Nathaniel launched Difficult Run in November 2012 and ran the website alone until August 2013, when he invited the first Difficult Run Editors to join him in adding content to the site.
Nathaniel has a background in math, systems engineering, and economics, and his day job is in business analytics. His real interests are science fiction, and theology, however. He is an avid runner, but not a very fast one. He is married to fellow DREditor Ro and they have two little children.
In addition to Difficult Run, Nathaniel blogs regularly for Times And Seasons and writes a lot of reviews on Goodreads.
I am grateful for my wife. I would like to tell you a little story. I have been to three or four thousand meetings, I guess, in the last twenty-five years; and every one of those times she has sustained me—except for one. When I was off to a Sunday School meeting one night, she asked, “Will you be home early?” I said, “Yes, I’ll be home at 10:30.” Eleven o’clock and 11:30 came, and I wasn’t home. When I finally came home, I walked up to the door to walk in as usual, and it was locked. I rang the doorbell—and no answer. So I knocked on the door, and finally she came. She said, “I’m not going to let you in.”
I said, “Oh, come on.”
And she said, “No, it’s one time too many.”
In those days we had a Nash Rambler with a front seat that made out into a bed (but it was in the middle of winter). So I took my overcoat and went out into the car and rolled back the seat, and went to bed.
After a little while I could hear the front door open, and my wife came out to the car and asked me to come in. I told her I didn’t think I would. It was so cold I finally did.
Good intentions, obedience, and righteousness are not a pass on the ordinary difficulties of relationships. Good to keep in mind. We always expect religion to make life easier. It doesn’t. It makes life better. I don’t think I’ll ever really, truly learn that distinction. I just have to keep reminding myself.
Some people ask the reason for an organized church. They feel they can work out their salvation alone, and that there is no need to attend church meetings or fill other requirements as long as they are honest and honorable and do good to their fellowmen. But the Lord has given us instructions that we should belong to a church; and this, his church, has the same organization that Jesus Christ himself established while he was on the earth. We have many explicit declarations from the Lord that make this clear, and also that we need to encourage and help one another.
You might have expected an explanation of why we need to have an organized church. I did. But there really isn’t one. There is just an explanation that we need to have an organized church because Jesus said so. God reveals the what more often and sooner than the why. Another good thing to keep in mind, when it comes to keeping our expectations in tune.
Let me mention one more thing. While we are in the mortal body we cannot “fashion kingdoms [or] organize matter, for [that is] beyond our capacity and calling, beyond this world. In the resurrection, men who have been faithful and diligent in all things in the flesh, [who] have kept their first and second estate, and [are] worthy to be crowned Gods, even the sons of God, will be ordained to organize matter. How much matter do you suppose there is between here and some of the fixed stars which we can see? Enough to frame many, very many millions of such earths as this, yet it is now so diffused, clear and pure, that we look through it and behold the stars. Yet the matter is there. Can you form any conception of this? Can you form any idea of the minuteness of matter?” (JD, 15:137).
So, was Brigham Young presciently predicting the existence of dark matter? Or is that just an attempt to retcon his words? Hard to say, or rather: I’d better not try to say without much more context and historical awareness than I actually possess. I’ll just quote President Kimball’s next words:
Can you realize even slightly how relatively little we know?
That sentiment is almost always a wise one. And—more than a habitual regard for intellectual humility—I like the practical implications of a religion that has a lot to look forward to. Much as Mormons do believe the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the “one, true church”, we also very much believe it’s a work in progress with more to come.
We have lost the art of fine distinctions, of exceptions, and of subtlety. We live in a world of brutally simplistic extremes. And the funny thing is, a lot of us think that these are the days of nuance and sophistication. So, here’s what a reactionary, ultra-conservative Mormonism had to say about family structure in the 1970s:
Families usually consist of a father, mother, and children, but this is not always the case. Sometimes there is not a mother or a father, and sometimes no children. Often there is one person living alone. In years gone by, our family was larger, but now it consists of only two.
There is no reasonable doubt that Elder Hunter had in mind a single archetype of the family: mom, dad, kids. There is also not reasonable doubt that he well understood that gap between the Platonic ideal of the Family and the mortal reality of families.
Back then, we could walk and chew gum at the same time, apparently. I miss those days. For an example, here is a paragraph-sized sermon from the same talk:
There was quiet meditation, the silence broken only by the voice of a tiny babe whose mother quickly held him close. Anything that breaks the silence during this sacred ordinance seems out of place; but surely the sound of a little one would not displease the Lord. He, too, had been cradled by a loving mother at the beginning of a mortal life that commenced in Bethlehem and ended on the cross of Calvary.
The capacity to understand a general principle—that we should be quiet during the Sacrament—and also fully appreciate a valid exception to it—a baby’s cries—without detracting either from the generality of the principle or the validity of the exception is a capacity that is very much felt through its absence.
This is swamp in southern Louisiana. Technically a swamp is not a mire, but it turns out that pictures of actual mires are pretty, and that’s not what I’m going for. CC BY-SA 3.0
UPDATE: Although this post was published on August 24, 2017, it was written weeks ago. Notably, before Charlottesville. I’ll be writing a followup in light of recent events for the near future.
Despite the fact that overt, explicit racism is widely rejected and condemned within the United States, racially disparate outcomes remain endemic. One particular blatant example of this is the racially unequal justice system we have in this country. In super-short terms, blacks and whites use illegal drugs at about the same rates, but black people are more likely to be arrested, charged with more serious crimes, and serve longer sentences than whites.[ref]For the longer version, you can read my entire review of The New Jim Crow.[/ref]
Contemporary definitions of racism–of which there are basically two–attempt to explain why America continues to be a place with racially unfair outcomes even though overt racism has long since been marginalized. The first contemporary definition of racism is about systematic racism. According to this definition, prejudice is a feeling of animus against a person/people based on their race, discrimination is unequal treatment stemming from prejudice, and racism is an attribute of social systems and institutions where prejudice and discrimination have become ingrained. Accordingly, America can be a white supremacy without any white supremacists, because the overt prejudices of the past have been absorbed into our institutions (like the criminal justice system) and have taken on a life of their own. If the system is racially biased, then even racially unbiased people are not enough to get racial justice. It would be like playing a game with loaded dice. Even if the other players are 100% honest, their dice are still loaded, and so the outcome is still not fair. If you accuse them of cheating, they will be defensive because–in a sense–they are playing the game honestly. But as long as their dice are loaded (and yours are not), the game is still rigged.
Second, we have the idea of implicit racism. This is the idea that even people who really and sincerely believe that they are not racist may harbor unconscious racial prejudice. This is based on implicit-association tests and the theory that tribalism is basically hard-coded in human beings. These two findings–the empirical results of implicit-association tests and theories about the innateness of human tribalism–are not necessarily connected, but they come together in a phrase you’ve almost certainly heard by now: “everyone is racist.”
Thus, racial injustice can remain without overt racism because (in the case of systemic racism) racism is now located inside of institutions instead of inside of people and/or because (in the case of implicit racism) racism is now located inside people’s unconscious minds instead of their conscious minds.
So far, so good. Both of the new definitions (which are not mutually exclusive) provide promising avenues to understand ongoing racial disparity in the United States and seek to redress it. But this is where we run into a serious problem. As promising as these avenues might be, they certainly take us onto more ambiguous and complex territory than civil rights struggles of the past. The more overt racial injustice is, the simpler it is. Slavery and Jim Crow are not nuanced issues. But now we’re talking about how to fight racism in a world where nobody is racist anymore (at least not consciously). And just when things start to get tricky, the problem of perverse incentives rears its ugly head.
Perverse incentives are “incentives that [have] an unintended and undesirable result which is contrary to the interests of the incentive makers.”[ref]Wikipedia[/ref] In the fight against racial injustice there are basically two kinds of perverse incentive: institution and personal.
Institutional perverse incentives arise whenever you have an institution with a mission statement to eliminate something. The problem is that if the institution ever truly succeeds then it is essentially committing suicide and everyone who works for that institution has to go find not only a new job, but a new calling and sense of identity.
If conspiracy theories are your thing, then it’s not hard to spin lots of them based on this insight. Instead of fighting poverty, maybe government agencies perpetuate poverty in order to enlarge their budgets, expand their workforces, and enhance their prestige. But you don’t have to go that far. In practice, it’s far more likely that an institution dedicated to ending something will have two simple characteristics. First, it will exaggerate the threat. Second, it will be studiously uninterested in finding truly effective policies to combat the threat.
An agency that does this will successfully satisfy the economic and psychological self-interest of the people who who work for it. Economically, the bigger the threat the bigger the institution to oppose it. This is true regardless of whether we’re talking about a government agency arguing for a bigger slide of taxpayer revenue or a non-profit appealing for donations. Psychologically, the bigger the threat the easier it is for the people who work in the institution to feel good about themselves and not think too hard about whether or not they are really picking the most effective tools to eliminate whatever they’re supposed to be eliminating. In short: institutions that oppose a thing will gradually come to be hysterical and ineffectual because that’s in the best interest of the people who run those institutions.
This may sound all very hypothetical, so let me give you a specific example: the Southern Poverty Law Center. Politico Magazine recently came out with a very long article titled Has a Civil Rights Stalwart Lost Its Way? which makes a lot of sense when you keep the perils of perverse institutional incentives in mind as you’re reading it. The article points out that the SPLC has “built itself into a civil rights behemoth with a glossy headquarters and a nine-figure endowment, inviting charges that it oversells the threats posed by Klansmen and neo-Nazis to keep donations flowing in from wealthy liberals.”[ref]9-figure means hundreds of millions, by the way, so we’re not talking chump-change here.[/ref] It also notes that the election of Trump–while ostensibly bad for anti-racism efforts in the US–is unquestionably great for the SPLC, “giving the group the kind of potent foil it hasn’t had since the Klan.” So no, this isn’t just hypothetical theorizing. It’s what is happening already, to one of America’s most legendary anti-racism institutions.
The second set of perverse incentives are personal and basically class-based. Both the systematic and implicit definitions of racism evolved on elite college campuses, and the anti-racist theories that are based on these definitions are correspondingly unlikely to successfully reflect the interests and concerns of the genuinely underprivileged. They may be about the underprivileged, but they are adapted to–and serve the interests of–elites.
Consider first the case of a hypothetical young black man with a solidly middle- or upper-class background. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. observed that “the most ironic outcome of the Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass,” and a 2007 PEW found that nearly 40 percent of blacks felt that “a widening gulf between the values of middle class and poor blacks” which meant that “blacks can no longer be thought of as a single race.” Thus, this young man faces a sense of double alienation: alienation from lower-class blacks and alienation from upper-class whites. Placing emphasis exclusively on the racial component of social analysis obscures the gulf between lower- and upper-class blacks and offers a sense of racial solidarity and wholeness. At the same time, it denies the actual privilege enjoyed by this person (after all, his neighborhood is not crime ridden and his schools are high-functioning) and therefore eases any sense of conflict or guilt at his comparative fortune.
The case is simpler for a hypothetical young white man with a privileged background, but (since this person enjoys even more advantages) the need for some kind of absolution is even more acute. Propounding the new definitions of racism allows low-cost access to that absolution. For an example of how this works, consider how the hilarious blog-turned-book Stuff White People Like discussed white people’s love of “Awareness.”[ref]Note that Stuff White People Like is, according to Wikipedia, “not about the interests of all white people, but rather a stereotype of affluent, environmentally and socially conscious, anti-corporate white North Americans, who typically hold a degree in the liberal arts.”[/ref] Stuff White People Like notes that “an interesting fact about white people is that they firmly believe that all of the world’s problems can be solved through “awareness.” Meaning the process of making other people aware of problems, and then magically someone else like the government will fix it.” The entry goes on: “This belief allows them to feel that sweet self-satisfaction without actually having to solve anything or face any difficult challenges.” Finally:
What makes this even more appealing for white people is that you can raise “awareness” through expensive dinners, parties, marathons, selling t-shirts, fashion shows, concerts, eating at restaurants and bracelets. In other words, white people just have to keep doing stuff they like, EXCEPT now they can feel better about making a difference.
The apotheosis of this awareness-raising fad is the ritual of “privilege-checking” in which whites, men, heterosexuals, and the cisgendered publicly acknowledge their privilege for the sake of feeling good about publicly acknowledging their privilege. In biting commentary for the Daily Beast, John McWhorter noted that:
The White Privilege 101 course seems almost designed to turn black people’s minds from what political activism actually entails. For example, it’s a safe bet that most black people are more interested in there being adequate public transportation from their neighborhood to where they need to work than that white people attend encounter group sessions where they learn how lucky they are to have cars. It’s a safe bet that most black people are more interested in whether their kids learn anything at their school than whether white people are reminded that their kids probably go to a better school.
So we’re at a time when the complexity of racial injustice in the United States calls for new and nuanced definitions and theories of racism at precisely the time when–due to the past successes–the temptation to exaggerate racism and ignore effective anti-racism policies is also rising. The result? You might have a Facebook friend who will pontificate about how “everyone is racist” one day, and then post an image like this one the next:
So, you know, “we’re all racist” and also “if you’re racist, you deserve to die.” No mixed messages there, or anything.
Speaking of implicit bias, by the way, the actual results of Project Implicit’s testing are that nearly a third of white people have no racial preference or even a bias in favor of blacks. Once again, this doesn’t prove that racial justice has arrived and we can all go home. That’s absolutely not my point. It’s just another illustration that simplistic narratives about white supremacy don’t work as well in a post-slavery, post-Jim Crow world. The serious problems that remain are not as brutally self-evident as white people explicitly stating that the white race is superior.
When making multiple admissions decisions for an academic honor society, participants from undergraduate and online samples had a more relaxed acceptance criterion for Black than White candidates, even though participants possessed implicit and explicit preferences for Whites over Blacks. This pro-Black criterion bias persisted among subsamples that wanted to be unbiased and believed they were unbiased. It also persisted even when participants were given warning of the bias or incentives to perform accurately.
If implicit bias can coexist with outcomes that are biased in the opposite direction, then what exactly are we measuring when we measure implicit bias, anyway?
I believe that both of the new definitions of racism have merit. The idea that institutional inertia can perpetuate racist outcomes long after the original racial animus has disappeared is reasonable theoretically and certainly seems to explain (in part, at least) the racially unequal outcomes in our criminal justice system. The idea that people divide into tribes and treat the outgroup more poorly–and that racial categories make for particularly potent tribal groups–is equally compelling. But the temptation to over-simplify, exagerate, and then coopt racial analysis for institutional and personal benefit is a genuine threat. As long as it’s possible to cash-in on anti-racism–financially and politically–then our progress towards racial justice will be impeded.
I am, generally speaking, a conservative. I don’t, by and large, share the worldview or policy proscriptions of those on the American left. But I do care about racial justice in the United States. I believe that the current discussion–or lack therefore–is significantly hampered by the temptation to profit from it. And I figure hey: maybe by speaking up I can contribute in a small way to shifting the conversation on race away from the left-right political axis and all the toxicity and perverse incentives that come with it.
As I read the General Conference talks, there are a couple of pet issues I keep in the back of my mind that I’m interested in learning more about. One of those, and this might be a little bit of an odd one, is the question of how Mormons should vote. I have a hunch that we worry more than we should about politics and ideology and not nearly enough about the character of our leaders.
I get that it’s not easy to get an accurate feel for a person’s moral character from afar. It’s not like we know public figures the way we know the people of our daily lives. But then again, we don’t always know the people in our daily lives as well as we think we do either.
So, while an accurate assessment of a politician’s moral character might be impossible on a case-by-case basis, I do think that we ought to have pretty high standards for the behavior of our elected officials, and be extremely unforgiving when they fail to live up to those standards. Forgiveness is great for the people in your lives, but turning a blind eye to corruption in our leaders does nothing but foster a corrupt environment that brings out the worst in the people who have the most power.
At least, that’s the hunch. And I feel like it’s something I’ve picked up from Mormon leaders. Is it? Well, yeah. My list of quotes to support this notion keeps growing as I read these talks, and Elder Tanner provided yet another one in his talk from the Saturday morning session of this General Conference:
We need to be governed by men and women who are undivided in honorable purpose, whose votes and decisions are not for sale to the highest bidder. We need as our elected and appointed officials those whose characters are unsullied, whose lives are morally clean and open, who are not devious, selfish, or weak. We need men and women of courage and honest convictions, who will stand always ready to be counted for their integrity and not compromise for expediency, lust for power, or greed; and we need a people who will appreciate and support representatives of this caliber.
Being cynical about the moral caliber of our leaders is trite and counterproductive. Accurately gauging moral caliber from afar might be hard, but expressing intolerance at the voting box for outright corruption isn’t nearly as difficult. We can do that. And we should do that.
The reality is that a lot of the questions people fight about the most are extremely difficult policy questions where the answer is unclear and about which good people can disagree. I think we have a lot of room for mistakes and errors and experiments in most of our policies.
But I don’t think we have anywhere near as much room for error when it comes to the quality of our leaders.
I read an embarrassing number of books (I’m in danger of having no life) but if I met you at a party (which I wouldn’t, because I have no life) and you mentioned a book that you’d read and I’d also read it, I might not admit it.
I’d lie because unless it was really, really special, I wouldn’t remember enough to talk about it intelligently.
The gist of the response thereafter is that it’s fine if you don’t remember the books you read, because (in this case) you can still harvest them for good ideas. And I think this is fine. It’s a perfectly valid reason to read books. Another valid reason would be the food analogy. You probably can’t remember (in any great detail) what you had for lunch last month, but it’s pretty important that you ate something right? Otherwise you’d starve. And so maybe books are kind of like food for your brain. Even if you don’t remember the specifics of any given meal, it still helps to have a high-quality diet. Another valid response.
But here’s one more: you can store what you remember about a book in your cyberbrain.
The idea of using computers–and especially the Internet / cloud–to augment human memory is an old one. And it’s not theoretical. It’s exactly what I do with my Goodreads reviews. I try to write a review of every book I read[ref]Including the ones I stop reading in disgust.[/ref] I also take lots and lots of notes in Evernote. Then, I promptly forget what I read. Sometimes I literally forget that I read a book at all. But when I go back and reread my reviews, a lot of my initial impressions come back.
Over my lifetime, I’ve certainly read thousands of books. And for the most part, I can’t remember them. I kind of have a big hole in my memory between the first few books I really loved as a kid in elementary school and middle school and the books that I started reviewing on Goodreads. In between, I really only remember a few books. The only exception is the ones I have on my shelves. If I pick up those paperbacks, I can basically always remember the overall plot and sometimes a surprising amount of detail. I just need the cues provided by the cover art–and maybe just the existence of a physical reminder–to trigger all those memories.
The Goodreads reviews are like that, but even better.
So review your books, kiddos. It’s like a diary of your literary life, and it can help you keep hold of memories that would otherwise be totally lost.
One of the most distinctive elements of Mormonism is food storage. It’s not going to be at the very tip-top of anyone’s list of “What do you think about when you think about Mormons?” but it’s still up there. If we were playing Family Feud, it wouldn’t be the #1 survey response, but it would be on the board.
This is kind of funny when you contrast it with what the Church actually teaches about welfare. Here’s a quote from Elder Brown’s talk:
May I remind you of the six elements of personal and family preparedness, all of which should be taught.
They are: first, literacy and education; second, career development; third, financial and resource management; fourth, home production and storage; fifth, physical health; and sixth, social-emotional strength.
It’s so interesting to me that the stuff everyone thinks about first–food storage and practical self-reliance–is actually fourth on this list, and only one item out of six.
This is one of the reasons it’s so important to pay attention to General Conference every spring and fall, and why it’s beneficial to go back and read through these old ones: because what we think the message is and what the message really turns out to be are not always the same. The messages, priorities, and narratives we absorb from our social network have all been through many, many rounds of telephone.
If we want to get the information from the source, we need to listen to what the General Authorities tell us themselves, and we need to come to that with a willingness to revisit our preconceptions, assumptions, and paradigms to actually really hear that they’re trying to tell us.
The Handmaid’s tale as a TV show is apparently a big deal. I don’t know about that. I really liked the book when I read it a few years ago, but I dreaded it being made for TV and haven’t checked the show out. Anyway, because the show is a big deal, I see lots of references to it on Facebook. Here’s one that stood out:
Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse for some.
The line is from the book, and it made it into the show, too. Of course it did.
The sentiment is very, very far from unique. In fact, it’s pretty close to universal among the left-wing of American politics. It’s actually pretty common on the right, too, since it’s more about populism than it is about left/right ideology. It crops up all the time. Just as one more example, here’s another left-leaning author in another overtly ideological (but not nearly as aesthetically accomplished) book[ref]It’s A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers. Here’s my review.[/ref]:
“Everybody’s history is one long slog of all the horrible shit we’ve done to each other.”
“It’s not all that,” Tak said. “A lot of it, yes, but there’s good things, too. There’s art, and cities, and science. All the things we’ve discovered. All the things we’ve learned and made better.”
“All the things made better for some people. Nobody has ever figured out how to make things better for everybody.”
“I know,” Tak said.
So, that’s one theory of human existence: in all of our history (and for hundreds of years into our imagined future) progress for everyone is impossible.
On the other hand, here’s the reality[ref]This is Walker’s favorite graph, btw.[/ref]:
I understand the idea of living in a fantasy world if the fantasy is better than reality. I can even understand extending this wishful thinking to fantasies that don’t actually seem very nice. That’s what conspiracy theories are all about, after all. Some people would rather believe in a world where things happen for a reason (and that reason is the Illuminati) rather than believe in a world where things are pretty random and chaotic because the Illuminati running everything is less scary than nobody running anything. OK. Not my cup of tea, but OK.
What I don’t understand is choosing to live in fantasy world that is so much grimmer than reality for no discernible benefit.
Which makes you wonder: what motivates this belief–contradicted by all available evidence–that universal improvement is impossible?
The ivory towers of King’s College London’s Maughan Library (Public Domain)
I’ve often met academics who seem mystified and horrified at the extent and depth of conservative animus towards academia. This excellent article does a great job of explaining (1) where this dislike comes from and (2) why it should concern everyone, and not just conservatives.
First:
Entire disciplines—Literature, Anthropology, Sociology, and the various interdisciplinary programs that end in the word “Studies” – have all become more strongly associated with a particular species of left-wing interpretation that now influences the broader discourse in journalism and on social media. In some departments, the social categories of analysis—race, class, and gender—have attained complete hegemony. The most recent convention of the Modern Language Association, the most prominent organization associated with the study of language and literature, hosted three times as many panels on post-colonialism as it did on Shakespeare.
Second:
Conservatives will point to statistics such as the imbalance in the ratio between registered Democrats and Republicans as evidence of a political imbalance. Students it is argued are only getting one side of the story. While this sentiment is certainly understandable, it ignores an element of the current phenomena that might be even more deleterious to student learning and thus all the more intractable. The problem isn’t simply one of political imbalance, an absence of parity between Left and Right voices, but the extent to which humanities departments have become politicized.
I’m a conservative (more or less), and so I have an interest in conservatives being able to get their message out. But–independent of that partisan concern which I cannot pretend I do not feel–I have a sincere, non-partisan interest in the quality of public discourse. The politicization of everything is corroding that discourse. When everything is evaluated first in political terms, the conversation often fails to ever get beyond those preliminaries. Battle lines are drawn over rhetoric, terminology, tone, and framing. What’s left is a zombie-discourse, the husk of a conversation serving as a thin veneer for power games.
It’s bad for everyone.
It’s especially bad for academia. If folks like those at Heterodox Academy don’t manage to hold onto a middle-ground position, I’m not sure what the future of the academy in the United States looks like, but it will likely be quite grim. Elite institutions are already much more about the perpetuation of elitism than education. When the academic content of academia effectively disappears, there will be nothing left except the quasi-covert apparatus of aristocracy.
I liked Elder Simpson’s talk on The Lord’s Support System. He starts with an analogy about how a multil-billion-dollar space mission can be held up by something as trivial as a flaw in a thirty-cent part.
Just as space probes depend upon tens of thousands of other lesser components in their so-called support system, so does the Lord depend upon tens of thousands in His support system, that His ultimate objective of blessing the lives of people and qualifying them for eternal life might be accomplished on schedule.
He also uses an analogy of life being like a school drama where there are only a few starring roles to go around. For the rest of us? We’re the spear carriers. But then comes this interesting paragraph:
There could be many surprises in the hereafter as we look up ahead and exclaim in our amazement, “But he was only a home teacher.” You know and I know that if he was the kind of home teacher that the handbook talks about and if he lived worthily, that man could likely stand eligible to inherit all that the Father has. And there is no greater blessing than that.
I remember one day in high school when I happened to be standing at a friend’s open locker and noticed she had taped up a black-and-white photo of several male models. (I think it was a cologne ad or a jeans ad or something.) I stared absently at the models for a minute or two, wondering if I’d ever be as good-looking as they were. In theory, I figured I could have muscles as toned as them if I really worked at it. But when it came to their faces? Not really anything I could do in that department. I’m not a bad-looking guy (if I do say so myself), but I’m not a model either and it occurred to me for the first time then that that was never going to change. They say you can be anything you want when you grow up, but it’s not true.
I’ve had a few experiences like that since then, for example in playing competitive sports with people who are simply not in my league, where no matter how hard I try I not only couldn’t win; I couldn’t even make it a challenge. I’ve met people who are so smart, that it takes everything I’ve got just to recognize their intelligence. Here’s the reality: I’m never going to be that good looking, that strong, or that smart. I’m just not.
I suppose that could be depressing, but I’m not really depressed by it at all. For a variety of reasons. But here’s the one that’s relevant: I’ve come to honestly believe that the only kind of excellence that matters is excellence relative to your talents and opportunities. I’ve come to believe it doesn’t matter at all—not even a tiny bit—what you end up with. It only matters what you did with what you started with.
I do have a collection of real talents: things I’m good at, opportunities I inherited from my parents, and so on.[ref]In modern parlance: privileges.[/ref] My goal in this life is make the most out of them that I can and to do so in the service of God and my fellow humans. If—God willing—I succeed then I will have achieved the only measure of success that really matters.
So, in a way, I kind of reject the analogy of the spear carriers and the thirty-cent transistors inside of rockets or satellites. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good analogy. It’s just not quite far enough. What I’m saying is that in God’s view a thirty-cent transistor isn’t valuable because the billion-dollar space telescope can’t work without it (or whatever). That’s an instrumental theory of value, albeit implicitly. What I’m saying is that if the thirty-cent transistor is the best thirty-cent transistor that it can be, then it’s worth exactly the same as the billion-dollar space telescope without caveat or qualification. Not because it enables the space telescope, but because all that matters is being excellent relative to our opportunities and privileges. Nothing else counts.
Shortly after we arrived in Toronto we were preparing the children to enroll in their schools. My five-year-old son was to start kindergarten, but on the first day he was afraid to go. My wife and I were concerned, and I was impressed to invite my son to come into my office and sit in what the missionaries call the “hot seat,” and we would have an interview.
He climbed up into the big black chair, and I asked, “Son, how can I help you?”
I shall never forget as long as I live the look of real concern on his face. With his little chin quivering, he said, “Daddy, I am afraid.”
I understood, for I knew he had left behind several friends of his same age, and so far he had found no one his age near the mission home. I said, “Craig, you have a friend that will always be with you. Let’s kneel down together and ask Him to help you.” We did, and Craig assigned me to say the prayer.
The Lord helped Craig find his courage in this experience. Every morning thereafter we held our interview, and every morning I was assigned to pray.
Then one morning, about two weeks later, there came no knock at my office door—no special father-and-son prayer. He had found his confidence and made some friends, and I was the one that missed that very special experience each morning with my little boy. I hope that this choice learning experience while on this mission will remain with Craig and become a source of strength to him when he is called to serve the Lord on a mission of his own.
The belief probably came about because of the pelican’s red-tipped beak and very white feathers, and because long-beaked birds such as the pelican are often to be found standing with their beaks resting on their breasts.
Because of the red-tipped beak, people believed that pelicans pierced their own chests and fed their own blood to their young. A gruesome belief? Perhaps, but not as gruesome as Christ’s teaching that “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.”
The story about pelicans feeding their blood to their offspring is mistaken, but the lesson is not. What Elder Ballard could have said ta the end of his story is this: the highest and deepest act of parenthood is to break our hearts and feed the pieces to our children. When we are doing our best, we are giving our lives—one tiny piece at a time—so that they can live, and we do not count the cost. Our greatest sacrifice is our joy.
We cannot understand what is to be God. But, as parents who strive to protect and nurture our children until they don’t need us anymore, we see the shadow cast by Godhood.
