Wednesday, September 06, 2017

To Do: Complete contacting singles


I have finally been released from the Single Adult committee. At least, they have someone else doing it, and I am gone.

It was never horrible, but it started to feel like too much. When I was missing meetings because no one else was free to stay with my mother, it became another source of guilt. I don't need that.

I do need to take another look at one of the To Do items on the list: Complete contacting singles.

The thing about the To Do list is that while some of them (like creating a vision board and posting a year of selfies) were definitely there because they related to my goals for growth, others were there only because they were things that I was working on at the time. Contacting single adults fell into that category, but there may still be things we can learn from it.

Just to bring everyone up to speed, the single adults committee organizes different activities and invites single adults to them. It's not about dating; it's giving people a place to have fun and feel fellowship and be nurtured by the spirit in a very family-oriented church, which is completely reasonable and valuable. I had nothing against that. Helping with the planning and putting on of these activities was okay when my life felt like less of a train wreck.

However, I also felt it was important to be aware of the single adults actually in my ward, and there were two big obstacles there: the majority of them didn't come to church anyway and the ones who did wanted nothing to do with singles' activities.

I believe some of that was a perceived stigma on singles - me showing up with an invitation was a reminder that I saw them as single, regardless of how accurate that was. It was discouraging.

My goal was to at least talk with everyone once, and find out what they needed. Is there a type of activity they would like to attend? Is there something they hate? Except the people who were at church were trying to ward me off like I was contagious and that left the people who do not go to church, who might understandably not be interested in church-related activities.

There were still a lot of good conversations. Also some slightly hostile ones. A lot of people had gotten married or moved, and I could update that information. It did feel like if the home and visiting teaching programs were working well, more of that should have been known. I was disappointed by how many people had been written off as "lost sheep". I mean, if they don't want contact you probably shouldn't keep pestering them, but was there a level of contact that could have worked and just wasn't done? Because there were people that I got to know a little, and while they were still not likely to not come out to activities, that was also true of people who were attending.

I tried a lot of different things, with phone calls, e-mail messaging, and some social media, as well as asking others who might know. I worked my way through the list three times using those methods, and was thinking about mailing post cards, but I had never considered it completed. Now it no longer makes sense to work on, by default.

This is where it becomes interesting to me for a second time, as I have to consider what counts as done. So much of this ends up being cyclical. I may research something, and give myself an assignment, complete it, and write about it, but then am I done? Have I grown enough? Have I learned enough?

There are things that I have looked at and decided that it's as far as I am going to get for now, but it may come up again, and that can be okay. I like clear delineations, but you don't always get them. Maybe you can only ask if it is enough for now.

Single adults was the first time I ever remember asking to be released from a calling. I did not feel good about that. Actually, I felt on the verge of hysteria asking for the release. I did keep doing things for the nine months or so it took for them to get someone else. Enough?

I did not complete working on the list. I don't believe I could have had actual contact with many more people, maybe one or two at most. Enough? Probably, I hope.

For myself, I am deciding that it is done, and I believe it is reasonable.

Related posts:

No comments: