A brilliant and faithful friend of mine was musing on the pattern typical to new converts in her ward. \u00a0With her permission:<\/p>\n
Our ward has brought in a bunch of single females into the baptism font recently and the trajectory has been almost identical for all of them:<\/p>\n
Phase One:<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0 Missionaries love me. I feel the pull of the truth and the Lord’s love.\u00a0 Church members are coming over in droves to listen to me talk for 90 minutes about the inside of my dog’s ear if I want to, waiting to get a niblit of gospel teaching into the conversation.\u00a0I love the church.<\/div>\nPhase Two:<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0 Excited, everyone showed up at my baptism and I’m willing and eager to learn a new life with new friends and the ward family I was welcomed into.\u00a0 This is gonna be so great.\u00a0 The Church is true.<\/div>\nPhase Three:<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0 They are now letting me know that the Jesus I shared my love for doesn’t want me alone and won’t let me hang around unless I’m married and my chances of that are slim to none.\u00a0 I explained I had a horrible marriage, divorce, abuse situation, etc but they summarily dismiss that and insist on family as the ultimate reason to exist and praise Jesus. Redemption and repentance are important but only as paths to get to family.\u00a0 Not to live with the Savior, but to live with my family. \u00a0I sit\u00a0in sacrament meetings all about forever families, but I can’t be sealed to my own children.\u00a0 The “it will come later” explanation seems the same sort of mystery that they said wasn’t good in my old church.\u00a0 But people are nice and seem devoted, at least to their own family.<\/div>\nPhase 4:<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0This is very differerent than my first month here.\u00a0 They don’t know I’ve gone back to my old church to visit. \u00a0Everyone here is too busy\u00a0protecting time with\u00a0their own insulated families.\u00a0 We had prayer circle on Wed and I loved it.\u00a0 I felt like a real family of worshipers again.\u00a0 No one from the new church comes to talk or listen anymore, missionaries stopped coming\u00a0and the assigned teachers don’t seem to have a genuine interest in anything but the magazine they read from.\u00a0\u00a0They don’t come other than that.\u00a0 I thought all that was the beginning of new friendships but I guess not.\u00a0 I don’t know what happened.\u00a0 We had such a good time talking last month.\u00a0 I have friends at my (old) church without even trying.\u00a0 They seem to need friends too so we all have that common support for each other.\u00a0 They have families too but are more open with their time.<\/div>\nMusings:<\/div>\nMaybe the baptisms serve to help us not have so many to do in the millenium but they don’t seem to be much more than that.\u00a0 While I don’t want to be the socially favorite church, it sure seems like\u00a0investigators don’t understand what they are getting into and either don’t have the motivation or don’t have the skills to withstand the isolation we put them through as singles.<\/div>\nWhile Sis Beck talked about the women flooding into the church as we found our vision of RS, I don’t think she meant they would come for 4 month stints and leave.\u00a0 It’s so frustrating and heartbreaking.\u00a0 The ones most attracted are those that need a community and think they’ve found it as the missionaries are so very attentive.\u00a0 Then they get suddenly ignored.<\/div>\n\nSo solutions?\u00a0 Still pondering what to do.\u00a0 Reading through some RS histories to try to get some ideas.\u00a0 [She here names a few women in her ward who do a good job maintaining relationships with singles.] \u00a0Some friends from Utah do it well.\u00a0 It’s far more rare than it should be.\u00a0 And mothers\/families suffer from the consequenses of being so isolated from others and overly insulated as a family.<\/div>\nWhen I was new to the church, I was convinced the choirs needed robes.\u00a0 I’ve since realized that was just my own wish for something familiar in an unfamiliar religionworld.\u00a0 Is this just a choir robe issue or do we really need to be more of a community?\u00a0 Will a community distract from our duties and abilities to care for our families?<\/div>\n“No success will compensate for failure in the home.”\u00a0 If I hear that quote one more time over the pulpit… I may scream.\u00a0 I don’t think they were talking about saying no to callings or spending time with new members.\u00a0 I can come up with\u00a0example after example of pioneer stories that\u00a0WE promote in our talks and lesson, about people inviting refugees into their home nad having all their kids die of smallpox.\u00a0 Of wagon\u00a0company members sharing food with others and suffering terribly.\u00a0\u00a0Missionaries going on 3 yr missions, leaving women and children, sick and pregnant behind.\u00a0 The list of\u00a0overdramatic stories we love are rife with sacrificing for others.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\nAnd the rumor is that “singles” are selfish or overly self-concerned.\u00a0 Oh brother!<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A brilliant and faithful friend of mine was musing on the pattern typical to new converts in her ward. \u00a0With her permission:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20575"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20610,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20575\/revisions\/20610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}