"You're not going to get excommunicated over this, are you?"

"Benjamin, can I talk to you privately for a few minutes?" SP₁¹ pointed to an empty classroom. We went in, unfolded a couple chairs, and sat down for a talk.

SP₁ is a pretty busy guy at Sunday meetings, so I understood when he didn't spend a lot of time with small talk. In fact, I'm typically a busy guy at Sunday meetings, and small talk doesn't interest me much anyway. I was quite happy to get to the point.

"I couldn't help but notice you were wearing a Boy Scout uniform last week²." In the sea of white shirts and suit coats, it does stand out a little. Yet, Being the lazy slob that I am, I will wear my scout uniform to my worship services when I have a scout activity that follows so closely on the heels of church that I wont' have time to go home and change my clothes. I figure the dress uniform is plenty appropriate for church services (although some people disagree), and the members of my congregation have seen me do it enough times now that, instead of weird looks that I'm dressed so oddly, I'm usually met with curiosity about which trip I'm going on today. In this case, I would be leaving to go to our annual week long Boy Scout camp.

"Why yes, I was wearing my uniform last week." I have quite the talent for confirming what people already know.

"I don't know if you're aware, but we released our stake scouting specialist a few months ago, and we haven't yet found a replacement." I honestly had no idea, and had never even heard of a stake scouting specialist. "So I thought it was fortunate when I saw you in a scout uniform." Oh boy, I think to myself. Here we go. "And yes," SP₁ says, "this is leading up to a calling³."

I don't know what SP₁ planned to say after this. I did notice him take a breath in preparation for his next statement, but apparently my silent laughter and shaking head interrupted his train of thought. The friendly smile shifted into confused worry.

"I'm sorry. I have no desire at all to work with scouting in the Church."

The confused worry barreled into dismay.

I give SP₁ a lot of credit, however. He recovered quickly and immediately asked about the reasons behind my statement. More importantly, he never tried to tell me my feelings were wrong, misplaced, or invalid. Or at least he didn't try to make me feel guilty for feeling the way I did (more on that later).

After a few minutes of describing my views on LDS scouting and why I am not a fan, he thought for a second and gave me a challenge. "I understand your line of thinking," he said, "and I'll be honest; I agree with a lot of it. As I say more, however, please understand that the Church has specified how it wants the scouting program to be administered, they have given us those policies and guidelines, and there is very little that we can do here to change those." I can feel the crescendo to impasse.

"What I'm hearing from you," he continued, "is a lot of I want, and I feel. But we didn't want to extend this calling for you. We felt that you would be the person that could help improve the scouting program in the stake and give the young men a better experience. In the end, this is about preparing our young men to be faithful and capable adults." He's tugging on my heartstrings now. This is, after all, why I am involved in Scouting to begin with.

I agreed to think it over for a couple weeks until we could meet again and discuss if I was willing to put my personal disagreements aside for the benefit of the teenage youth in my stake.

Naturally, I discussed this meeting with my wife. Her first course of action was to laugh at me. She then proceeded to ask a couple questions about how much travel and time away from home this calling would require. In a stunning display of lack-of-faith, I came up with a series of questions aimed to find out if I could take on these responsibilities without disrupting my commitments to family and current troop. She and I agreed that if I couldn't keep those commitments, then this calling was not something I could accept. I then sent this list of questions to SP₁.

Of course, SP₁ was on vacation, and I knew I wouldn't hear back from him until he returned. Not wanting to be wholly unprepared for the event that I could accept stake scouting specialist position, I began to prepare myself for the long and miserable discussion about what Church scouting policies I could make myself live with and which policies I absolutely could not accept. After a few days, I had put together this seven page document (yes, it's long) about what I think makes a quality scouting unit and where my vision conflicts with Church policy.

Side story: I asked my scoutmaster to look over what I had written and include anything he thought I should add. He added a couple notes, then commented that I was being awfully thorough. He then proceeded to ask, "You're not going to get excommunicated over this, are you?" Thanks, David.

After having written all of that, I realized something--I didn't feel good at all about taking this calling. It wasn't just that I didn't want to do it, I also genuinely had an uncomfortable feeling whenever I thought about doing it anyway. This made me nervous. It wasn't that I felt good about saying no, I just felt bad about saying yes. And now I found myself bracing for the scenario where I was pressed to put my personal feelings aside in order to take an inspired calling.

This created a bit of a problem for me. My mind was pretty well made up--I wouldn't be taking this calling unless they were willing to ignore a lot of Church policies (some of which they already indicated they would not)--but how were they going to take it if they said they felt inspired to ask me to do this and I replied that I felt differently than they did. Don't get me wrong--I have no problem taking my own inspiration over the inspiration of my religious leaders. The concern this gave me was a) would they agree, and b) I didn't feel any inspiration about saying no, just strong discomfort in saying yes. Can you really say you're inspired to an action without any positive feelings?

Fortunately, I never had to have that discussion (nor did I need to show the stake my expose on scouting [my church membership is safe {for now}, Dave]). It turns out that the time commitment the calling would require would take me away from home more than my family could support, and it would also require me to take time away from the commitments I've made to my current troop. On those grounds, I turned down the calling, and SP₁ graciously accepted those reasons.

Personally, I wasn't quite satisfied. I hadn't felt a single good feeling in all of this yet, and that bothered me. I don't particularly like navigating life on negative feelings. Naturally, the issues weighed on my mind for a little longer.

It was a few days later that I happened to be thinking about my life in larger terms than just the microcosm of the three week dilemma I'd been going through. I considered some of the choices I've made since having moved to my current home, and the resultant lessons that I've learned. Then there was this sudden wave of emotion and reassurance. I won't go into the details of all the things I was thinking about, but in that brief moment of inspired recognition, I understood that the decisions I have made and the things I have learned will impact my family and my community for years to come; and that I would lose the ability to make that kind of an impact if I had accepted the role that had been extended. Most importantly, I felt good about having said no.



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¹ Stake presidency, first counselor. LDS congregations are referred to as wards, and a stake is comprised of 10-ish wards. The stake presidency oversees the administration of the wards in the stake and coordinates inter-ward activities.

² I volunteer with a scout troop in my community. It is hosted by a local Episcopalian congregation. Since my scouting involvement is outside of the LDS Church, it shouldn't come as a surprise that leaders outside of my congregation were previously unaware of my involvement.

³ The local LDS congregations are administered entirely by volunteers. As is the case in most of the world, people are usually asked to volunteer. It is commonly held belief that callings, or invitations to serve, are inspired invitations given from the Lord through the local church leadership. Whether or not each and every individual calling is inspired can be debated, but I can assure you from my experience in Church leadership that local leaders try very hard to let inspiration guide the general function of the congregation as a whole.

My Daughter Is Growing Up Faster Than I'm Prepared For

We have a kind of game we play to help Julie learn the scripture stories. We take out a copy of The Gospel Art Book, let Joules pick any picture she wants, and then Daddy has to tell the story of what's in the picture. Mama usually laughs at daddy because he uses words that are clearly too big for Joules to understand, but I'm trying.

In any case, we played this game for a few minutes before sending her to bed. I told her to pick a picture, and she picked this one:



Nope...I'm not ready to go into much detail about Potiphar's wife yet. Sorry, kid.

Zombie Statistician

I met with a physician at work today. He just purchased a copy of the Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) and wanted to do some research out of the data. His question was whether having a certain condition exposed a person to premature death. He wanted to know if I would be able to extract and analyze the data.

He purchased 12 years of data; each year contains a sample of just under 8 million subjects. As a starting point, he suggested we start with the 2009 data and see what we learn from just that sub-sample. The only concern he had was that we wouldn't have enough follow-up data to know if the patients had died.

To me, it was a simple solution: extract the data, pull the social security numbers, and run them through the Social Security Death Index. As I said this, I realized that it wasn't likely that this purchased data set would contain social security numbers.

"Well, the website said it had social security numbers."

I furrowed my brow and looked at the set of 30 or so CD's sitting in a binder on the table in front of me.

"You mean to tell me these discs have social security for some 90 million subjects?"

"I think so."

I try to suppress the panic attack and say, "I think I'm going to have you take these discs back to your office and I'll check with my supervisors to make sure I'm legally allowed to work with these data."

Turns out I am. Another panic attack. I'm allowed to work with these data pending my completion of a number of training modules on the internet. These will undoubtedly remind me many times over of the stiff civil and criminal penalties to which I will be subjected should I even accidentally leak any identifiable information. Forget the panic attack--my heart just stopped.

So there it is. I died at work today, but will continue sifting through this mountain of data in my undead state. And the worst part of it all--it wouldn't even make a decent straight-to-dvd movie.