There are No Small Offerings

I received a thank you card this week for my ward bulletin.

It was from a senior who wanted to let me know that she appreciates having all the information I provide in it because "not everyone is comfortable with smart phones."

It's going in my collection of notes, cards, and letters that I keep forever. Not only because it was so sweet and honest, but because it reminds me of something I remind myself of often. 

There are no small parts. Just small actors.

There are no insignificant, unimportant, inconsequential offerings in the Church. 

What a bishop does is not more important than the person who puts their name on a clipboard in Relief Society to bring meals to someone who is sick.

It's not. Period.

The person who makes the flower arrangements for the podium.

The person who shows up for cleaning the building.

The person who brings their extra garden zucchini and puts them on the foyer table to share.

They're all important in building the kingdom of God.

Why?

Because they all can answer someone's prayer. They can all be just the thing somebody needed. They all can be a blessing to someone.

If you're phoning it in, but don't want to give up whatever you're doing because you might be asked to do something that "isn't as important"... Nothing you do is unimportant. Not in comparison to anything else. And especially not in comparison to the thing you could be doing instead of phoning it in.

Do the simple thing with earnestness without telling yourself that a simple thing can't be important.

It can be important to someone, even if the only person it matters to is you.

#GiveThanks

I'm grateful for my brother-in-law, who is Very Gay and still came to the temple on our wedding day, despite all the emotional complications that come with waiting outside, just because he loves his mother and brother that much. And I am pissed beyond measure that I probably won't get to be there for his wedding because of COVID-19. 

I want to show the same loving, unconditional support to him and his husband he showed to us. But I honestly don't know what to give him that even begins to compare. I don't have anything, no gesture I can even think of to offer, that compares in what that cost him. Nothing in my relationship with him comes at that kind of price for me. 

And I didn't even have the decency to understand that at the time. 

I do now though.

I'm grateful for every person, especially every LGBTQ+ person, who shows up for their family with the dignity and grace that they're so often denied. 

Sometimes, the rest of us are lucky enough to have you, to be changed by your goodness.

 

President Nelson's Gratitude Challenge

I've been listening to all kinds of perspectives about President Nelson's #GiveThanks challenge. It seems to me like the Church's energy could've been spent much better on a campaign about humility instead of gratitude.

The pandemic is the closest thing to divine retribution, where those who dug a pit for their neighbors have fallen in themselves, as I've ever seen in my lifetime. To focus on positivity in this moment, I feel, misses the point of what God has always communicated through disease. Plagues and diseases in scripture are the great equalizers in society, where those with with, power, and position are finally forced onto equal footing with everyone else, experiencing the same devastation that their money can't protect them from.

Like famines and droughts, they cease only when there is a humbling of spirit, a reckoning with the moral failure within one's own soul. When selfishness and indifference to our neighbor's suffering is confronted, challenged, and finally eliminated.

I find it interesting that what this situation calls for most—submission to the empirical knowledge of secular authorities in the wearing of masks, and the solitude and reflection of social distancing—are acts that require humility particularly from religious individuals. 

Like many of the policies from this administration, how we respond to COVID-19 and the restrictions that attend to it reveal his much we really value ourselves and our neighbor. We're all collectively witnessing this in families, in employments, and in society as a whole.

When we reach the end of this, we will know who the villains are who surround us. We will see the private evils in the businesses we have our money to, the schools that teach our children, the organizations we supports, and the institutions that claim to care for us.

We have a choice. 

We can look the truth in the face, accept the facts as they have always existed around us, and rise to the challenge we've been given.

Or we can look away, hide our faces in shame, and maintain the status quo as it existed before all of this began. 

A necessary component of what will allow us to make the right choice is not gratitude alone. It will be humility that heals us, and ultimately asked us to go forth from this moment changed and bettered by the experience.