“They will have All the Power they have Wisdom to Exercise”

 

Talk I gave in the Winstead Ward of Boise, Idaho on 30 July 2024

I want to direct my remarks today to the Young Women. This was a talk I wish someone would’ve sat down and had with me when I was figuring out what my place in the Church was when I was a 16-year-old new convert. And I want to start by telling a story of an experience I had as a BYU student when I was about 19 years old.

I was in my best friends’ apartment. It was the day of one of the Relief Society general meetings, and I came to ask if anyone wanted to walk with me to go see it at the Marriott Center. We had a couple of young men on our couch (I’m convinced they come standard with the couch) who were waiting for someone to come out for a date. My friend asked if I would turn their television to the Relief Society meeting so they could watch it from home before I left.

As I did so, one of the young men made an unkind and immature remark by saying “Relief Society… isn’t that the meeting where all the women get together and cry?” His friend on the couch thought that was funny. I did not, but recognizing the opportunity for a teaching moment, I did my best to be gentle.

“Those are my leaders you’re talking about. If you wouldn’t talk about the prophet that way, don’t say it about them.”

It was the first of several experiences I’ve had throughout my eighteen years in the Church where I’ve encountered people who think that women don’t play an important role in what we do here. What men do is the “real work” of bringing salvation to others because they have the priesthood and perform the ordinances, and women are just ornaments to that process. I’ve heard men say that the Church could operate without women, but the Church would cease to function without men, going so far as to say that the Church should baptize fewer women because “men who are priesthood holders are where real growth comes from.” That was language I heard on my mission.

Young Women: as you serve in your callings, go on missions, date, and interact with others both inside and outside of the Church, you may encounter people who say these kinds of things to you. This may be one of the challenges you have to overcome as you go forward into your futures, wherever they take you. I want to talk to you today about the power and authority you have to speak and act in God’s name. I want to make sure you understand it, so that if you ever end up in a situation like this, you know the truth of who you are. I want you to be able to walk into every room knowing that God sent you, and never once have to question it, no matter what anyone says.

1 Corinthians 12, Moroni 10, and Doctrine and Covenants 46 all teach about the spiritual gifts of the Holy Ghost that God gives to all people. I’ve created a list I want to review with you briefly, which I invite you to add to in your personal scripture study. Let’s review each of the spiritual gifts the scriptures mention and look for examples of women using them, as a demonstration that God doesn’t withhold divine power from you based on your gender.

1. Teaching the Word of Wisdom: Emma Smith and her disgust with smoking and chewing tobacco and spitting on the floor in the Newel K. Whitney store during the meetings of the School of the Prophets. This led to D&C 89 and the Word of Wisdom being revealed.
2. Teaching the Word of Knowledge: the mothers of the Stripling Warriors teaching their children that God would protect them in battle if they kept their faith. (Alma 56:47-48)
3. Exceedingly great faith: the Lamanite Queen when Ammon calls her people to repentance. It was said of her that she had exceedingly great faith, more than any of the Nephites. (Alma 19:9-10)
4. To know that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the reality of his Atonement: The Samaritan Woman at the well. (John 4:28-29)
5. To believe on the words of those who know: Sariah being comforted by Lehi. (1 Ne. 5:6)
6. Healing and the faith to be healed: the woman with the issue of blood, who healed herself through her own faith in Jesus Christ. (Luke 8:48)
7. Working mighty miracles: Esther when she saves her people from certain destruction.
8. Prophecy: Deborah when she foretells and ensures the conditions of a military victory in Judges 4-5.
9. Beholding angels and ministering spirits: Mary, the mother of Christ when she’s told she’s going to be the mother of the Son of God. (Luke 1:28-38)
10. Tongues and the interpretation of tongues: The women at Pentecost in Acts 2:17-18.
11. The Differences in Administration, which D&C 46 explains is the ability to know how to adapt in ways that please God, enact his mercy, and meet the needs of people in whatever their present conditions are: Mary and Martha of Bethany (Luke 10:39-42). Note: neither one of them were wrong in how they chose to adapt to the situation of having Jesus Christ stay with them. They each prioritized what was important to them. The only thing wrong was the judgment from Martha that Mary was doing something wrong.
12. Diversity of operations, which D&C 46 defines as discernment, to recognize the hand of God, and helping others to recognize manifestations of the Spirit: Mary Magdelene being the first one the recognize Jesus Christ after he was risen (John 20:11-17). She and many of the other women told the apostles they had seen angels who told them that Jesus Christ was resurrected. In Luke 24:11, we read of the apostles’ response to them, which was that “their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.” Note: this is not a new lesson we’re learning together. Just because the apostles rejected the women’s gift of recognizing  manifestations of the Spirit doesn’t mean the manifestation wasn’t real.

This is one of the most important lessons I feel I could teach you from my own experience: there will be times in your life when you will be given sacred information about yourselves, your families, your safety, and your relationships to other people that come directly from God. There will be times when those around you may not believe you in relation to what God says to you because they doubt the power by which you are led. Never let the doubts of others diminish what you know to be true about yourselves.

There will be times when you are in deep trouble and need rescuing from this world and its challenges, from other people, and from yourselves. Never go into those experiences believing you need someone else to save you, that you’ll be left alone and vulnerable if they don’t show up.

Because of the covenants you’ve made the commandments you’ve kept, even when the only commandment you can keep is to repent, you are entitled to powerful manifestations from God in your moments of greatest need. It is your birthright. Every time you call down the powers of heaven in the name of Jesus Christ for yourself or someone you love, you exercise priesthood power. You are authorized and able to bear the power of God in your own right. Your Heavenly Parents would NEVER leave you powerless, comfortless, or hopeless anywhere. No matter who does or doesn’t help you, who is or isn’t there for you, or how alone you think you are, they will always be there.

I testify with everything I have, with all that is in me, that Jesus is the Christ. I testify that the power by which he performed his miracles anciently, the authority to speak and act in the name of God the Father, has been restored again to the earth in our day. We have a church of prophets and apostles, who are fully authorized to act and speak in the name of God. This is what it means when we say the Church is true. I testify we also have a church full of powerful, holy sisters who are equally authorized to participate in the errand of angels with every gift and power God promised to us of old in the words of the prophet Joel:

“I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy… and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit.” Joel 2:28-29.

I also want to repeat the words of Eliza R. Snow, one of the earliest presidents of the Relief Society when she taught this same lesson to the sisters in her day: “Tell the sisters to go forth and discharge their duties, in humility and faithfulness and the Spirit of God will rest upon them and they will be blest in their labors. Let them seek for wisdom instead of power and they will have all the power they have wisdom to exercise.”

Young Men, I have a challenge for each of you was well. As you study the rights and privileges that come with your priesthood offices, make sure you understand how those scriptures apply not just to you, but to the women in your lives. Make sure you can articulate the power women have to work beside you in the work of salvation. Make sure you are prepared to treat every girl, every young woman, and every Sister in this Church as a powerful, cherished daughter of God. Make sure you understand that women in this Church are every bit as capable of bearing divine power and sacred office as you are. You have much you can learn from them, and you will never be as effective in your priesthood service until you learn that lesson.

In closing, I want to teach you the priesthood language you Young Women need to know and recognize for what it is. It’s the most common phrase we say and hear in the Church—even more than “and then it came to pass.” It’s how we end every prayer, every lesson, every talk, and every testimony we give, and I hope you’ll feel the power in it every time you say it now. It’s the language that matters when it comes to speaking and acting with power and authority from God. It’s the phrase I’m going to use now, not just to end my talk, not because it’s the thing we’ve all been taught to say, but because I am calling down all the powers of heaven to give power and weight to my words. I am calling down the powers of heaven to bless each and every one of you with a deeper knowledge of the power and authority you possess as daughters of God. I leave these words and my testimony with you,

In the Name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

The Youth Fundraiser—Then and Now

 

It's that time of year when various congregations are doing their annual youth fundraisers to raise money for their youth camps this summer. The emails went out last week setting the date for our silent auction and asking other members of the ward to volunteer items and services for the youth auction. I've decided to make a crocheted blanket (maybe two) for it. We did a dessert auction in my last ward and people paid $200 for cake pops that the Young Women made, so I'm imagining some version of that will also happen here.

That was one of the last years girl's camp was a thing before they made a lot of changes to the youth program. From what I see now, the single fundraiser pays for a co-ed overnight trip that all the youth go on to the same place, and have the chance to do the same activities. It's wildly different from what my experience was as a youth, where the Young Women would raise most of the money and the lion's share of it would end up paying for the Young Men to go to Scout Camp because it was more expensive. I went to Church in Delaware when I was in Young Women and there was an enormous discrepancy between Camp Rodney (the expensive and very nice facilities owned by the Boy Scouts) and the cabins we went to, all of which were in poor conditions and didn't have a fraction of the amenities and offerings that Scouting did.

I hope those days are gone for good. I would not wish them back. And now that I know the stuff I donate isn't being allocated in ridiculously gendered ways, I'm happy to support in whatever way I can to give the youth a fun experience in the outdoors together. Especially if it means I don't have to come along because these Idaho people feel the need to climb up vertical surfaces to the tops of things, and I do not enjoy it. If I'm going to pop a lung, I can think of better places to do it than in the middle of nowhere down the dirt roads of Idaho.

All this to say: if you're so inclined, start thinking and planning the goodies you want to offer up for your youth fundraiser.

And if you were in Young Men as a youth, know that more likely than not, the other youth in Young Women you went to church with probably paid (at least in part) for you to go to Scout Camp. You can thank them by making sure the Young Men and their leaders in your congregations pull their own weight during these fundraisers instead of making the Young Women do all the work and raise all of the money.

The Meaning of Integrity

On the 3rd of October in 1992, Sinead O'Connor performed Bob Marley's "War" on Saturday Night Live.

She concluded that performance by ripping up a picture of John Paul II, in condemnation of the sexual abuse of children by the Catholic Church.

Two weeks later, O'Connor appeared on stage at Madison Square Gardens for a Bob Dylan tribute concert.

This is what happened to her there.

Here's the thing though.

She was right.

She was right that the Catholic Church had a widespread, international cover-up of sexual abuse of hundreds (thousands?) of victims that wouldn't come to light for almost another decade.

That entire crowd, many of whom were not Catholic and had no personal experience with the church to draw from in assessing her claims, booed her off-stage all the same.

Call it the Dunning-Kruger effect. Call it being confidently incorrect. But the word I like best is wrong.

They were wrong.

Everyone who lambasted Sinead O'Connor in the media for the message she delivered was wrong.

She was right. They were wrong. And the price of their wrongness was that the abuse of children at the hands of Catholic priests went on for almost an entire decade longer. Not because it was a secret. Not because it wasn't known. It was because when confronted with the truth, no one who heard it was prepared to believe it.

Kris Kristofferson said Sinead O'Connor had integrity. And let's be clear about what integrity is. It's not stating an unpopular opinion or belief, regardless of the reaction it gets from other people. It's the act of telling the objective truth, no matter what the consequences are, especially in protection of someone who cannot defend themselves from harm.

Conservative pundits, paid actors, and politicians don't have integrity because they're willing to debase themselves publicly by abusing marginalized people for money, without apology or remorse. The fact that they remain unchanged by visceral public rejection is not integrity. In so much of what they say and do, they've been proven to be dishonest, if not confidently incorrect. But remember, that just means they're wrong. And refusing to admit that they're wrong when they've been corrected (or in many cases, caught) with the objective truth makes them liars. And liars, by definition, do not have integrity.

Integrity is what happens when you tell the truth that no one wants to hear, it costs you everything, and you still keep telling it anyway.

This is what so many youth leaders taught in the Church. Especially in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I was a youth and Integrity was one of the Young Women values: "Till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me." Job 27:5

So it should come as no surprise when those same youth (now adults) look upon the words of those like Donald Trump and all who support him and see the lies for what they are, who refuse to support any of them because it would mean giving up their own integrity. It's what they taught us to do. They can't take any of it back now.

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.

Finding the Defiance in Turning the Other Cheek

Angel of Empathy, J. Kirk Richards

Part of how I'm navigating this current era of watching the most conservative apostles die on every untenable hill is by shifting my focus to female leadership, members, and their perspectives. What this looks like is getting their books from the Church's thrift store, Deseret Industries. I live in an area where this is very easy to do. Curating my library of church books to be predominantly written by and focused on women is something that brings me joy. 

So of course, some dude had to come and interrupt it.

Around the same time I picked up Rosie Card's book from the shelf, one of the employees came over to stock more books. Apropos of nothing, he tried to engage me in a conversation about the SEC fine, with the opener of "Did you know our church is the richest one in the world?"

Now, the trouble with doing this to strangers is you have no idea who you could be talking to and what their lived experience has been. I could've said absolutely anything back to him, much of which could've hurt his feelings. But I didn't. I was not having this conversation with a stranger in DI because it's not my job to help him manage whatever combination of feelings was going on inside of him to make him approach me like this. So I ignored him.

He didn't take the hint, so I said as gently as I could, "Yes, sweetheart. I'm aware."

He didn't expect that. He didn't know what to do with it. It confused him enough that he disengaged. He then left me alone to do my browsing.

Just because a person refuses to engage in a dialogue about the failures of the Church with you doesn't mean they are ignorant about the situation, or deluding themselves into apologetics to soothe themselves into pretending it isn't happening. Sometimes, the exact opposite is true. They know just as much, if not more of the details of the situation than you do. They know people involved whose names you don't even know.

The world of the Church is small like that.

When you come at someone sideways, in inappropriate times and places, with assumptions and accusations, you put yourself into a position where the only version of a story you will hear and can accept is the one being passed around by people in that exact frame of mind.

Why?

Because folks with the details you don't know aren't interested in having an argument, especially not with a stranger. Silence is how they protect their peace. It's not complicity in wrong-doing. It's the refusal to engage with someone who lacks tact and self-control. That behavior creates an echo chamber of its own in which no one involved actually arrives at a full vision of the truth.

Anyway, here's my haul from yesterday:

•  A Woman's Reach, Belle S. Spafford
• Model Mormon, Rosemary Card
• Women Testify of Jesus Christ, Elaine Cannon
• Women I Have Known and Been, Carol Lynn Pearson
• Why the Church is as True as the Gospel, Eugene England
  

I'm going to make a Goodreads bookshelf of my finds to share what I've found so far since people have asked. You can also find what I'm currently reading in the Goodreads widget in my sidebar

I also got Becoming by Michelle Obama. Anyone insulting me for including her memoir will be reminded that she has never had to pay a $5 million fine to the SEC.

 

P.S. If you think "turning the other cheek" in Matthew 5:39 means passively letting people hurt you, let me relieve you of the burden of that false interpretation. Turning the other cheek is an act of defiance, the refusal to surrender your own dignity to the person trying to deprive it from you. That's what Jesus taught.

RIP Krista Brown Smith

Today was the funeral. It was the biggest one I've ever seen. There were so many people there, it filled the parking lot, the park next door, all the street parking on both sides of the building, and down the block.

The chapel was packed. The overflow and the cultural hall were packed to the point of standing room only. There were so many flowers up front, I don't know how they fit them all up there.

I was really nervous. It's been years since I went to church in person because of the pandemic. It was also my first time visiting since we left the ward. The eulogies were beautiful, especially from the former bishop she and I served with in Young Women. So many moments I shared with her came back to the surface for me.

The most important one was the time she invited me over for a girl's night, and we just talked for hours. She wanted to invite me into her fertility struggles, knowing that I'd been through so many of my own. We commiserated over the same frustrations and disappointments with the only fertility clinic anywhere near us. I gave her the best advice I had for any infertile person which I wish someone had given to me: have a time frame in mind for how long you're going to keep trying. Give yourself permission to stop. Don't keep hurting your own feelings more than you can take.

And as it so often happens, she gave up on the fertility treatments when she reached her point of exhaustion without success, only to get pregnant on her own after she stopped the treatments. I smiled when they recounted that story, knowing the hand I played in it.

She was such a good listener. She had a way about her that made you feel like you were the only person in the planet when you were talking to her. I confided in her my struggles with going to church, with the way things are for women who do so much with so little respect and recognition. She loved me in that moment exactly as I was, without asking me to be or feel any differently. I didn't realize it at the time, but that conversation was what put me on the path to returning to church. All because she made me feel understood. Accepted. Loved unconditionally.

It was also the last time I would see her alive.

Seeing her casket, I didn't regret not going to the viewing on Sunday. I want to remember her as she was then. Smiling and laughing with her on her couch, eating pizza and being one of the rare visitors who actually got to see her cat.

I've never been to an LDS funeral where they truly pull out all the stops. I didn't know what happened next. That the family would leave the building to do the burial and the cultural hall was about to be transformed before my eyes. Tables, chairs, centerpieces, plastic cutlery wrapped in napkins and tied with pink bows. In the time it took me to say hello to several of the people I had spotted, it all coalesced seemingly from nowhere. There was one more person I wanted to say hello to, and I already knew where she would be.

I went into the kitchen, and sure enough. She was surrounded by people who were all asking for directions for food prep and presentation for the luncheon. She had just enough time to give me the biggest hug and get a thirty second update on me and my family before she handed me a salad and told me to follow her so she could keep listening. Before I knew it, I was prepping and plating dozens of pieces of cheesecake, chopping lemon slices for water pitchers, running back and forth to refill salads, funeral potatoes, fruit, and dinner rolls.

In all that hustle and bustle, I felt a part of me coming back to life. The one that knew the alto parts to almost every hymn. The one who was loved and remembered to be invited to this, even after all these years. The one who belonged. It all came back to me so fast, it honestly felt like I never left, that no time had even passed at all. I could just pick up right where I left off with a group of people who have already decided that they love me, no matter what.

It was there all along. But it took me walking away, then coming back a different person for me to be able to see it. Thank you, Krista. For everything.

Lessons from the Silk Industry in Utah

Why do I have such an easy time being vaguely indifferent to things most church leaders say, regardless of who they are or what they want from me? 

That's a fun story so I'll tell it to you.

I was in Young Women as a teenager when the Personal Progress value projects were still a thing, while at the same time the curriculum du jour for adults was to study the life of a dead prophet. I already had this nagging sense that it was weird that we only studied the lives of LDS men in this kind of detail. I also had a fixation at the same time with the history of women's suffrage, thanks almost entirely to the movie Iron Jawed Angels.

I arrived at the intersection between women's suffrage and Utah spontaneously while falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. I decided this was something I was already going to dedicate at least 10 more hours of my life to and called it a value project. Along the way, I bumped into the history of the silk industry in Utah.

Silk Culture, 1895. Photography by George Edward Anderson. Courtesy of the Church History Catalog

What the failure of the bank in Kirtland was to Joseph Smith, the silk industry was to Brigham Young. Namely, a colossal waste of time and money.

Brigham Young decided, based on I still don't know what, that a good use of the time and limited resources of the women still trying to figure out how to survive in Utah should be dedicated to hand raising silk worms for the creation of silk. If you don't know anything about silk creation, it's ridiculously labor intensive. It relies entirely on your ability to meet the dietary/environmental demands of a bunch of worms whose constitutions are incredibly delicate. These worms are just waiting to yeet themselves off the mortal coil at the slightest offense.

And that's before any fiber has been produced. 

All for a task the women were not choosing to do themselves. Most notably, Zina D. H. Young, wife of Brigham Young who was appointed by him to oversee the silk production, hated the silk worms sufficiently that they gave her nightmares.

The silk industry in Utah was a colossal failure. They couldn't get the machines to process the silk. What they were able to produce had no market outside of Utah and was frequently sold at a loss to the producers.

Brigham Young said he wanted his coffin to be lined with pink Relief Society silk. There was more than one woman in Utah who probably heard that and thought to themselves "if that geezer wants silk in his coffin, let him come down here and make it himself."

As a convert who was reading about all of this on 2007 dial up internet, totally unsupervised, I had the space to come to my own conclusions about what I was reading. The lesson I took from it was this: Men in the Church would rather waste women's time and the Church's money on something they can see is a failure, rather than admit they were wrong. And God is 100% willing to let them embarrass themselves like that.

I went into my adulthood as a member of the Church knowing this was a thing that could happen, largely because it had already happened. It planted the seed in me not to automatically prioritize anything, just because a man in the Church with a title was telling me to do something, because they're still mortal men capable of misleading me. They can have me spending resources on something that will never succeed.

I had a brain with the ability to judge for myself, a mouth with the ability to say "No," and a God who was teaching me early to use them both.

It's an important lesson if you don't want to be raising silk worms in the desert, asking yourself repeatedly "how did I get here?

Epilogue: Proposition 8 happened the following year. If you even thought for half a second of suggesting those two experiences are unrelated, no you didn't.

Addressing Mental Health and Prayer with LDS Youth

Coming from someone who was in Young Men/Young Women adjacent callings for years in my previous ward: the most important thing I ever said to a room full of teenagers is that mental illness doesn't mean that God has given up on you.

Even if your family is no longer in the Church, do yourself a favor. Go say those exact words to the Mormon/Mormon-adjacent kids and teens in your life.

How did we get to the place where we have to say that? I have theories based on the youth I taught. The group who needed this the most were the teenage boys. Hands down. No question. And I think how we get here isn't necessarily through "mental health treatment doesn't work" messaging. The youth I had weren't sequestered from getting real professional help. 

What I think goes wrong here is the idea that prayer helps in every situation.

People with mental illness have a very different relationship with prayer than those without it. Prayer does not cure, or even improve, mental illness. I will go so far as to say the best messaging is that prayer has no impact on mental illness.

Kids in religious households need to hear this very explicitly. They need to hear it from the adults they love and trust. The first person saying it to them should not be their Sunday School teacher when they're 14 and 15 years old. (Ask me how I know.)

What happens if they don't hear that? The following logical progression: I am depressed, anxious, struggling with an illness in my brain. I prayed for help. I can't "feel" the answer. I'm too broken for God. God doesn't love me anymore. 

They will go to this place on their own, independent of the example you've set for them in pursuing mental health treatment in your own life. They need someone they know and trust to help them contextualize religious devotion through the lens of mental illness.

I would also add to this: There isn't anything wrong with teaching young children that they can feel answers to their prayers. There's a lot wrong with that messaging if it doesn't evolve with them as they grow up and mature into adulthood. 

As a religious person with mental illness, God isn't someone I interact with through my feelings, especially when I'm in crisis. God is the one teaching me to reach out, ask for help, and to keep asking until I get the help I need. God is the one in that situation telling me not to give up on myself, and to take care of myself. 

When I'm in crisis, there is very little else God is going to be saying to me. Why? Because God knows better than I do that Prozac is better than prayer for me in that moment. It can make religious people uncomfortable to say this because they feel like it's admitting failure in God.

To me, it's like purposefully having a conversation in a loud room and making the person I'm with scream at me, when I already know they don't like to yell.

I take my medicine because it quiets most of the noise from my mental illness most of the time. Then when I pray, it's less of a struggle to hear and interact with God. That's just the nature of being me. There's nothing wrong with that. And it doesn't mean God doesn't love me.

Our teens struggle more with their mental health than other teenagers because they're getting very different messaging about God's direct, granular involvement in their lives than most other teenagers, with no corollary for mental illness. So they go from "God is in every detail of my life" to "God is nowhere to be found." 

That's not good! It's enough to make any mental illness worse because our youth feel like the most loving, most selfless part of their support system abandons them when they need it most.  

If you're going to raise your children in a religious environment, there needs to be a healthy understanding that God isn't a magic gumball machine who takes away every problem just because they pray. How we talk about mental illness needs to be a part of that.

The Duty and Difficulty of Protecting Children from Sexual Abuse

Let's talk about why it's important for believing members to be okay with  condemning The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its failures to adequately protect children from sexual abuse.

 

The Church is not just an institution made of policies and procedures like some sort of abstract machine. First and foremost, it is an assemblage of people. It's going to have all the same problems people have. And there is a problem with childhood sexual abuse in our society. The Church has a childhood sexual abuse problem because our society has a sexual abuse problem. And I say that as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. 

This is something every person needs to be acquainted with how to address. Not just at Church. In their jobs. In their families. In their schools. In the friend groups of their children. For a child to be abused secretly, more than just a church needs to fail.  

Teachers. Coaches. Youth group leaders, secular and religious. Parents. Friends of parents. Other relatives. 

Think of all the adults in a child's life that have to fail them for a secret like this to go on being kept. How many adults have to be unsafe for a child to say nothing?

This is a failure in the Church to take this seriously. But I'm afraid too many people are so eager to dunk on church leadership, they're not internalizing the important lesson here. It's not just the church leaders who failed. 

Every adult in that family's lives failed. 

An estimated 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of childhood sexual abuse, according to the Crimes Against Children Research Center. Think about what that means in your life. Your family members. Your children's friends. Your students. Your friend's children. 

Maybe you've managed to be surrounded by the 4 out of 5 girls and 19 out of 20 boys every day of your life who has never experienced sexual abuse, that you've never missed the opportunity to help. 

Or maybe you're not as safe of an adult as you think you are.

The entire reason I refused to ever report the sexual abuse that happened to me was because I never wanted to be forcibly separated from my younger sister. If I didn't know where she was, I couldn't protect her. Any adult who would've come into my life, guns blazing, trying to upturn my situation with no thought as to how the dust was going to settle once law enforcement came into my life was not trustworthy to me. Especially when sexual abuse is rampant in the foster care system.

Helping childhood sexual assault victims is many things. Heartbreaking. Tragic. Delicate. Morally fraught, especially for all the ways a child's wishes have no weight on the situation.

 

The one thing it's not is simple, which is why we all are so abysmally bad at addressing it in our society.

 

So why am I in a place where I criticize the Church for these failures, especially from a place where my association with the institution isn't changed by stories like this? Several reasons.

• The Church won't change what it doesn't have to acknowledge from the inside.
• These types of failures exist everywhere in our society, not just in the Church. It's not like I have anywhere I can go to escape it. It's literally everywhere. 
• I can, and have, done work to heal survivors on the ground in my local congregations.
• My experience as a survivor in the Church, because the Church was not connected to my abuse, has been overwhelmingly positive. I have seen how well the Church can do the work of healing survivors, when they do it right. To me, that is a goal worth working towards.

So if it makes you uncomfortable to see a faithful church member condemning the Church for how it's currently handling its failures to protect children from being abused, maybe you should sit down and ask yourself: 

 

What do I think the Atonement is for if not for this?

You might think I can't be a good Christian if I'm willing to condemn the prophets and apostles over this. I don't think you can be a good Christian without it.

The Good Shepherd

Let's talk about sheep.

Jesus taught that we are his flock of sheep. And the likes of Greg Olsen have made that sentiment way more endearing than I think it was intended to be. When you actually know something about animal husbandry, his meaning changes from the way we typically understand it.

If you had to describe sheep, here are several words and phrases you could use:

• helpless 
• vulnerable 
• fragile 
• able to be injured or killed remarkably easily, especially by accident

I'm learning animal husbandry for my certification as a veterinary nurse. Sheep scare the shit out of me. Handle them wrong and you can literally snap their necks. Their skeletons are fragile. They can't regulate their body temperatures much beyond 50°F. If you handle them roughly, you can break their back legs. You can't grab them by the fleece because you can permanently ruin their skin. They can't jump especially well. They have no natural defenses of any kind. If you remove a baby from its mother before she can bond with it, even to save its life, she will abandon it entirely. Touch them wrong and you could do irreparable harm to them.

 

There's no such thing as a little "oops" with sheep. Every sheep has to be treated like the slightest injury is a big deal. There's no such thing as being too sensitive or too careful with sheep. Their feelings matter because they are incapable of withstanding any kind of violence. There is no place for violence in a sheep herd. 

 

The shepherd's biggest worry for the sheep isn't just that a predator could come and wipe them all out. It's also that he could literally kill them by accident through bad husbandry.  

 

If you fancy yourself any kind of shepherd like Jesus Christ was, in any kind of ministering capacity, you need to recognize that one of the greatest threats to its survival isn't wolves. 

 

It's you. 

 

Specifically, you assuming you know what you're doing whenever do not. Because in that scenario, it's not a question of if you will do irreparable harm to some of the sheep in your care. It's when and how.

 

To be a good shepherd is to love sheep in all of their "I'm allergic to tap water" glory. To care enough to know how to handle them with love, meeting all their needs, no matter what they are.

 

When we talk about Jesus being the Good Shepherd, that's what that means.

Why "No" Needs to Become a Complete Sentence in the Church

I remember the "What am I doing to myself?" moment the last time I got talked into going to girl's camp after I initially said "No."

I had the undeniable prompting that I needed to leave, drove home in the dark on terrifying mountain roads in rural Idaho. At one point, a bat flew right into my windshield and scared me half to death. 

I didn't get home until 1 a.m.

My mother-in-law was actively deteriorating from either Lewy Body or vascular dementia. She ended up falling on the floor the next morning. She would've been stuck like that for hours had I not come home early from girl's camp.

I still haven't recovered from how angry I was at that entire situation.

Just once, I want a man in the Church to hear me say "No" to something and just say "OK."

Rethinking What "Clean" Language Means

I watched History of Swear Words, that documentary about cussing on Netflix. Starring Nicholas Cage, it's an in-depth exploration on the history and etymology of various swear words, where each word gets its own dedicated episode. The scholarly approach, combined with the subject matter, is a fascinating romp through how humans use and develop language.

I don't remember which episode it was, but one of the people being interviewed made an observation I find especially salient. The most offensive words to young people aren't the Four Letter words for bodily functions anymore. 

They're slurs for marginalized groups.

Imagine having that lesson in Young Women.

"We're having a lesson on clean language today. Why the N-word is wrong for you to say and I better never hear you say it. You've been warned."

There's a lot to be said about making sure that kind of language is included, confronted, and specifically condemned in those lessons. Otherwise, we may end up raising children who casually using the language that is actually the most offensive in the societies in which they live.

Remembering to Collect and Donate Feminine Hygiene Products

The next time my ward collects items for homeless people, I'm donating feminine hygiene products.

 

It never occurred to me that feminine hygiene products are such dire need items for the vulnerable. But thinking about what I go through to buy them, how could they not be?

This becomes increasingly frustrating when you realize that feminine hygiene products are taxed, but Viagra isn't. Prescription medication isn't subject to taxes because it's considered a biological necessity, and it's not the time for the government to be making money. Feminine hygiene should have that same protected status. They are a public health necessity. There shouldn't be any distinctions between them and prescription medication.

Where I live in Idaho, the sales tax is 6%. In certain municipalities, total sales tax is as high as 9%. This is very common in larger cities and areas with high costs of living. Pads and tampons are not tax exempt,  are not covered by public assistance funds like SNAP/food stamps, and are legally classified as luxuries, not needs. My state government is not only choosing to make money off of menstruation, it's forcing the full cost onto individuals and families, regardless of their socioeconomic status.

 

No one should ever have to make a pad out of a rag, a napkin, or an old shirt. But that's what menstruation looks like for those who can't access what they need to be safe, clean, and happy.

When you donate this holiday season, don't forget feminine hygiene products. And if you still have it in you to write to your elected officials, maybe tack this into your next letter, email, or mass-fax.

Approaching Modesty with Respect

Our Young Women president handled this so well this past week at Mutual, and I want to tell y'all about it.

The plan was to meet up at a local park and play water balloon volleyball. It involved tossing balloons with towels on a tennis court. Everyone showed up in street clothes, not bathing suits. Several older girls, including a visitor, came in the shortest of short shorts.

Our Young Women president wanted to say something about modesty to the girls, but wasn't sure if that setting was the best place. So she asked us advisors and her counselors in the presidency. It was discreet and out of earshot of any of the girls. 

Multiple leaders said no, that it was best not to do that with these particular girls. We're in a delicate situation with several of them, trying to help them attend more frequently and grow spiritually. They would not have handled the correction well. It likely would not result in a change in their behavior, except not to come back to church anymore.

She took that advice to heart and didn't say anything. We had a great activity and all the girls left more likely to return the next week.

I really appreciated her wisdom in pausing, asking for help and support from her presidency and leaders. It truly was a treasure to witness. I would definitely recommend that as an approach in the future.

Come Follow Me: How does the priesthood bless women and mothers?

In my current ward, my time has been focused primarily in serving among the youth. My first calling was to teach the 14-15 year old young men and women in Sunday School. My current calling is as the Beehive Adviser, a youth leader to the 12 and 13 year old girls of my congregation.

Today, we had a lesson on the Holy Ghost. After discussing the difference between the Light of Christ and the gift of the Holy Ghost, we had a lengthy discussion about spiritual gifts. It was a discussion made all the more meaningful after the confirmation of a laurel we had in our ward earlier this morning.

As part of this conversation, I wanted to address a particular point that was inspired by a question from the Come Follow Me curriculum. As I sat down to prepare a lesson in April answering the question How was the priesthood restored?, one particular question in the Learn Together section struck me as one I wanted to address in detail with the class:

How does the priesthood bless women and mothers?

I ultimately ended up creating an entire lesson that addresses this question instead. It was important to me to differentiate between the authority of the priesthood, and the power of the priesthood. Because while men alone are ordained to the authority of the priesthood, hold keys, and officiate in the offices, there is no gender restriction on the power of the priesthood in any way. The power of the priesthood, in its most fundamental sense, is the power of God. And women of faith access and exercise the power of God every day in their lives.

As an example of this point, I wanted to specifically outline how women exercise spiritual gifts. These gifts are not limited by type, gender, or priesthood ordination, and are instead a manifestation of the gift of the Holy Ghost in our lives. I could think of no better way to illustrate this than via the scriptures, which is how I came up with this chart.

By outlining the spiritual gifts listed in Moroni 10: 9-16, and challenging the young women to think of examples of each that deal either primarily or solely with women, we were able to think of examples for each of the gifts without much difficulty. Not only that, but it became abundantly clear that many of the accounts involving women are manifestations of more than one gift.

While I came prepared with my own examples, the young women did not need my assistance to think of them. They were able to complete the chart on their own, faster than I was able to write in the names or descriptions of these women. They also came up with other examples that hadn't come to mind as I was preparing my chart, including when Mary (mother of Jesus) spoke with the angel Gabriel.

In fact, I've already decided that I want to expand this chart to include a more thorough survey of women in the scriptures. And because I know it will be a blessing to the young women to read the experiences of women in the scriptures, I think it would be a great Personal Progress project in which to have them participate.

Verse from Moroni 10	Spiritual Gift	Example of Woman from the Scriptures
V: 9	Spirit of  God to teach the word of wisdom	Emma Smith: D&C 25: 7-8
V: 10	Teach the word of knowledge	Eve: Moses 5: 11-12
V: 11	Exceedingly great faith	Esther 4: 14, 16; 5: 1-2
V: 11	Healing/being healed	Woman with issue: Mark 5: 27-29, 33-34 Daughter of Jairus: Mark 5: 41-42
V: 12	To work mighty miracles	Stripling Mothers: Alma 56: 46-48
V: 13	To prophesy	Deborah: Judges 4: 6-7 Mary and Women at Pentecost: Acts 2: 17-18
V: 14	Beholding of Angels and Ministering Spirits	Mary Magdalene and Women at the Tomb: Matthew 28: 5-6
V: 15	Gift of Tongues	Mary (Mother of Jesus) and Women at Pentecost: Acts 2: 4
V: 16	Interpretation of Tongues	Queen of Lamanites: Alma 19: 29-30

As we conversed about the women of the scriptures, it became obvious that they weren't just women of faith, but also women of great power. Or perhaps I should say, that to be a woman of great faith means inherently to be a woman of great power. You simply cannot have one without the other.

It was a wonderful lesson, one that I felt privileged to give. And it was an enriching change of perspective not only for me, but for the counselor in the Young Women presidency who sits in with us every week. She was so excited, she copied my references and scriptures right from my notes. 

Next time, I should just come prepared with a handout!

I know that Heavenly Father loves, treasures, and empowers his daughters. He has done so in the past, does so in the present, and will continue to do so throughout the endless reaches of the future. While the methods of access to the priesthood are different for men and women, the end result for women who cultivate the access they are given is equal, in every respect, to men in the Church.

I know that Jesus is the Christ. He is my Savior and Redeemer. I rejoice at the thought of spending the rest of my life as his disciple. There is no part of that future to which I do not look forward with great anticipation. I know that he calls prophets and presidents--including women of great power and influence--to lead his restored church. He sustains them, and we are all blessed and empowered together. In the name of Jesus Christ, AMEN.

When the Youth Bail on a Lesson

My Sunday School class sat in the foyer today to communicate how done they are with the Come Follow Me topics for August. 

They have told me outright they dislike the new curriculum. And they really dislike talking about Marriage and Family.

The ones who stayed talked over me the entire class. 

I was warned about this group when I took this calling. But in my experience, they are great kids. Their history suggests they only do this when their real needs aren't being met.

I might need to close the manual for a while.