This is a complaint. Just a warning.
I am fast approaching the second anniversary since I last had a calling in the church. During that time I have managed to be a home teacher for only 9 months. I will admit that I have been in 5 wards during that time span, but the breakdown is this – 1 month after being released I left the student ward for a family ward. 5 months later I moved from Logan to Lehi without having had a calling or a home teaching assignment. Admittedly I was very busy with family issues during that period (which is why I moved). Two months after moving to Lehi I moved to American Fork. So in 8 months I covered three of the five wards. In American Fork it took them 3 months to give me a home teaching assignment. Later Laura got a calling, but when I moved to Columbia, Missouri 11 months after I had moved to American Fork I had never had a calling. In Columbia there was a lot of noise when I moved in about how soon they would have a calling for me. It only took one month to get a home teaching assignment so I thought I might get a calling sometime. After two months they have called Laura back into the primary.
Apparently I am sill invisible. As of yet I have not met a single person who had managed to stay so completely invisible while remaining fully active. I figure that you can hardly blame the ward leaders for not extending a calling to those who are inactive, or unwilling to serve, but I am neither unwilling nor unavailable nor incapable and yet they cannot find anything for me to do. I don’t mean to murmur, but it gets really old after a while when you consistently have no place in the ward structure. I am the perpetual nobody. I am not a particularly social person on my own, but I have made plenty of friends in the ward in Columbia during my time as “the new person” but now that I am no longer “the new person” I have no identity.
Laura gets to be a Sunday school teacher again, she has a place, but I am an outcast. Okay, in all fairness they do not treat me like an outcast, but I serve no function in the ward beyond being a warm body. I am not asking for a position of prominence, I would as quickly serve as a Sunday school teacher or employment specialist as I would accept a calling to be president of the elders quorum. At this rate I am about ready to call up the bishop and demand that he call me to something – even if he just calls me to place the hymn books in order from least worn to most worn before church on those Sundays when the choir will be singing.