{"id":46668,"date":"2024-03-06T07:05:44","date_gmt":"2024-03-06T14:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.timesandseasons.org\/?p=46668"},"modified":"2024-03-06T16:49:12","modified_gmt":"2024-03-06T23:49:12","slug":"46668","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2024\/03\/46668\/","title":{"rendered":"The Refiner’s Fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWas the refiner\u2019s fire hot?\u201d my stake president (SP2) asked me on the night he came over to give me my release a little less than a year ago. This was a bit of a surprise since it was at 4.5 years, but SP2 explained that they were reworking the boundaries. His question was in reference to the hard time he knew I\u2019d had as bishop, and I appreciated his acknowledgement of that.<\/p>\n

Lots of reasons why and I consider an instance I\u2019d had a couple of months before my release to be most indicative of the experience. My wife (Lee) and I were on a date and had stopped to do some grocery shopping. As we sat in the car, Lee cried and expressed how difficult and emotionally exhausting my time as bishop had been and how she couldn\u2019t wait for it to be over. My radiantly positive and confident wife doesn\u2019t do much crying in the car, but was that evening.* SP1, who called me, told me that he hoped my time as bishop would be the very best time for my family; that goal didn\u2019t seem to have been achieved.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And yet, a lot of other things had been achieved for me. I came in feeling pretty shaky about a number of things, and at the point of sitting in the car in the grocery store parking lot, I was definitely feeling better about the church and my place in it, with all my unconventional views (more on all of that).<\/p>\n

So as Lee cried, I thought, \u201cI\u2019m actually feeling better about things, but considering what we\u2019ve been through, crying in the parking lot seems like a very appropriate response.\u201d The point of this post isn\u2019t so much to focus on those difficult things, but more of my sense of myself and relationship to God and the church that I developed during the process despite my unconventionality.<\/p>\n

A good story of how I felt at the time of my release was when the youth Sunday school asked me to come see her class on my last day. As I walked down the hall to the class I thought, \u201cOh, man. I was so bad at working with the youth, and I never improved.\u201d But as that thought crossed my mind, another thought did as well: I truly believed that I had given everything I had to the calling, even if a lot of things about it I was bad at. God had asked for everything, and I had given all I had.<\/p>\n

Being a bishop is really hard and I think I may have had a few additional challenges. I\u2019d break those overall challenges into four categories 1) the general hard stuff of the huge calling 2) perhaps made harder by my social awkwardness and introversion (kind of unacceptable for bishops and that\u2019s hard) 3) my own struggling to make sense of my unorthodox views on the church and unorthodox research, and 4) the changes the church leaders made over the last 5 to 8 years, many of which made the bishop\u2019s task much harder, in my experience.<\/p>\n

The point isn\u2019t so much to complain as to give some context for what I\u2019m sharing here. All of these contexts include many long stories, but I did very much come to view my hard stuff as very useful learning experiences that God wanted me to go through. And in terms of the context for this series, a big part of that was the sense of myself as committed to God and the church despite my unorthodoxy.<\/p>\n

Watership Down <\/em>was my wife\u2019s favorite book as a kid and became a family favorite. I hope I\u2019m not giving away spoilers to say I love the book\u2019s many climaxes, especially the great showdown between Woundwort and Bigwig. Woundwort is the biggest, fiercest rabbit who has come with his lieutenants to meet out revenge on the Watership Down warren for having tricked them. The mighty Bigwig, though not as large as Woundwort, must hold off Woundwort while Watership Down\u2019s clever leader figures out a way to save his warren.<\/p>\n

Woundwort and Bigwig clash again and again both knowing that if\/when Woundwort kills Bigwig, his rabbits will have the Herculean task of trying to remove Bigwig\u2019s corpse from the tunnel he is guarding. Woundwort, exhausted from the fight, and knowing what a problem Bigwig\u2019s death in the tunnel will cause, pleads with Bigwig to come out, offering him all kinds of inducements.<\/p>\n

Which leads to what is likely my favorite line in all of literature: \u201c[Bigwig\u2019s] reply, when it came was low and gasping, but perfectly clear. \u201cMy Chief Rabbit has told me to defend this run and until he says otherwise I shall stay here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"
Bigwig v. Woundwort<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bigwig\u2019s resolve holds them off, and having loved that allusion of Bigwig\u2019s ultimate dedication, I do feel like my time as bishop was a Bigwig-like task. I did feel absolutely pummeled by those four factors I listed above in Woundwort-like fury for 4.5 years. And though not a mighty rabbit like Bigwig, my sense of having come through the process does make me feel like I\u2019ve come to Bigwig\u2019s resolution. God asked me to perform bishop and other tasks and I will stay and defend my tunnel while the Woundwort storm rages on.<\/p>\n

So if I cause any discomfort or confusion over any of my future posts (sorry!) leading any to wonder or express, \u201cWhat kind of Mormon is this?\u201d just know that I will disagree with claims that I\u2019m not properly LDS (though I can certainly understand confusion, that makes sense). I definitely have a knowledge of the sacrifice I gave and what I learned from it. That\u2019s a big part of what I took from the experience.<\/p>\n

More to come!
\n_____<\/p>\n

*And, no, I wasn\u2019t a bishop-husband forcing the imposition of my calling down my wife\u2019s throat (I hear that can happen!) Like I said in my last post<\/a>, my wife is quite assertive and had overwhelmingly took the view of encouraging me to hang in there. Plus I did a lot more crying (the “sad tear” kind, though a few happy tears too) than her while bishop, as she is generally more resolute and joyful than I am, but even she was exhausted by that point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWas the refiner\u2019s fire hot?\u201d my stake president (SP2) asked me on the night he came over to give me my release a little less than a year ago. This was a bit of a surprise since it was at 4.5 years, but SP2 explained that they were reworking the boundaries. His question was in reference to the hard time he knew I\u2019d had as bishop, and I appreciated his acknowledgement of that. Lots of reasons why and I consider an instance I\u2019d had a couple of months before my release to be most indicative of the experience. My wife (Lee) and I were on a date and had stopped to do some grocery shopping. As we sat in the car, Lee cried and expressed how difficult and emotionally exhausting my time as bishop had been and how she couldn\u2019t wait for it to be over. My radiantly positive and confident wife doesn\u2019t do much crying in the car, but was that evening.* SP1, who called me, told me that he hoped my time as bishop would be the very best time for my family; that goal didn\u2019t seem to have been achieved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10406,"featured_media":46694,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latter-day-saint-thought"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/defense.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46668","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\/10406"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46668"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46702,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46668\/revisions\/46702"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}