I\u2019m writing this knowing that I have a big meeting in fifteen minutes. Here\u2019s the reason I\u2019m never going to go very far.<\/p>\n
I hate meetings. <\/p>\n
I don\u2019t mind meeting with people when there\u2019s something to talk about \u2013 I just hate \u201cmeetings.\u201d Where people sit around a table and have an agenda. Where someone always \u201ccalls in\u201d and everyone has to speak up so the speakerphone can hear it. And when that person is asked to comment, he or she has to take the phone off mute and say \u201cwhat?\u201d And then the whole meeting stops as you catch them up on what\u2019s just been said. And the meetings last at least an hour longer than you thought, or at least an hour longer than it needed to go, even if it was only supposed to last an hour. <\/p>\n
I remember working for the pseudonymically-labeled Myron Felgewater, who used to cram the day with meetings, including meetings on how to make our meetings more productive. When he asked for input on how to make that happen, I suggested fewer meetings, which didn\u2019t go over well. <\/p>\n
Where I come from, it takes a damn good meeting to be better than no meeting at all. <\/p>\n
Which, of course, leads me to believe that I\u2019m probably in the wrong church. Mormons meet. A lot. It\u2019s gotten better with time, from what I hear. It used to be that you\u2019d go to three hours of meetings in the morning and then come back for a two-hour Sacrament Meeting at night. When I was about twelve, the Church came back with their new, improved \u201cblock schedule,\u201d which combined most of the massive meetings into a single, three-hour block. <\/p>\n
Yes, you read that right. Three hours. Every Sunday. <\/p>\n
This was one of the main reasons Glenn Beck was initially reticent about investigating the Church. \u201cIf your God can\u2019t get it all done in an hour like everybody else,\u201d he reportedly said, \u201c then I\u2019m not interested.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, now that I\u2019m no longer in a bishopric, three hours is nothing. I used to get up at 5:30 AM to get to my first 6:00 AM Bishopric meeting, and then do nothing but go through a series of meetings \u2013 Correlation, Welfare, Priesthood Executive Committee \u2013 until the three-hour regular meeting block started. And then there were stewardship meetings and temple recommend interviews and whatever else meetings after the block. I didn\u2019t get home until four o\u2019clock on a regular Sunday, and I wasn\u2019t at that meetinghouse half the time the Bishop was. <\/p>\n
For the Bishopric, sitting up on the stand is the only time Sunday is actually a day of rest. <\/p>\n
I always fell asleep sitting up on the stand. Always. In full view of the entire congregation. It got so bad that one family had a running bet – not whether or not I would fall asleep, but whether I would do it before or after the bottom of the hour. <\/p>\n
I tried not to. Honestly, I did. But when you\u2019ve been up since 5:30 and been meeting all day, and you\u2019re finally not being asked to do anything but listen, it\u2019s hard to get the body geared up enough to stay alert. Once the snooze instinct hits, you have no recourse. You can, of course, tighten your sphincter, which gives you about three seconds of alertness, but there\u2019s not much else.<\/p>\n
I bring this up because our family attended the dedicatory services for the new Draper, Utah temple. The dedicatory prayer was beautiful; the Hosanna Shout was inspiring, and hearing the choir sing \u201cThe Spirit of God\u201d was certainly a highlight.<\/p>\n
So why did the whole thing have to last an hour and a half?<\/p>\n
We got THREE choir songs, about FOUR different speakers, and an event that could have been about thirty minutes long and felt entirely complete was elongated to three times its natural length. Why? <\/p>\n
I hope this doesn\u2019t make me look faithless. I love the Church; I love the Gospel; I love, adore, and worship the Savior. <\/p>\n
And I really, really hate meetings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019mwriting this knowing that I have a big meeting in fifteen minutes. Here\u2019s the reason I\u2019m never going to go very far. I hate meetings. I don\u2019t mind meeting with people when there\u2019s something to talk about \u2013 I just hate \u201cmeetings.\u201d Where people sit around a table and have an agenda. Where someone always ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4791,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/4791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}