The number was never the measure

For a long stretch of my mission, I kept score.

Not officially. Officially we reported numbers every week like everyone else. But privately, I kept a second count, and I used it to decide how I was doing. Lessons taught. People at church. Baptisms.

It took me almost a year to understand that I had made it about numbers instead of people.

Alma is talking to his son Helaman about the plates of brass when he says this:

“By small and simple things are great things brought to pass; …and small means in many instances doth confound the wise.” (Alma 37:6)

Read that again with a mission, calling, or assignment in mind.

Small things! Not impressive ones.

Not the ones that post well on social media or make a good story at zone conference.

Small things are how the great things get done!

And then the second half, which I think is the harder line: small means “doth confound the wise.” The people most likely to misread a small thing are the ones who think they can tell what matters by looking at it.

I was one of those people. I looked at my week, and I thought I could tell you exactly what it was worth. Whether I was a good missionary or not.

Looking at the numbers was the wrong way to measure success!

In the April 1996 General Conference, President James E. Faust (then Second Counselor in the First Presidency) gave a talk called “What I Want My Son to Know before He Leaves on His Mission.”

In it he says this:

“Do not feel that you must obtain a quota of baptisms to be successful… The harvest is the Lord’s. Your responsibility is to thrust in the sickle.”

I wrote in my book that “the Lord doesn’t need your mission to be statistically impressive,” and I believe that, but I am one returned missionary with an opinion.

President Faust was speaking in the priesthood session, to young men who were about to leave on their missions. He was talking to the exact person I was about to become. And he was not softening a hard week for anybody. He was correcting a definition.

The definition he was correcting is the one I was living by.

If I could go back and say one thing to that young missionary in Japan, it would NOT be “cheer up.”

It would be: “You are measuring the wrong thing, and the thing you are measuring can’t tell you what you’re asking it. It cannot tell you your worth!”

A number can tell you how many people were baptized.

It cannot tell you whose heart moved.

It cannot tell you what a person will remember in three years.

It cannot tell you which conversation someone will still be turning over long after they’ve forgotten your name.

Your job is to plant. It was never to control the growth.

If you are the one counting

You may be a missionary right now, in a week where nothing has worked, and feel like a failure.

You may be a parent reading a discouraged letter and not knowing what to send back.

You may be home from a mission you still quietly think of as a disappointment.

Here is what I would offer you, and it isn’t mine. It belongs to Alma and to President Faust:

The number you are carrying was never the measure. It was never supposed to be the measure. And the fact that it looks small is not evidence against you.

According to Alma, it may be the most ordinary thing in the world for something great to be coming, and to be coming through means so small that it confounds the wise.

Including you.

You were faithful in a small thing. That is the whole assignment!

One more thing, and then I will stop.

Jesus Christ taught thousands of people. He healed them. He fed them.

Most of them walked away.

His closest friends scattered on the night He needed them most. At the end, a handful stood at the cross.

Hand that in as a weekly report and nobody is impressed.

He knew it would go that way, and He loved them anyway. Not because the numbers would come out right in the end. Because every single one of them mattered to Him.

That is who is measuring your week. He is not keeping score. He is watching to see whether you will keep loving people after the count tells you to stop.

Let’s Keep Learning to Walk with Him!

Ken

Ponder this

Think of the smallest thing you did this week that nobody noticed.

A text you sent. A name you remembered. A door that stayed shut.

Write it down. One line.

Then read the verse right after the one above, Alma 37:7, and look at what the Lord does with very small means. He brings about the salvation of many souls.

That part was never your job. Yours was to hand Him something small.

He is not keeping score.