Family History

I am attending RootsTech this week, a huge genealogy conference in Salt Lake. While I am admiring the many high tech tools that make things so much easier these days I have been thinking about the debt I owe to others who started this work before me. I remember my Grandma Johnson with her many paper files and large wide carriage manual typwriter. I appreciatey great grandpa Turley writing his life story on 90 pages of longhand writing. How lucky I am to have both current advantages and a great heritage.

In the Lord's Hands

When I was in high school, I had a goal to be student body president.  I thought I had a great chance.  I was in a lot of school organizations and knew a lot of people (track, cross country, student clubs, choir, etc.) and I had experience as a student body officer (Director of Communications, Treasurer). There were not very many LDS kids at our high school, and I thought this would be a great thing to have an LDS student body president.  I worked hard to make posters and get the word out and prayed that the Lord would bless me in my efforts.

El Camino Real High School Emblem

There were several candidates running and I figured there would probably have to be a run-off election since it was unlikely anyone would be able to get a majority of the votes on the first ballot.  I was wrong.  One of the candidates got enough votes to actually win on the first ballot! I was sad and a little confused.  Why hadn't the Lord answered a prayer which seemed like a righteous desire to me?

I found out the answer the very next morning. A representative of the seminary association met me after seminary the next morning and asked me to chair the regional seminary council.  This involved planning an upcoming seminary conference in put me in contact with leaders from other stake seminaries in the region.  I don't think I would have had time to be involved in this project if I had been student body president.

The calling turned out to be really important to me personally. I had some friends in school who took academics really seriously, but they weren't LDS.  I had some good friends at church who took the gospel seriously, but weren't very serious about academic things. I had been wondering if there were other people like me who were interested in excelling in both academic and spiritual pursuits. I found a whole committee of people like this in the regional seminary council. It strengthened at an important time in my life to be with like-minded young people. I'm sure it helped me stay focussed on these things that have turned out to be very important for the rest of my life.

By the way, the school did get an LDS student body president the next year: my sister Pam.  She did a better job than I ever would have done!

I taught a lesson in the High Priest's Group last Sunday about family history.  One of the thing I encouraged the group to do is think of principles and ideas that were important to them they wanted to share with their family.  We discussed how we probably learned these lessons through stories and how they could effectively be communicated that way.

With that in mind I'm going to start including historical musing in this blog in addition to events as they happen in my life.  The first story that occurred to me I often use in lessons is my experience business contacting in Germany.

Altstadt, Ulm (1973)

This is a picture of the old part of the city in Ulm, Germany where I served as a full-time missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  My mission started in June 1973 so this picture was probably taken sometime between fall of 1973 and the following summer when I was transferred to Stuttgart.

A lesson I recall learning in Ulm was related to business contacting.  At this time in the church, the church leaders were anxious that our missionary efforts focus on families and not on bringing separate individuals into the church.  Since the church is very family centered and the blessings of the gospel are very focused on families and the home, they learned by families where only some were members of the church were less likely to continue in active church involvement.

To that end, we were encourage to center some of our teaching and proselyting activities around Family Home Evening.  This is a program where families are encourage to gather weekly for a time of gospel instruction, sharing experiences, and family bonding activities. We would offer families a chance to have us visit them in their homes and show them how to start having family home evenings with their own families.

One challenge in getting these invitations was locating and talking to fathers about setting up these opportunities.  As full-time missionaries, we had a lot of time during the day we were supposed to use contacting new people to set up teaching opportunities. Typical ways we would use this time was talking to people on the street, visiting with people as we used public transportation, or knocking on doors.  Since these daytime hours were the ones where fathers were usually at work, the people we would most often find at home would be mothers and some single students. If and when these contacts joined the church, they frequently would join without other members of the family, particularly fathers.

Ulm, Germany from the Danube River

To encourage us to have better contact with fathers, the church leaders (through our mission president) asked us to spend ten hours each week doing something called business contacting. We would visit businesses in the city and ask to speak to the owner.  We would then ask the owner if we could present a family program we had to his employees.  This was confusing to German business owners.  At that time, Germans generally had a strict division in their lives between work and home.  Business owners had trouble understanding why we would be talking to them about home things in the workplace.  Sometimes they thought we wanted to talk to them about insurance rather than a family program.  When we finally would make ourselves understood, they told us it would be more appropriate to contact the families at home than in the workplace.

Because of this it was challenging to make appointments using the directed "business contacting" approach.  However, I learned an interesting lesson.  Even though I don't think I ever made an appointment doing business contacting, the weeks I was faithful in putting in the requested 10 hours doing business contacting, everything else was better:

• we had more success making other kinds of appointments
• we had more visitors come to church
• we were happier
• we had more opportunities to teach people about our church through other means
• we had more members give us referrals to their friends

The lesson I learned from this was that there are blessings in  following the instructions of priesthood leaders, even if the instructions themselves might not be such great ideas.  While business contacting may have been very successfully in accomplishing the church's missionary goals in other parts of the world, it didn't work very well us as missionaries in Ulm. However, the Lord blessed us for being obedient and following our leaders anyway.

Since then, I've tried to carefully follow the counsel I've received from church leaders, even when I didn't always understand it.  Often their inspired counsel was a blessing because they understood particular principles better than I did in a given situation.  Other times (as in the case of business contacting) I believe the Lord blessed me just for demonstrating my faith and willingness to follow those who had been called to lead.

High Priest's Group Leader

I was recently called to be High Priest's Group Leader. The calling feels very different this time around than I remember it in about 1996 when I was first called.

The first difference is that I'm now about the median age for a high priest in the group, rather than being one of the younger ones.  With the additional years of experience, I better appreciate some of the trials family members in the group may be experiencing. For instance:

• all of our children except Lisa have been through and past their teenage years
• we've had missionaries leave and return
• children have attended and in many cases completed with college educations
• we have grandchildren
• many of our children have married
• a few couples have struggled a bit with things in their marriage (and all worked them out so far, thankfully)

Through professional, church, and community opportunities I think I've learned some things about effective leadership in a group like this.  In particular, I think I'm better at framing a vision and setting and achieving goals in that direction.

Even though I should have understood earlier about the importance of effectively ministering in priesthood callings, I feel like I'm better at understanding that and more effective at doing it.

I've learned some things about effective teaching and am in a better position to bless the lives of group members through my own instruction and encouraging good practices in the teaching of others.