I have this memory nestled into the recesses of my brain that pops up every now and again. It is from when I was about four years old, which is remarkable; my memories from early childhood are few and far between. I don’t know why this one stands out, but it is fairly clear. I’m sitting at the coffee table in our living room, with pencil in hand, a sheet of wide ruled paper in front of me. My mom is sitting with me, teaching me how to write my name.
And I was pretty mad about it.
I don’t remember what I was doing just before, but I do know that my mom had pulled me away from doing it to sit me down and make me trace out these hieroglyphics for some godforsaken reason, and I saw the whole exercise as pretty futile. “Why would I ever need to do this?!” I know my mom must have been losing patience with me. I was feeling so frustrated about this waste of time, that, unless I was an infinitely more patient person at the age of four than I am now, there was pretty much no way I wasn’t being obstinate. Since I knew the alphabet, but wasn’t yet reading, lining up the letters L – E – A – H meant little to me, and I had no interest in doing it over and over.
I remember my mom explaining that I was starting kindergarten soon and that I would need to know how to write my name at school. I vaguely remember her saying something about learning to read, and then understanding it all better, but I was like, “WHATEVER. I don’t want to do this and I don’t need it and I don’t understand why we’re even talking about this.”
It goes without saying, mom was right. She was right because she could see way, way past what I was seeing. She knew so much better than I did what the future held, the skills that I needed, and the things I needed to do to prepare. What she knew, that I couldn’t see, was that this was about my identity. She knew that the rest of my life would be shaped by my name and that everything I ever accomplished and everyone I ever connected with would all carry my name. Learning to write it was one infinitesimal step towards a wide open future, full of potential.
Bless her, I got to kindergarten and knew how to write my name. Super handy skill, that.
Sometimes I hear women in church talking about female ordination. I hear a lot of pushback against it. “We already have everything we need,” these women say, “we don’t need anything different. We want to keep doing what we have been doing.”
But I wonder, you know? I sense our Heavenly Mother is standing by, and She can see way, way past what we’re seeing. She looks into the future and She knows the skills we need and what we need to do now to prepare. She is patiently sitting with us, Her obstinate daughters, who *just don’t want this and don’t know why we’re even talking about it,* saying, “My daughters, you need to know this. You need to learn this new skill. The more you learn, the better you will understand how important this is for you. This is a tiny baby-step, my daughters, and it will shape who you are for the rest of eternity. Everything you can accomplish, everyone that you can bless, it all comes back to you learning this skill. If you don’t take this step your identity will be stunted. You can’t reach your full potential without this.”
I feel like I can hear Her gentle nudges; I am ready to learn what She wants to teach me.
Leah, this is great! When it comes down to how much I personally understand and know about the world, eternity and everything in the universe, I recognize that I know about 0.0000000000000001 percent of it. I know so, so little. We all know so, so little, and I have no problem church leaders in that description. We are babies. We aren’t even 4 year olds yet.
So as I learn more and progress ever so slightly from my own babyhood to the toddler years, things like why women probably do need priesthood ordination begins to make more and more sense to me, when it didn’t always before. Your analogy makes perfect sense to me.
I love my sister.
Although she should stop making me cry. It's not nice.
Hear that Leah Marie? Stop it.
I make no promises.
A simple but powerful analogy. Thank you.
This is perfect, Leah Marie. So perfect. Thank you for your beautiful words and for your wise heart. You really are your Mother’s daughter. (You knew I would say that.)
Oh Melody, I love you. Yes of course I could have predicted you would say that. (And thank you.)
Really great post. When you consider the audacity of any of us mortals, “knowing all we need to know” and refusing greater light… It kinda makes me shudder.
Great post, Leah!
This is sort of how I feel whenever any Mormon being challenged by new information knee-jerks with, “That’s not pertinent to my salvation.”
I usually follow up with, “How do you know?”
Yes, you can argue that the regular Mormon doesn’t know it is not pertinent to his or her salvation, but how do you know that it is? I’m not asking you specifically, but this group generally. Surely Leah has something more to go on that our Heavenly Mother wants women in the church to have the Priesthood than “a feeling.” I mean, if we’re giving credibility to the notion that a feeling is all we need to go on to completely uproot our notion of who is able to wield the power of God, then we must also be willing to concede the other side of the coin. Namely, that those who disagree with the concept of Ordain Women find it to be apostasy. If it’s all about feeling and what we want– what we believe– then we should be fair with those that disagree with us, no?
Think about it. Our apostles and prophets claim they receive revelation from God himself and the posters here contend that almost daily. And yet Leah claims that God (our Mother) wants women to have the priesthood and not a single objection is heard. If you want the church generally to here your cries, more honesty and less hypocrisy is needed.
I cannot in good conscience privilege the claims to revelation of Church leaders over those of Leah.
In fact, I suspect Leah receives more revelation than the top 15 combined.
Then you clearly do not see this Church as being led by Prophets, Seers and Revelators. So maybe God is waiting for Leah to go into a grove of trees and She can then ordain her, and restore the Church afresh – with this modern alteration.
Nothing in the Gospel of Jesus Christ has ever expected Women to hold the priesthood. It is not an ordinance of salvation for Women.
If they do not need it, why would you want it – and the associated covenant?
The message behind this post is women now are better than women of previous ages. Women now are ready for the priesthood and the likes of Mary were not!
I love this, Leah Marie! Outstanding post!
Thank you for such a wonderful way of explaining this!
It is great to be able to share with the rest of the Finding Heavenly Mother Project participants. 🙂
Thank you for your beautiful piece. I felt pain on Sunday as well. Having 5 grown children, my heart hurt to hear one of the mom speakers talk about "not knowing what to do," but that surely Heavenly Father did. I leaned over to my nazi-mo husband and said, "She'd know what to do if we had an example from our Heavenly Mother. He rolled his eyes and my heart just hurt. Inviting Her into the learning process as you so elegantly explained, would make mothering more meaningful and inspired as well as give us someone on whose shoulder we could cry, and from whom we could find deep, meaningful inspiration.