On Ineptitude
Toward the end of high school, when I finally resigned myself to the fact that I could not build a university education around intramural volleyball, I began seriously looking for a “career path.” The problem was not a lack of options, but an overabundance. I was interested in, and moderately good at, just about anything my schooling had thrown at me. But I was not passionate about any of it. After months of mulling over different possibilities—medicine, book binding, classics, hiking (isn’t there some way to use that professionally?)—I decided instead to reverse the process. I easily packaged the things I absolutely did not want to do into three main categories: sales, teaching, and counseling of any sort.
The irony in this list is that my dad was a salesman, my mom a former teacher, and I could probably have used some counseling. But all genetic transfer had excluded any aptitude or appetite for my parents’ chosen fields. I disliked them, I was lousy at them, and I heartily disliked how lousy I was at them.
Upon arriving at college, I quickly realized I was also not very good at avoiding the things I was not very good at. Even innocent sounding classes, like zoology or watercolor inevitably had some element of salesmanship or teaching which the students were expected to engage in. And with five roommates (not to mention four sisters), emotional counseling pervaded everything like a heavy hairspray. I was continually confronted by my ineptitude, and I was not enjoying it. So I decided to do what any rational person would do—leave school and seek direction from a distance. I entered the Missionary Training Center in December of 1994.
This idea seemed perfectly logical at the time. As a missionary I would only have to plan for the future on a month-to-month basis, while limiting my roommates (and thus the necessity of counseling) to one. And who ever teaches more than ten discussions in a northeasterly stateside mission? Eighteen months of safety, headed my way.
I would not call it a stretch to say that within six hours of bidding my family farewell in the MTC auditorium in Provo, I realized that not only did missionary work have a lot to do with teaching (discussion-packed schedule or no) but also with salesmanship (although no Large Group Meeting Leader would ever have couched it in these terms).
Over the next year and a half, my fantasy “one companion” stretched to multiples, and overlapped with district members, investigators, and dozens of people we encountered on a daily basis—many of whom took “missionary” to be synonymous with “counselor.” I felt cornered, trapped. In trying to outrun my ineptitudes, I had completely surrounded myself with them. Perhaps I should have done the mature thing and embraced my weaknesses rather than try to avoid them. I do know people who intentionally engage in activities they do not do well for the thrill of the challenge or for the satisfaction of improvement. But I am not one of those people. Confronting weakness, for me, is as enjoyable as a root canal, without anesthesia. Instead I chose to panic.
I believe in the theory that interdependence is healthier than independence, but my natural bent is do-it-yourself. As a panicking missionary, however, I groveled for help. My morning prayers and evening prayers and the lunch prayers over chicken broth with peas took on a sense of urgency, longing, and absolute reliance. And slowly things began to change.
Teaching became downright enjoyable, not because I was improving, but because the information transfer was improving in spite of my involvement. Even tracting started to lose some of its bite. By the time a diabetic companion told me she obviously had no faith because she couldn’t fast without going into insulin shock, I managed to pull off a counseling session that would have made a family therapy veteran proud.
Despite the fact that missionary work was saturated with tasks I conceptually loathed, I somehow came to love it, to feel that it was the most crucial thing I could be doing. My mantra became D&C 1:23: That the fullness of my gospel might be proclaimed by the weak and the simple unto the ends of the world. Youth, inexperience, and a general lack of sophistication are presented as the strengths of young missionaries, as a path to humility and a reliance on the Spirit. I happily embraced this “weak and simple” reasoning at twenty-one; I was very obviously both, and miracles were happening despite my best efforts. But my ego took some comfort in the hope that eventually I would not be so weak and simple—or so inept and inexperienced and easily frustrated. Someday, the Spirit could work through my strengths instead.
More than a decade later, I am not so sure. After graduating with a BA in history I took a full-time position as mother to a brood that has expanded to five, and I am hard-pressed to find any aspect of motherhood that does not incorporate teaching or sales or counseling. Apparently no matter what I choose to do, be it tracting or potty-training, I am going to be confronted with doing things I don’t do well. And the most bizarre part is that I am finding this idea comforting. The more desperately dependent I seem to feel, the better things seem to go. I have begun to think that maybe ineptitude is where the real missionary work, the real spiritual and intellectual transfer, is always at. The jump in effectiveness between what I do poorly and what I do well is negligible compared to the gap between everything I do alone and anything I do with the Lord.
Take Family Home Evening, for example. Our FHEs generally consist of as much ricocheting, refereeing, and pouting as anything else (and I am not just talking about the kids). Being the oldest member of our seven-person crew, one could assume I would also be one of the wiser, more able members. But I find that my well-reasoned, carefully presented messages have less chance of communicating the intricacies of the Atonement than hand signals and playground analogies. Sitting wedged on the couch while our two year old conducts “I Am a Child of God” from the ottoman, I am struck by the feeling that “weak and simple,” on a spiritual level at least, seem to run in reverse chronological order. The more I learn, the more I tend to rely on conventional wisdom rather than instinctive, basic promptings.
One night, my husband presented a lesson on goals. We gave each of the kids a paper and some simple parameters: set three goals. We suggested they try to include something spiritual, something physical, and something intellectual. We talked about goals you could mark progress on, small goals, large goals, things to inspire. They nodded respectfully, as if soaking in all our enthusiastic details, scribbled out their own lines, and ran off to the other room.
Feeling like our wise guidance had reshaped the course of the next year in a matter of minutes, a feat akin to Superman rewinding the world, I skimmed though their lists. They had obligingly included a number of the things we had “encouraged” them to write down—be patient, do well in school, be more reverent in primary—but had come up with much more impressive goals on their own. For instance, I would never have thought of “read Esther twenty-five times” or “run eight mph,” but found them to be strikingly specific. And when I saw that the son who gripes about violin practice wrote “finish Book I violin,” in lieu of the more predictable “hide my violin where Mom will never find it,” I nearly wept with joy. Real goals, with the potential for real results.
The questions these kids come up with, the three-word metaphors, the small wads of bone-jarring truth they spout just when I’ve given up all hope that anything but the treat portion of FHE is having an impact—are astounding in their simplicity. When our four year old daughter’s friend died we had a lesson on the plan of salvation. She spent the next two weeks explaining to every neighbor, family member, and grocery clerk she came across all about resurrection and heaven, often ending with, “And I am so excited for when I get to go to heaven and play with her!”
In spite of all the ineptitude I can muster, it appears that these kids are actually getting it. And maybe, another decade or two down the road, I will be immersed deeply enough in my own weakness and simplicity to begin to get it as well. For now, I can still take heart that at least during the treat portion of the evening I don’t have to only rely on my weaknesses.
Allyson is a member of Segullah’s editorial board.
