Another Tender Mercy

Imagine a spider web.  I know, I know--there are several Kennedy family members who would rather not think of spiders, but you can't deny that the webs spiders create are pretty fantastic.  All those long tendrils of silk leading to one central point of the web.  Just imagine that.  You can even imagine it in a lovely meadow with dewdrops hanging from the strands if that makes you feel better :-)

I have a lovely tender mercy which sits at the center of several tendrils of experiences that I would like to share.  It might take me a minute to get around to that "core" of the web, but please bear with me.

I don't know what it is, but in our current ward (and stake), and in the Bitburg ward, I have had some serious issues with some of my priesthood leaders.  Before we moved to Germany, I had served as Primary president in our ward in Dayton without a single hitch, nor had I had any problems before that, so I'm not sure what has happened.  I can't say if it's me, or if it's the situations, but there have been some issues.

I was raised with a mother who was a physician in the late 1970s.  I can't imagine that it was easy for her to break the glass ceiling of medical school.  Too, I spent my summers with a grandmother who was no kind of wallflower, but instead maneuvered her way through a world of men with ease and strength.  I never imagined that women would be seen as anything different from a man; if you're smart and capable, you should be given the same opportunities, woman or man. To a lot of men's credit, I was never personally treated any differently.

(I pause here to say that I am not a feminist.  I believe that men and women are strong, capable human beings, and there should be no discrimination against either of them.  We shouldn't even be having a discussion about feminism because it shouldn't be an issue.  I will stand up for women though (or men for that matter) if I feel they are being treated poorly because of their sex.  For example, it was extremely touching to see Wonder Woman on the big screen--and to see her playing a strong person without using sex to sell herself.)

And I'd like to mention my husband here.  He has never treated me as less than himself.

A couple of years ago, I was asked to serve as the Family History Director for the stake, and for our ward itself.  The responsibilities of the calling were rather ambiguous, and there were a lot of disgruntled people in the stake.  (If you want a full recap of the situation, you can look up a post of mine from a couple of years back involving two characters I humorously titled "Crash and Burn".) There were many voices in my ear, expressing dissatisfaction with how things had been run before, and there were many expectations for change.  The two men who had held the calling before me had been unsuccessful, and they happily handed over the reigns.  I thought things would be rainbows and roses, seeing how much I love doing family history research, but there were some very large personalities who had held callings in the the family history department for more years than they should have, and I was walking into a hornet's nest.

However, I'm nothing if not methodical, and I thought that if we could all just sit down and discuss things, we could work through it all.  When the laymen of the department refused to even talk to each other, I knew I needed to call in the big guns.  I ended up going to my bishop and asking if the bishops involved, along with the high councilman in charge of Family History and I, could all sit down and create a game plan for how to make things work.  I needed some advice about how to circumnavigate all the hurt feelings of the previous years, so that we could all get on the same page and move forward.

It seemed like such a simple request, but I waited a couple of months to even get a reply to my initial email, and when I didn't hear back, I started sending more emails.  And even more emails.  And they became desperate in tone.  Seriously, there were people who refused to speak to each other because of some offense from the Middle Ages.

About four months in, I discovered that the bishops had been meeting with the high councilman, and with each other, and I had never once been invited to any of those meetings.

Even to this day, thinking about that just makes me sick.

I couldn't believe that when I had begged for the meetings and initiated any kind of conversation between bishops who hadn't discussed it at all between themselves beforehand, I was completely left out of any and all proceedings.  Me, who had been called to manage the family history concerns of the stake, and who was the earpiece for so many frustrated people, wasn't being asked to express any opinions on the matter, but instead, several men who didn't know anything and who hadn't spoken to anyone were making decisions for me.

I can't even begin to tell you the relief I felt when I was rather quickly released from the calling and called into the presidency of the Stake Young Women's.  Sister YW was the newly called president, and no joke, I was so insanely excited to work with her.  She has all those amazing qualities that I don't possess:  she can cook for 500 people without even breaking a sweat, as well as offer 5-minute missionary appropriate haircuts to boys during a Stake Youth activity, focusing on missionary work.  She's amazing.

Well, as we all know, there are least two arms to the Youth program of the church.  There's Young Women's...and there's Young Men's.  I love the Young Men's program, mostly because a huge part of it is Scouting, and no matter how old we get or how long we haven't been involved with it, John and I will always be Scouters in our heart of hearts.  I wish Young Women's was as hands-on as Young Men's, but I can't deny that Personal Progress is an inspired program.

I had thought Sister YW was a pretty strong woman, but I quickly discovered that when confronted by a man, she had no backbone at all.  She could walk into a meeting with the Stake Young Men's president with a list of things we thought were inspired, but she would always report back to us that "they" had decided to go in completely the opposite direction....or in other words, we were going in the way that the Young Men's President wanted to go.  This usually involved doing as little as possible in order to produce mediocre results (versus us wanting to pull up our bootstraps and get busy).  So all of the great ideas that we had had were pitched in the garbage with no chance to be recycled.  The other counselor (whom I lovingly name Charlotte) and I felt extremely frustrated as we attended presidency meetings, knowing that nothing we said or decided would ever come to fruition.  It honestly became less painful to just take a passive stance in the meetings.

However, at one point, our two presidencies were invited to meet together with a member of the stake presidency.  We told Sister YW that we would be there for her; that we would stand up for her when she was being railroaded....and as anyone who knows me knows, I will speak up for what I believe in, especially when people are acting like idiots.

So I sat there in that meeting, and sure enough, Brother YM became rather animated when we began offering opposition to his ideas.  In fact, at one point I called him out for not listening to us at all, and he consequently slammed his fists on the table, threw his head down on it, and yelled "NO!" at me.

It was, quite simply, unbelievable.  In fact, Charlotte could hardly wait to share notes about how poorly we were treated in that meeting.  And in more unbelievable news, the stake presidency counselor at the time did absolutely nothing to defend us.

Like I said, I'm not sure what's up with all of this--is it me, or is it the men?

Wow, what a timeline.  I was shortly released from Stake YW's and called to be a seminary teacher.  As I've written before, I had such high hopes for the calling, but I was worried too.  The same person who had purposely kept me out of meetings was the bishop in charge of me, and I wasn't sure that he would have my back should something go wrong.

Because, as we all know, something DID go wrong, and that one worry came to fruition.  It was undeniably one of the hardest times in my life.

So, with that, I started to think about moving.  I just wasn't sure that I could handle much more of any of this.  I longed for the times when I felt such an outpouring of love from my bishops and other male leaders.  When I felt like what I thought mattered.

It was over two years ago that the moving "seed" was planted.  I signed up for a job posting website, starting to look for jobs for John (unbeknownst to him)

And then we decided to put our house on the market.

I won't lie--so many people told us that our house would sell immediately, and we banked on that.  We started looking at property in Altoona, because we didn't feel right leaving the area before John had finished his calling.  It wasn't exactly what we wanted (we were still far away from the temple and an airport), but it would get me out of the ward with Itsy Bitsy, and John wouldn't be commuting 90 minutes a day anymore.

We were terribly disappointed when our house didn't sell.

But the bishop was released, and after a year of no calling (talk about feeling like garbage), I was called to be Gospel Doctrine teacher and life moved on.

So, as John's release has been coming closer, we have questioned if our deciding to move has been the right decision.  John signed a contract for a new job that pays more and is less work back in January.  We bought a house in Michigan.  We switched realtors.

All the while, we wondered if John might be called as the stake president.  In our minds, we felt nothing, and we didn't think it was a possibility, but we wondered if nothing was coming together how we wanted it to because we would end up staying here anyway.

We have really questioned if we were inspired in the first place to leave.

So today, there was great expectation about who would be the next stake president.  John knew it wouldn't be him.  A nice moment though was before the session of stake conference, the presidency and their spouses had the chance to meet with Elders Clayton and Dunnigan.  We were asked what we have learned as our husbands have served in the Stake Presidency.

I can't say that my answer had anything to do with the Stake Presidency itself or with John serving, but I have certainly learned some things along the way personally.  Actually, I've learned one main thing:

The Lord has a will, and if we are obedient, His will will work through us and through our lives.

I didn't have long to expound on that thought, but Sister Price spoke after me, and she seconded my experience.  We might think we know what is best for us, but the Lord has the long view in mind.  He knows what's best, and we need to give our will over to Him, and we need to trust in Him.

Of course, as I was saying this in that small meeting, I was wondering again if John and I have been inspired about deciding to move, and I'm questioning if our moving is more our will, or the will of the Lord.

So, fast forward thirty minutes.  Presidents Price, Kennedy and Hark were released as the Stake Presidency, and three new men were called:  the bishop who had left me out of meetings and not had my back when I was thrown under the bus, another counselor, and Brother YM (the man who slammed his head on the table and yelled "NO!" at me).

I could hardly believe it.  Two of the three men were some of the most difficult men I've ever worked with, and here they were, about to serve and administer to the needs of the our very large stake, a huge portion of whom are women.

And in that moment (and here's the center of the strands), I felt an overwhelming feeling of love from the Lord flow over me.  It was like all of the clouds of doubt and uncertainty were blown away, and the sunshine of clarity was shining through.  I knew, in that moment, that we had made the very right decision to move.

I knew that our time was over.  Our skills were no longer needed.  A new kind of presidency was called, and we wouldn't be part of their vision.

In fact, all of the misery that we have experienced over the past two years was flipped over like a blueberry pancake on a hot griddle.  I thought to myself that if we hadn't started this process two years ago, we wouldn't have found the job that John now has, and we wouldn't be ready to move on with our lives.  We would be stuck here, feeling very sad, knowing that there was no place for us to serve.  We would not be a thought in the lives of a couple of those men.  In fact, I believe that we would be sitting on the sidelines for as long as we stayed here.

What a blessing that we listened to the Spirit and took those blind steps of faith to do what we felt was best for us at the time but that made no sense.  I cried tears of thankfulness as I drove home with John today (yes, we actually drove home from church together), and I know that those tears would have been tears of sadness and misery if we weren't ready to move on with our lives.

I've wondered over the past years why I am put into these situations where callings aren't easy.  John has well made the point that in each of those callings, no matter how short a time I'm in them, I've made a significant impact on the life of at least one person.  In fact, Brother YM's heart was greatly softened towards me when I was released as seminary teacher, when his kids (who were in my class) told their father how devastated they were because I was the best seminary teacher they ever had (and they maintained that belief even with subsequent teachers). However, I know now that if I hadn't had those experiences, John and I wouldn't have been motivated to look elsewhere for a job, and to buy a house, and to be ready to move once John was released.

And as I've already posted, I have faith that the Lord has great plans for us elsewhere.  So, in the end, it's all good.

What a tender mercy.