"I've had to add you to my inactive list."

Helpful?

Encouraging?

Hurtful?

Offensive?

I don't know how the message was meant to be received, but I'm not sure it was helpful or encouraging to have someone knock on my door and tell that my name was added to the inactive list for Relief Society.  Luckily, I didn't find it incredibly hurtful or offensive.  I considered the source, I considered the truth, and I decided to leave it at that.

I love Relief Society.  I've spent more time serving in callings with the Relief Society than any other organization of the Church.  I'm an advocate of the spiritual and temporal blessings it can bring to the women who participate purposefully.  I love the lessons and the insights that are shared or that I discover during the lessons.  I love the diversity of the sisters there.  There are friends with backgrounds and stories there who you never meet if you don't attend.

Anyone who knows how my church attendance has bounced around for the last year or so, has never really asked why.  It's no one's responsibility but my own to get me and my children to church.  But, I do see and hear how others view my spotty attendance as laziness.  And, with my visitor's information, I saw and heard how I was a missing check mark on an attendance roll rather than a missing sister in Relief Society.

I never would have guess that my name would have been on any "inactive list."  I never anticipated the feeling of scraping up my mental, emotional, and physical stamina from off the floor to try and get myself out the door to church every week.  Add in the way little flu bugs pass around a family to my struggle to gather my senses on a daily basis and you'll find a partly inactive family.  Sometimes I make it there, with or without my juvenile entourage, and sometimes I don't.

But, I'll try again next time, just like I did every other time.