Enjoying the long-lost blessings of visiting teaching

Published: Monday, Feb. 1, 2010

My life has been in something of a transition phase for the past year, and one of the casualties of switching wards and moving states has been some lag time in getting fully integrated into my new Mormon congregations. Formal callings -- you know, the kind where they actually read your name over the pulpit and ask for a sustaining vote -- never take too long to show up, but getting involved in a new ward's home- and visiting-teaching programs seems to be a much slower process.

At least that's been the case for me, and the result was that I passed most of 2009 without ever making it onto anybody's assignment sheet, and without receiving any assignment myself. I don't say that to cast blame about; when I started attending a family ward in Chicago at the beginning of 2009, they knew I was short-term, so to speak; I was applying for graduate school and was fairly certain that it would take me out of state.

Then, when I moved to Massachusetts last fall I started attending a ward that was brand-new and still in the process of finding its bearings. And, frankly, I'm sure that if at any point last year I'd gone to my Relief Society president and demanded instant inclusion in the visiting teaching program, I could have at least gotten my own assignment. After all, service works both ways, and to my mind so does accountability for assignments like these -- at least a little bit.

No, my point in bringing all this up is to say that when I finally saw my name on that visiting teaching spreadsheet in December -- both as a teacher and as a teachee -- my heart leaped. I'd had inklings throughout the year of how much I'd missed that inclusion, but I don't think it really settled in until I saw the names of the women who had been given a degree of stewardship over me, and I saw the names of the sisters who were now officially in my care.

I didn't realize how much I'd missed knowing there was someone who would certainly take note if I failed to show up at church one week, and whom I could count on to stop by my home on a regular basis with an uplifting thought and genuine interest in my life.

That's all despite the fact that by the time those assignments were made, I already had made friends in my new ward who would noticed if I were missing one week, and who knew at least some of the particulars of my life and schedule. It wasn't that I didn't have anyone to look out for me, and thus desperately needed someone to be assigned to do so -- I just needed visiting teachers.

See, when my visiting teachers visit me in my home or check in on me during the week, it feels different to me than when a friend does so. To me, those women doing that work are standing in for the Savior, and their love carries the spirit of his love -- and I can feel the difference. I feel it when they come to my door, and I feel it when I consider and pray for the sisters in my care.

I know there are plenty of people who feel differently -- women who decry the visiting teaching program as phony friendship, or who feel like an item to be checked off a to-do list whenever their visiting teachers come to visit. And I know there are situations and circumstances where the program can indeed feel that way. But I also know it can -- and should -- be so much more than that.

During my time as a Relief Society president in Chicago, there was nothing I was more grateful for than the sisters in my branch who took the time to be diligent visiting teachers -- who knew the women they visited as friends, and who understood the importance of sharing spiritual things with them and being in tune with their needs and well-being. As much as I wanted every sister in my branch to have that kind of care, it wasn't something I could do by myself. We all needed everyone to do her part.

Those kinds of relationships are what visiting teaching is all about, and not only does everyone deserve to have them, I believe everyone needs them, too. I'm not there yet, of course; as much as visiting teaching assignments put us on the path to those kinds of friendships -- and the spirit of the work most certainly facilitates their creation -- it still takes time and work. And it most certainly takes love.

Speaking as someone who spent a year without the opportunity to do that work, I can attest that the simple calling of visiting teaching -- so simple we often don't even think of it as a calling -- is perhaps among the most powerful responsibilities we can assume in the church, and one of its sweetest blessings.

They say that sometimes you have to lose something to realize how much you needed it. Well, lesson learned. From now on, I think I'd rather understand its importance by embracing it.



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