Setting High Goals for Life After the Mission

Any of my companions will remember my love for keeping the ward list cleaned up.  I really enjoyed getting updated addresses & phone numbers from members of the ward (especially inactive members) and passing that info back to get it updated in the system.  I hated to see mistakes like a family split into two separate groupings or a child duplicated in the system.  At least once on a slow day, I recall getting out the phone book, hoping to find inactive members who were "lost", get their contact info back on the list, and of course eventually reactivate them.  On the other hand, when contacting members of the church who were no longer active, who expressed no desire to be contacted by members or missionaries, and who appeared to no longer believe in the gospel, I believed that they should remove their names from the Book of Life (or at the very least remove it from our ward directory so it would be cleaner!)  I didn't like discussing increasing our ward activity rates and knowing that there were people among the number of inactives who seemed completely impossible to reactivate, since they wouldn't even TALK to us.

I do think this belief played a small part into why, after being inactive and an unbeliever myself for the past couple of years, I decided to have my name removed from the records of the church.  If I don't believe it, why would I want my name to remain there?  If I don't want anything to do with the church anymore, why would I want well-intentioned missionaries banging on my door every few transfers?  If I believe in all that is good and true as it relates to organization and record-keeping, why on earth would I want my name to stay there on that record, distorting the membership numbers of the church and lowering their activity rates?  They will be grateful I'm removing my name, for accuracy's sake!  Right?  Right.

However, that was never my thought while on my mission, of course.  I never expected ME to be one of those people.  The following blog entry details the lofty goals and high hopes I had for myself following my mission:

20 Jan 2002 – No Aparicios at church, but Hna Guerrero came again!  :)  Zone Activity cancelled for tomorrow… or postponed for the next Monday.  So, we think we’ll play volleyball & who knows what else, with the Tapias & all the district.  Should be fun! :) Today S Williams & I were going through the new ward list that Mark Brown just gave us, and making corrections of address, phone, name, etc… I enjoy that type of stuff.  I would like to be ward clerk.  But maybe I’ll just strive to be wife of the ward clerk, & I’ll talk my husband into letting me help out.  :)  I’m not quite sure why that’s a priesthood calling.  Well… I guess in a way I understand it but I don’t like it.  :(  Today, we told Pres Berry that we’d like to start going to some of the youth basketball games (because of the nonmember families) but they are Saturday mornings, the same time we go to the Remate*.  Maybe we’ll have to do companion exchanges to get both things done.  :(  I’d like to do both!

*Note: Remate = flea market in spanish.  We would go there to set up a booth to try to contact people and hand out pass-along cards. 

In case you were wondering, yes, I did obtain the high and lofty status as Ward Clerk's Wife.  Thankfully, I obtained said calling just a short time before finally drifting away from church.  It didn't turn out as fun as I'd always hoped, and my husband never let me update records directly into MLS.  It is, after all, a priesthood calling, and I wasn't born with the right body parts for that.

How many baptisms do YOU have?

Wouldn't it have been funny if we all had received one of these for each baptism that we participated in?  I'm imagining us wearing them all on our shoulder like military (or boy scout) badges.  It would have shown our rank. 

Of course, we were sometimes reminded that the important thing was not how many baptisms we got.  On the other hand, we were sometimes subtly told that how many baptism we got was exactly what was important.  I recall a Zone Conference about "Inner Circle Missionaries."  If I recall, to be an Inner Circle Missionary, you were supposed to be obedient and diligent and all those wonderful virtues.  But there was (at least) one missionary whose main technique seemed to be Flirt to Convert and who had been caught in deception and who otherwise seemed to be NOT living the wonderful virtues, but who was considered an Inner Circle Missionary - due entirely, from my understanding at the time, to the number of baptisms said missionary had achieved. I also remember, one particular transfer, being told to set a goal of how many baptisms we were going to get during that transfer.  My comp & I set a ridiculously high number (well, it only seems ridiculous in retrospect, since it was about the number of baptisms I "got" my entire mission) and ended up with zero that transfer, I think.

I also remember disliking the fact that my number of baptisms was marked on the little ID card kept in the Mission President's office.  The card had my name, my picture, it showed what area I was currently in and who my companion was, and it had a tally of how many baptisms I had so far.  I think I was given that little card at the end of my mission to keep.  Things like that, combined with the reminders that number of baptisms aren't important, sent a mixed message about what our purpose was.

I hope you never felt that your status as a missionary, as a member, or as a human depended on how many people you led to the waters of baptism.