The best part about being on a contentious chatboard was firing off a blood-rushing, eye-brow pulsing ball of righteous indignation. With the personal element removed, everything was stunningly black and white. Anyone who disagreed was obviously an idiot (or worse). These no-holds-barred conversations were more about high-fiving people on my team than about changing anyone's mind on key issues and that was fine. This was a good, old-fashioned, adrenalin-filled snowball fight: keep throwing until you run out of ammunition and then take a look around to see who is still standing. I did that for several years before deciding to bow out.
It was actually pretty hard to walk away from the snowball fight because I love a good rush of adrenalin. But these were not powdery snowballs, disintegrating as they flew and landing with a playful thump. These were icy snowballs--hard packed snow wrapped around a chunk of ice, frozen again, and lobbed, rapid-fire, at somebody's head. They were words said in anger and received in anger among strangers who didn't have any reason to trust each other. When I looked at it objectively it was a waste of time and energy.
Eventually I stopped having off-the-cuff snowball fights in real life too. In the spirit of choosing my battles, I chose silence. I couldn't trust that people would be generous in their assumptions as I worked through my thoughts out loud. In political and religious discussions, people rarely are. Here in Utah there is no subject where this is more true than homosexuality and the LDS church. Think you know my thoughts on this subject? I doubt you do. But I'm not choosing silence today. And the reason I'm not is because I want to trust you.
I've moved around a bit in my life but now, for the first time in my adult life, I'm really putting down roots. I've had ties to Utah my whole life, went to BYU as an undergrad, and have visited Utah County for major holidays for 20+ years but I still feel a bit new around town because it was only a few years ago that we moved here with no intention of moving away. So I have long time long-distance friends that I'm figuring out close-proximity friendship with and I have formerly-close-proximity friends that I'm figuring out long-distance friendship with. I also have a big group of new friends that I am building trust with. I love the metaphor for building trust that Brene Brown uses in her talk The Anatomy of Trust: a jar of marbles.
I am very aware, lately, of the small things that add or take away marbles from your friendship/trust jar--simply showing up (or simply not showing up), answering a text (or letting silence shut down the conversation), speaking your mind with compassion (or speaking your mind in anger). It's that last one that has been cutting deeply in the past few weeks. Like the contentious chatboard, social media creates an environment where you have niche conversations with like-minded people that are actually broadcast widely. I'd like to believe that if you were looking right at my face you would choose your words more carefully but the reality is that you didn't. And you lost marbles from your jar. Those of you who had precious few marbles left lost your jar entirely.
It's not just people who have jars; institutions can earn or lose trust too. This is why even though I was shocked and upset when I read the updated pages of the LDS church handbook that were leaked in November, I did not denounce anything or anyone. The church has earned a lot of marbles with me. I wholeheartedly believe that a prophet of God is on the earth. That is not something to take lightly. I also believe in taking time to see the whole picture and to let things percolate in my brain (I'm still in that process currently).
I love all of you--those who have lost the very last marble in their church jar, those whose jars are overflowing, those who live in a black-and-white world, and those who truly see where the colors blend. I welcome a thoughtful, in-person discussion with any one of you. But leave your icy snowballs--your snarky memes, your hateful language, your assertions that "in the Last Days more persecution will come from within the church than without"--out in the cold where they belong.
P.S. Apologies to those who thought I was going to weigh in on the specifics of the controversy online. I thought I was going to as well. Turns out I wasn't.
