Resting on Laurels or Growing New Ones

Yesterday I read a great (brief) book called Life's Lessons Learned by Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2011). One of the chapters, "Transition to the Apostleship," has been on my mind.

Do you keep getting the same callings again and again? I do. We moved 13 times (and thus were in 13 different LDS wards) before we settled in our current home, where we have lived for almost 12 years. When I was younger, I was often called to be the Primary music leader or to teach or help others with family history. I taught adults in Sunday School and frequently was called to edit a ward or Relief Society newsletter. And I've always, it seems, been a visiting teacher and a member of the ward choir, and still am. Currently I'm also a family history consultant, co-teaching Marriage and Family Relations in Sunday School with my husband, and I was recently called to edit the ward newsletter (again). I've done it all before and I'm pretty comfortable with each calling.

What does this have to do with Elder Oaks' call to be an Apostle? Obviously, that's a call that only comes once. Before that, Elder Oaks had a distinguished career as a lawyer, law professor, president of BYU, and Utah Supreme Court justice, as well as serving in many callings in the Church. When he was called to the apostleship, Elder Oaks felt "inadequate and very apprehensive" (p. 99). To paraphrase, he felt that the qualities and skills he would need in order to serve effectively as an Apostle were not those he had become most comfortable with in his successful career. But he knew that we all tend to do that with which we are comfortable--and he could have fallen back on all those well-honed skills and qualities to be the former lawyer and judge who became an Apostle, rather than the Apostle who had been educated as a lawyer.

If I slide into old habits and methods of performing the callings that repeatedly come to me, I am becoming the "family history person" who's been called to be a family history consultant, rather than the family history consultant with some background in genealogy and family history research. And in an area that had grown and changed as rapidly as family history has (just google "family history"), the former is a recipe for ineffectiveness. If I create the ward newsletter the way I've always done it, I miss the opportunity to fulfill my current calling--to be the ward newsletter editor in this ward at this time--in the way the Lord and the ward members intend and need.

So each calling is a chance to grow into that new calling at a new time and in a new place, for new people with new needs, and to become the (fill in the name of the calling) the Lord needs now. Even in a longtime calling, like visiting teaching the same sisters for years, their needs change and the abilities and means of service the Lord wants us to develop change over time. Perhaps this is one meaning of "magnifying our callings"--not finding more things to do, but finding ways to fulfill the calling in response to others' and our own changing needs, seeking always to find out how the Lord wants us to serve now.

The lesson, borrowed from Elder Oaks (p. 100), is: "When called to a Church position, we should focus out efforts on being what we are called to be, not on what we feel qualified to do."