Church callings!

As I stop to think of each of my church callings, I remember none in my youth except for that of Teachers Quorum secretary and of this I have no remembrances; however, I can remember most callings since I served as a missionary but not all or I am not sure I want to admit to the poor job I did in some callings, such as ward financial clerk.

Shortly after Diana and I were married, we were called in Laredo to be the young men and young women leaders. I don’t think I ever understood what it was that I was supposed to do as I had a very hard time associating with the young men. I couldn’t seem to et them to understand the importance of setting goals to make them want to plan on a mission and this frustrated me to no end. I think if I were asked to serve in this position again today I might have a better chance of helping the youth to have a good time and of making plans.

I did not hold another calling until we moved to Moses Lake, WA. Once we moved to Moses Lake I was called to the calling of ward membership clerk, which I think is the best calling I have ever held. While serving in this position I was responsible to report to the Bishop who was less active and then which members were totally not active. Once these people were identified we would go out as members of the bishopric to visit these people and ask them what they wanted to do with their membership records, to which approximately 1/20th of the people would ask to have their names removed from the church rolls and the Stake President wanted to get them off the records to lessen our inactive members but the Bishop disagreed. When we were asked to remove the names we would work even harder to get these people activated and involved with the church once again. If this were not possible we asked if we could just mark their records with a “DO NOT CONTACT ORDER” where the home teachers and/or visiting teachers would be relieved from trying to visit them. I believe our Stake President was a person who was very interested in showing good numbers and not so interested with what happened to the people.

While we lived in Moses Lake both Diana and I took the teaching course. It was only Diana that obtained anyrhing from this though; I don’t think I will ever learn how to teach someone else anything. Tomorrow we will go on to Spokane.