Our Ministering Assignment Went Nowhere for a Year

A few of you have asked me, in comments and in the hallway at church, some version of the same question, and I put off answering because my real answer is a little embarrassing. What are you supposed to do about the sisters you're assigned when you have a toddler, a bedtime that falls apart if it slips twenty minutes and nothing left in you after seven o'clock? For about a year I did close to nothing about mine, and I felt bad about it on the first of every month.

What changed was small, and I wouldn't have come up with it by myself. I'll get there, but the handbook comes first, because I had it wrong for a long time.

What the handbook lets you count

My ministering list lives on my phone as a screenshot with two names on it, and I must have opened that screenshot a hundred times last year without doing anything about either name. Chapter 21 says ministering brothers and sisters should "adapt their efforts to the needs and circumstances of those they serve." I read that as comfort for my circumstances. It took me a year to see it was also an instruction about hers.

The same chapter lists the ways you can reach someone: phone calls, video calls, texts, emails, letters, social media, contact at church and acts of service. A visit is on the list, and it's one item among eight. A card counts. A call counts, even one you make while pushing a stroller around the block. Contact at church counts too, and I mean sitting down next to her in Relief Society and asking about her knee, which is a different thing from lifting a hand at her across the chapel. I did a great deal of the lifting.

Daytime suits many sisters better than evening ever did. And if you want to protect your evenings, which with small children I think you should, say so to yourself once and stop renegotiating it monthly. I wrote a whole cabin packing list around the sleep things first, so you know where I stand on bedtime.

Mosiah 4:27 has a second half

For a year I'd been using this verse on myself, and I'll give you the whole of it.

And see that all these things are done in wisdom and order; for it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength. And again, it is expedient that he should be diligent, that thereby he might win the prize; therefore, all things must be done in order.

Mosiah 4:27

The first half is real, though, and a mother of a fifteen-month-old who can't do Tuesday at seven is not failing anyone. I quoted it back to myself every time the first of the month came around.

King Benjamin is talking about giving to the poor, so I'm borrowing it a little. Then the second half says be diligent, and I skipped that part. I'd quit before I started and called it wisdom and order. Verse 26 ends with the phrase "according to their wants," and the wants it means belong to the person receiving the help. I had never once asked either of my sisters what hers were.

The Thursday I pulled her trash can up the driveway

The assignment came in February of last year with two sisters on it. Marisol had just had her second baby and was glad of any text at all. I once left a pan of enchiladas on her porch and got a photo of the empty pan back, which I'd call a complete ministering relationship.

The other was Pat, who is seventy-eight, widowed, and lives two streets over from us in a house at the top of a very steep driveway. Ben was fifteen months old. Every month I'd text her something like "Would love to stop by, what evening works for you?" and every month she'd write back "Oh any time, don't worry about me!" I took that as a yes and then couldn't find the evening. Mondays were family home evening. Wednesdays I'm out testing recipes until five, and on the other nights I was standing in the hallway outside Ben's room at seven-thirty with my forehead against the doorframe, listening to find out whether he'd gone down or was only resting up. When the Relief Society president asked how it was going I said we were in touch, which was true if you count a thumbs-up.

This past February I sent the usual text and Pat answered with a second line under the usual one. She was home from her hip replacement and the worst part of her week was the garbage can. A neighbor boy could get it down to the curb on Wednesday nights, but getting the empty one back up that slope on a walker was the thing she dreaded.

I asked when the truck came. Thursday, early. And I realized I drive right past her street at 8:35 on Thursdays after dropping Caleb and Lily at school, with Ben in his car seat and a sippy cup going.

The next Thursday I pulled over, slid the van door open so Ben could see what was going on and walked the can up the driveway. Pat was at her front door in a quilted robe before I'd reached the garage. "You don't have to do that." I told her I was already holding it. She stood on the porch with a bowl of oatmeal and talked to Ben across the lawn for the four minutes it took, and then I went to the grocery store.

I did that every Thursday for weeks. Around the fifth one Pat told me that people had come before, kind people who'd sat on her couch for forty-five minutes with their coats on and a lesson open in their laps. She said she didn't mind company. What she minded was feeling like a shift somebody was working, and that was why she'd been writing "any time" all year, to be sure nobody felt they owed her an evening.

She has a daughter in Phoenix who calls every Sunday and a neighbor who mows, so nobody had to rescue her. The can was a thing she'd said out loud, and it gave me a reason to show up that she didn't have to accept as charity. By April I knew her granddaughter Josie was getting married in Mesa. By June Pat was leaving a sandwich bag of river rocks on the porch rail for Ben, who sorts them by color and will not be told that gray is one color. I've been inside her house twice and neither time was an evening.

What I'd offer if evenings are gone

Look at what she has already mentioned to you or to somebody in your hearing. I bet each sister on your list has said something small, a ride to a doctor's appointment or a lightbulb in a ceiling too high to reach, and you filed it as chatter. Go back to it. If you can't find one, ask a question with a small answer. "Do you need anything from the store, I'm going Thursday" gets a real reply far more often than "Let me know if you need anything," which hands her the job of inventing a need.

Pat is up at five and asleep by eight-thirty, and I'd spent a year trying to schedule her in the hours she'd already gone to bed.

I wrote not long ago about a family home evening lesson that lasted eleven minutes and did more than the long ones. Four minutes at a trash can has done the same for me, and it has outlasted every monthly visit I ever planned.

Frequently Asked Questions

What if my sister never answers my texts?

Make the text easy to answer, a yes-or-no question and not "thinking of you." If a month goes by with nothing, mail a card, because a lot of sisters who don't text will write back on paper. And tell your Relief Society president in plain words what's happening, since she may know something you don't.

Do I have to visit in person?

No. The handbook's list doesn't treat a visit as the standard one. I'd still try to see each sister in person now and then, at church or on a porch or through a car window. Pat and I did most of ours with a garbage can between us.

What do I say when my leader asks how it's going?

Say what's true. I said "we're in touch" for a year and it did neither of us any good, because nobody could help me when I'd said nothing was wrong. Try "I haven't found a way in with Sister so-and-so yet, any ideas?" In my experience the president usually has one.

Can I bring my kids along?

Yes, with a caveat. A toddler waving from a sister's porch can be a gift to her. The same toddler on her white couch for forty-five minutes is rough on everybody, including the toddler. Ask which she'd rather have, and keep it short until you know.

I've only told you the side of the person holding the garbage can. If you've been the one assigned to, what did somebody do for you that you'd want the rest of us to copy?

with love, Melissa