I'm going to start with a little bit of explanation here.
In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, there are no paid clergy. Instead, people get asked to do different things by their leaders, and we call these callings. I know friends of other faiths have been confused by that, because for them a calling is something personal that they feel called to do.
We can have that too. With my mission, I felt that I needed to go, very strongly, so I filled out an application and then got called to Fresno, Laotian-speaking. Right now, you could say I feel called to look out for people on Twitter. Still, when a Mormon talks about a "calling", we usually mean our church responsibility.
What I really want to focus on is that there is not really a hierarchy, where you work your way up. I have taught Sunday school, been a visiting teaching supervisor (visiting teaching is when women visit other women and look out for them), planned activities, and right now I am working in the library and also with single adults. For a long time I was ward emergency preparedness, and then I did it for the stake (a stake is a group of wards, and the ward is the congregation you meet with on Sunday), and then I ended up doing it for the ward again.
When I started doing it for the stake, I joked that it was a promotion, but really, it does not work like that, and it was not a demotion when I went back to doing it for the ward. There are a lot of different ways to serve, and you learn knew things and get to know different people by it switching around, so that works well.
Some people do find it more like a calling as the word would be used outside of the church. Maria ends up teaching a lot. I remember one woman in Fresno whose callings were almost always with children, and she felt like that was her thing. I can see that being true, but I also imagine that if she suddenly found herself working with youth or adults, or in the library, that she would adapt to that as well.
To do any calling right, the point is always service, so that should be humbling enough, but also things do change around, and there is no climb.
There is one good family friend who was in the bishopric when I first remember meeting him. He has been my bishop twice, and he has been in the stake presidency. He has done a lot of leadership, and he was over public affairs for the area for a while.
He has also been a Sunday school teacher twice that I know of. From the last time he was bishop, he and his wife went straight to teaching a very small class of teenagers. (I think it might have been four 16 year old kids, or something like that. This was not a demotion. He had served well as the bishop in the singles ward, where he had been needed, but now it was time for someone else to do it, and a youth teacher was needed. Actually, this is a really good thing, because being a bishop of young singles is very demanding, and it's good to get a chance to rest.
It is not random. We believe our leaders use inspiration, but also you can see preparation happen. There were things that led me to be ready for emergency preparedness, through classes I had taken. Before our friend was the singles bishop, he and his wife had taught a class on relationships in that ward, and I don't doubt that it helped them for when they came back.
There are chances for being humbled by serving others and getting to know them, and in watching the Lord's hand in events that lead you to where you are, and there can be humility in being asked to do something you have never done before.
But also, and this is my real point, there should be some humility in seeing other people doing it later. Maybe you will see things you did better, but I hope you will see the value in a different perspective. You will certainly see that you weren't the only capable person, and you may even see someone doing much better than you, which could sting a little but still be valuable. We are all needed, so then it is not only you who is needed, and yet, you still are needed. That can be a frustrating loop until we replace all ego with love.
I'll give one more story. I had a mission president with a son who was deaf, and while his son was growing up, most of the father's church time was spent signing to him so he would know what was going on. He did at times feel kind of jealous when he would see people getting callings that he knew he could do, but the inspiration he received told him that what he was doing was the most important thing for that time.
And it was. I had recently read a story about a deaf girl who had been in the church her entire life, but did not understand the resurrection and life after death until she was seventeen. There are language barriers, and sometimes the hearing don't even know what is not sinking in.
You know that father got to be a mission president, but he was also a stake president for a while. An apostle called him for that. (It was President Packer; Elder Packer at the time.) When he got the call he was surprised, and said "I've never even been a bishop," and Elder Packer said, "Neither have I."
There is not a job path. It is based on abilities and needs and things we may not understand until later.
It should all be done in humility.
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