I have a confession: I don’t much care about what the people in my ward think about me. I feel guilty about this. I wouldn’t want to go too far with my confession. It is tru that I probably don’t want my bishop to think that I am a sinner or an apostate. I certainly don’t have any particular agendas or feats of personal integrity that my fearless individualism allows me to pursue free from fear of social consequences. It is just that by and large, the opinions of most of the people in my ward about me or my life choices don’t matter to me all that much.<\/p>\n
Part of this is that I am really bad at remembering names and faces. In our six years of marriage, my wife and I have moved eight times. As a result, we have been in many different wards, and it takes me a while to get to know everyone and fit in. It is hard to worry about the opinions of those that we do not know. I suspect that a larger part of my disregard comes from simple pride and arrogance. Finally, the largest reason that I don’t much care is that I am not all that good at picking up cues about people’s opinions, and I suspect that most people in my ward rather than maintaining a high or low opinion of me maintain no opinion at all.<\/p>\n
My guilt over this state of affairs, however, comes from the fact that I believe that I ought to care more about what people think about me. As a member of the church, I am part of a community, and it seems to me that meaningful allegiance to a community requires a decent respect for its opinions. If we really are brothers and sisters in the gospel, fellow citizens in the household of God, then I ought to care about what the members of my ward think about me. I care about what my parents or my sisters think of me. Their regard is something of great value to me because it necessarily informs the nature of my relationship with them. It is not that I think that my family will cease to love me or associate with me when I do things that they disapprove of. I don’t worry about this. I trust them and their love. Rather, their regard or lack of it will necessarily create an issue between us. It seems to me that it is not possible to form a community, let alone meaningful relationships of love and charity, without in some sense making your ease or contentment contingent on the opinion of others.<\/p>\n
Many people legitimately complain of feeling judged by those in the church. I have certainly seen rather vicious examples of this in the lives of friends and loved ones. Yet it seems to me that there is a real tragedy in not living with the risk of such hurt. There is an alienation and isolation that comes from not caring about the opinions of others that carries its own measure of loss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have a confession: I don’t much care about what the people in my ward think about me. I feel guilty about this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2451","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\/2451","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\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}