necessarily care if volunteers lift something too heavy. I imagine it’s happened that someone tried to make a medical claim, but I’m not sure how the church would handle it if so.
“…I’m not sure how the church would handle it…”
For some reason, I think (I know?) the church would say that the volunteer was acting in an individual and personal capacity, that the volunteer willingly assumed the risk, and that the volunteer was not in any way an agent or instrumentality of the church — and that the church has no liability or responsibility whatsoever.
My ex-wife’s family was always in need of assistance. Before she graduated from High School, they moved 21 times. They even moved in November of her senior year and missed her graduation after promising to be there because they were moving again. My Ex-Father-in-Law always said it was because he had a vision or prompting or some other “spiritual” thing, and my Ex-Mother-in-Law believed him. He would brag about how the Lord would provide, but in actuality, it was the ward, wherever in AZ, UT, or CA he lived at any given moment. The ward would provide moving services, furniture, food, and clothes because sometimes he was inspired to move in the middle of the night. He never said anything about bill collectors, but he did say he was being blessed because he had heeded the Lord’s commandments and had 12 children to raise unto the Lord. I won’t go into how many of them were abused physically, sexually, verbally, or how many divorces, suicides, or untimely deaths occurred, or how many graduated from High School, let alone went to college or got additional education in a technical field, and how many are still active in the church.
Instereo: The irksome thing about people thanking God and calling it a blessing when human beings provide service to them is that it preserves their sense of superiority (“I deserve these things because I’m righteous”) rather than actually being grateful for the actions and sacrifices of other people (“This person gave me something I needed.”) It can lead to an attitude of “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is also mine–if I’m righteous enough.” I understand pscyhologically how it benefits the person, giving them an esteem boost (“I’m so special God blessed me”) rather than a wake up call (“I need to get my crap together because I’m hugely inconveniencing others.”) I’m not sure either extreme is the best approach. We should probably be able to see the sacrifices of others as laudable without developing a sense of entitlement, but it sure seems hard for Mormons to do.
I can’t help but think that Miss Bates (from Jane Austen’s Emma) is a better example of how to receive charity. She thanks everyone profusely all the time, and perhaps it’s a little tiresome and played for comedic effect, and doubtless Miss Bates would prefer to have her own status and wealth rather than relying on the charity of others, but she is at least expressing gratitude to the people who help her rather than claiming it came from God because she deserved it.
Wow. Those RS president accounts are really disturbing. Entitlement hurts all volunteer organizations.
Years ago I was an EQ President in a ward with a long tradition of not questioning service requests. After years of frustration with young fathers and husbands being called every weekend to pull some ox out of the mire, we finally imposed a condition on each request. “Have you contacted your own family?” “What are they doing to help?” A few got angry, and one wealthy man punched me when I refused to move his piano (he won’t do that again), but we finally got the service where we needed it (widows, poor and elderly) and I could look the guys in the face on Sunday.
Hawkgrrrl, it is one of my absolute pet peeves when people thank God for God’s blessings instead of the person doing the work.
As a family we were talking about the various spin off effects we had seen as a family from covid (some of the changes being positive, some negative, just chatting) and my husband spoke passionately about how blessed he was that the entire time of covid restrictions none of his work pants had worn out. Which, considering all changing rooms in clothing stores were closed for a long time here, was a good thing.
Gentle reader, his pants had not worn out because every time I did the laundry I proactively examined all the clothes coming through and did repairs. I have over the years become quite skilled in the art of visible and invisible clothing repair. Some of the repairs I can now do become art, not just functional patches.
I did tell him, rather bluntly, that God had nothing to do with his clothing longevity. And that I was offended at his casual dismissal of my work and skill by giving all the credit to God. To his credit he did apologize. It is very easy to publicly and effusively thank God. It makes us look humble and spiritual. It is harder to thank the people doing the work directly, that makes us *feel* humble and needy.
As to the topic of helping others, I firmly believe that just because my experience of (insert hard struggle here) sucked, that the person coming behind me doesn’t also have to have it suck. There are enough sucky things in life that we don’t need to ensure that there are “enough” barriers for the people coming along behind us. Let us make the path smoother, the barriers fewer, the hairshirt less itchy.
Since I quit attending Church, the number of times that I’ve felt imposed on has dropped down to zero, basically. I find ways to serve that I enjoy doing. That required me to change my thinking — I used to think that something only counted as service if it made me miserable. Like, pulling weeds in the heat was service. Going out to lunch with a friend and cheering them up didn’t count because I liked it. Did anyone else have that misguided idea? I honestly believed I got more blessings if I “served” by doing something that I disliked, and the service didn’t count if I had a good time.
Church expects service. That attitude of entitlement that several have mentioned comes from Church. I was a visiting teacher for another woman with some health problems. She had surgery and her sister called our RSP and complained because the ward was only taking in two meals and wasn’t going over three times a day. Why didn’t her sister have her move in for a few weeks after the surgery? Why was it the ward’s responsibility?
But of course, it’s exhausting for the sister to take care of a family member after surgery. It’s too bad we don’t have enough social service safety net to have a home health aide assigned for post-surgery visits. Caretaker duties are exhausting, and while I felt imposed on by the sister who wanted me to visit three times daily, her family felt imposed on too. This wasn’t anyone’s fault; it’s just a hard situation. Wouldn’t it be great if someone who was trained and well-paid could handle the hard parts and leave friends and family to just provide company?
It’s so much more rewarding to provide service that isn’t expected. I can offer to help, and only offer what I can do, and people are nice about it. I try to make life better for the people coming after me. If I suffered and struggled, I want to make things better. It’s a whole lot easier to do that when it feels like giving someone a gift rather than having someone take more than I would willingly give.
Q: “What do you do? Do you think one of these options is more Christlike than the other? Does that matter? Do you help someone who is struggling in a situation that you just had to endure? Or do you figure that it builds character to struggle, and if you had to live through it, then so do they?”
Having a child with significant special needs – and several other of my kids having “stealth” needs – I find myself a lot more willing to see needs of others with similarly situated issues and share as many resources as I can. whether that takes the form of financial assistance or just “wisdom” of what worked for us. To me, it’s like the see-a-child-on-the-airplane-crying moment: because I have BEEN that parent with the kid who won’t calm down, I go ahead and let the flight attendants know of my willingness to sit next to them or trade seats, whatever. Because I know how hard that can be, being judged for something I really can’t fix immediately (a kid crying). To that end, I don’t remember the stories of Christ having prerequisites and they-should-suffer-through-it mentality …
… But. When I think of others, like close family members, who truly are in need but keep seemingly choosing to fall into the same rut (has anyone else seen that short video of the sheep getting pulled out of a ditch, just for it to jump right back in it?), it’s harder. On the one hand, would love to help – but I feel like I need more discernment, because what I think might help could actually just cut off their ability to grow independence (also with my older kids!). Kind of like the way that many humanitarian efforts increasingly counsel volunteers to NOT give money/excess travel items so as to prevent a dependency. Sometimes I get the sense with some people, like said close family members, that NOT helping might actually be the right choice (e.g., after helping multiple times in the past, and seeing that their attitude is morphing into one of expectation of bailout, instead of relief from random crappy happenstance) so as to give them a chance to walk a bit of the path they insist on walking down.
So I guess I would answer: it depends. At the least, I would separate the clauses in your last question: “Do you figure that it builds character to struggle?” and then, as a separate concept, “if you had to live through it, so do they?” Those are very different attitudes, and I don’t think one follows logically from the other. It CAN build character to struggle – but helping doesn’t mean their struggle disappears, especially if it is something that makes a meaningful impact. And just because I suffered through it doesn’t mean the next generation must as well – when things get better, let’s build off of that.
I just want to say that sometimes a disabled person really can’t do what they can do. Refusing to help because they might become dependent over looks the reality that whether you help or not they are already dependent whether they want to be dependent or not. Refusing to give them the help they means they become deprived, not that they learn to help themselves. That’s the whole point of disability: they can’t do it even if no one will help.
Not to say that helping each time is right either; you have to decide what is right for you to be doing, a separate and different question.