Looking for something to do

When I was at BYU, I attended a stake (group of congregations, or wards, if you don't know) that was part of a pilot program the church was doing. Each ward, in additional to its traditional leadership structure, was divided into ten committees. Examples included things like, temple, missionary, sabbath day worship, music, public affairs (service), publicity (basically just outsourced P.R. for all of the other committees), activities, etc. What invariably happened each semester was that the co-chairs of these committees would decide with their various committee members (by the way, the process of how people were put in committees was a hairy process; it was called a "draft" but often more closely resembled the floor of a stock exchange) that they wanted to host either a fireside or a ward activity sometime during the coming semester. That means that the music committee wants a music fireside, the public affairs committee wants a service fireside, temple wants a temple fireside, missionary missionary, you get the picture. Everyone thought they needed to "do something" independent of the other committees.

It was similar on my mission. Every morning, we needed to be out of our apartments by 9:30 in order to be obedient. We were also expected to keep our records up to date, which is hard to during the other hours of the day. It would have been much more effective to designate, say, one hour each Tuesday morning to update the area book, instead of knocking on empty doors. But we needed to be out working, not sitting inside taking care of "administrative" matters that could help other missionaries after we left. We needed to be out doing something.

I was thinking about that recently as I was reading Jacob 1:19 (in the Book of Mormon) where he talks about "magnifying" his calling. Contrary to some, I don't think magnifying a church (or otherwise) responsibility necessarily means to expand it. Instead, I think it means to take the most important tasks and do them correctly; it requires us to focus. When we view anything through a magnifying glass, we see the thing itself bigger, more clearly, and we see less of the other stuff around it. The less we see of the other stuff that doesn't matter as much, the more we see of the important stuff that does matter, letting us place greater emphasis on it.

During this political season, I've been thinking quite a bit about what I belive the proper role of government should be. Consequently I believe it should be small and generally should stay out of people's lives. Disappointingly, the Republican party, one that claims to be a believer in small government, hasn't done that as much as I wish it had. All politicians, it seems, have a "solution" to a "problem" that frequently requires them to "do something" to fix it. Almost without fail, their doing something requires government getting more involved, not less, because doing something is what appeals to the political base. The recent tax rebate/economic stimulus is a case in point. In order for any politician (or candidate for political office) to appear assertive in dealing with the economy, they need to be acting to help us steer clear of the coming recession.

Going back to the magnifying glass analogy, congress and the president need to focus more on the task of governing and less on a lot of the other jobs they have assumed for themselves over the years. I saw an interesting quote about the actual and assumed roles of government from Jonah Goldberg (HT: Arnold Kling):

"The fundamental insight of libertarianism is that the government is the government. It cannot be your mommy, your daddy, your big brother, your nanny, your friend, your buddy, your god, your salvation, your church or your conscience. It is the government. A big bureaucracy charged with certain responsibilities, some of which it is qualified to carry out, many of which it is not."