The new handbook again

I know; I can't believe I am still writing about this either.

It's just that I suddenly felt that it made sense, at least in a different way than I had understood it before, though that didn't mean that it was handled in the best way possible.

I was thinking that the protecting children part was about how if they are hearing one thing at church and another at home it could be confusing, because that was pretty much how it was phrased. Then it suddenly came to me that if you have children being baptized at eight and then in their teens deciding that the favoring of heterosexual marriage is wrong and unfair, that teenager could then break sacred covenants that it would be better not to have made in the first place.

If you don't believe there is any power in the covenants, then that sounds like a stupid concern. There might be less reason to care about it, except on a level of social exclusion, and I think a lot of people are looking at it that way, but this seems like it could have been communicated much more clearly. After all, when you are talking about protecting children and also referencing homosexuality, there is a history of gay people being portrayed as predatory and corrupting anyway that you don't want to echo.

This is one reason that the desire for a more diverse leadership is reasonable. People with different experiences can hear things in different ways and pick up on different things, and that is valuable. I do think if it was explained this way, that we have children who make covenants that they break later because of the conflict between what home says and church says, and it is better that they make the decision as adults, I think people would get that. You can understand your baptismal covenants at one level at eight, but there are a lot of things about life that you don't understand.

There is the feeling of exclusion still, and for people who believe that the church will eventually accept same-sex relationships there is not much comfort that it is not happening now, but viewed in that way it still makes sense.

There is still the matter of the baby blessings. That is not a saving ordinance, so it feels like it should be open to anyone. Apparently it was brought up because it creates a record, and then that is a child of record that the church keeps track of, and where there is the assumption of baptism at eight. I have some thoughts on that as well.

My mission was serving Laotian refugees, and there were a lot of people baptized a few years earlier who were completely inactive. The first missionaries to start teaching them did not speak the language, and there is a sense that it was rushed and there may have been some over-zealousness in offering people couches and clothes and beds, because many of them were poor.

I completely understand the frustration of trying to keep track of people who are not coming and are not interested, and I often thought it would have been better if many of them had never been baptized. I get that.

I also know that it was amazing how receptive some of their children were. A lot of the families did go for a while, so there's no knowing how many primary lessons they got, but at the time I really saw how receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost could be beneficial, even when there was not a lot of nurturing and instruction that followed.

So I see both sides of that, and drafting a policy when there is a whole range of individuals and circumstances with so many different possibilities is a difficult thing.

What I do know is that it all gets easier when people stop being awful. If people will spend more time loving and serving than judging and condemning it will work well. Let's all focus on that.