Proverbs 26:27
I can't imagine what goes through the minds of men when they are called to, or as they serve in, the Quorum of the Twelve or the First Presidency. I don't have to consider any of it. It'll never happen to me because I'm a woman. But I think about the consequences of their failures anyway.
What are the consequences for failing to meet the challenges they're given in the moments in which they live?
How will God hold them to account for things like violence? Betrayal? Dehumanization? The abandonment of their divinely-given duties due to political pressure and fear?
In the history of our people, we've had to collectively consider consequences for things like rebellion and adultery for our senior leadership. But not much else. Not because other failures haven't happened, but because our people are often negligent in even engaging with the possibilities.
But those future consequences in the Day of Judgment don't disappear because considering them make us uncomfortable. Neither does our complicity and participation in the moral failures of our leadership.
We praise our God and our Savior for ministering "one by one." That even though Jesus of Nazareth, and the Father who sent him, could heal all souls in a multitude in a single moment, they still choose to do so individually. It stands to reason that judgment would be much the same.
Each and every soul we have injured will come to face us, one by one. Apologies we failed to give. Reconciling we failed to do. Insults and unkindness and families to do the right thing. These won't be actions in a ledger we have to contend with. It will be the people we must account to. Face to face, one by one.
That's what I think judgment will look like. And that has implications for those who stand in leadership at that level of the Church. Millions of people, for good or for ill, will get justice with or against them.
How much do they think about that as they serve in their positions? Do they comprehend how uncomfortable and embarrassing it will be to face some of the people they've wronged? To do so with the Savior as the advocate for that person?
I'm thinking about the lives we lost during Prop 8. I lived through that and what I've seen and heard still haunts me every day. I think about everything that has happened since 2016. The first Trump administration with families in cages. COVID-19. Now ICE raids on civilians in the streets.
One by one. Face by wounded face.
Have they considered what they're in for? Do they have any idea how long that line is going to be? How long it will take? What it will do to their souls to have no defense for what they did, and failed to do? The harm it caused to so many people?
Heaven isn't like mortality. Everyone gets a court date. There are no plea agreements. Everyone gets a lawyer. And this isn't mediation. There will be real consequences against leaders who failed to live up to who and what they promised to be.
Real justice will happen there. I barely want to be myself, as insignificant as I am, at such a prospect. I shudder to think what being an apostle or a prophet will be like. Especially making the kinds of decisions they're making together as a council. Their inaction and failure to defend the most vulnerable, over and over?
Perhaps we do ourselves a disservice by calling it Judgment "Day." There's no way all of this is done in a single day. We have, probably in our reckoning of time, years of this to look forward to. One by one. Face by face.
I have no idea if they think about any of this. I'm not one of them, and never will be. Point being, I don't envy them.
Those who dig pits for their neighbors fall into them themselves. It's an old promise that repeats all over Scripture. I believe in that kind of justice. It's why the most dangerous weapon I can imagine isn't a gun. It's a shovel.
And it's bizarre, watching my people dig their own graves.
