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Membership clerk is the calling I Aspire to. You get to skip Sunday school, walk around during sacrament, and you can get it done during church hours…and you don’t have to go to the early bishopric meetings Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I727 using Tapatalk 2
When the Pres. Benson pride talk first came out, I really loved it. Something that I thought he said has stuck out to me ever since, that pride is often not people who have great stuff looking down on people who don’t but works the same way when someone (the have nots) looks up at those with more and envies, covets or feels they don’t deserve good things. That comparison is pride. Decades later, I have a few more things to add. One, I was surprised that this talk was practically plagiarized from C.S. Lewis. Not a huge deal because C.S. Lewis is a great religious thinker, but I was surprised as Benson did not attribute any of it. It’s not that it’s that unique conceptually, but still.
Quote:You are basing your self-worth on how others see you.
I think that’s the core of pride actually, and it is rampant in church and in the human race: seeking approval from others rather than from within (or from God as they might say at church). The opposite of pride IMO is not humility, but self-worth. It’s also empathy. Because the script of pride is that the other person doesn’t deserve those good things they’ve got as much as we deserve them.
I disagree, johnh. As a membership clerk, you MUST do one of those things and CAN do the other two (which I did), but doing the things I COULD do brought the hammer down. Perhaps I should have stepped aside BEFORE I had cleaned up the mess the previous two do-nothing membership clerks left behind. But that would have probably been unrighteous pride by any standard … Basing your worth on how others see you can also be self-hatred, though, if you internalize everything dished out in the church. I did that for a long time.
I think I reached a breaking point through this experience, though, when the leaders kept repeating “This didn’t happen”, “This didn’t happen”, … , “These are not the droids you’re looking for” (so to speak), when I knew from the victim’s mother that it DID happen.
I apparently didn’t do it right when I broke, though. Having to let go of things now feels like a return to square one (i.e., loathable), which is just as unhealthy – feels more so.
Hawkgrrl, at least it FEELS like pride is still rampant in the church. Do any brethren out there think PPIs are a free forum to dish it out? I’ve put up with exactly one in the last decade, and it’s been all I can stand. The spirit in which the thought of “yes, you’re right, I could stand to improve on that” could exist seems to get booted out the window by quorum leaders.
insomniac, the Church really isn’t the same everywhere – and that is both a blessing and a curse. I sorry you have had the experiences you have had and hope you can learn something from them, even as they really have sucked.
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