Career(s?): Faith

Career(s): Faith

Just as life is a school, it is a progression in the spiritual realm. If you believe as I do, you realize that everything else we struggle for in this world barely manages to achieve secondary status in comparison to the grand enterprise of becoming perfect and returning to God. To be learned is good, if one uses one’s knowledge to approach ever nearer to the stature of the Omniscient and to the capacity to bless that belongs to the Omnipotent. The riches we gain from our labor are a treasure, if we use them to bless others in love; otherwise, they become filthy lucre and drag us down.

In many religious traditions, one can have a career in the Church, with well-defined opportunities to rise in the ranks and to be regarded widely as learned, honorable, and distinguished. Not, however, in the tradition to which I have the honor to subscribe. One may obtain, as I have, a sequence of offices, titles, powers, and authorities that confer upon their possessors increasing influence and opportunity to serve their fellows, and that progression can look like a career in some ways. But we’re firmly cautioned against regarding one person or class of persons (particularly oneself) above another or seeking personal gain or advantage in any way. The various offices and callings and priesthoods I’ve been granted over the years have been and remain great treasures to me, but they don’t add up to a career: should I choose to see them or to exploit them as such, their values would shrivel and blow away.

Ultimately, when the day comes that I have to be adjudged a success or a failure, I expect confidently that that judgment will focus on an assessment of my value to others, specifically as a husband, father, ancestor, descendant, and disciple. I hope for an affirmative outcome and wish fervently that I were more confident of achieving it.

Here follows, for the convenience of any of my successors who may wish to see it in chronological context, the sequence of duties, opportunities, and ordinances that has constituted the labors, devotions, and consequent joys and challenges in the spiritually-oriented life of an ordinary twentieth-century Latter-day Saint: